Gone are the days of creating a social media profile off-the-cuff and posting whatever comes to mind. Social media marketing should be one area of your digital marketing strategy that you spend considerable time, effort, and resources maintaining.
When done well, your social media marketing strategy can be a low-cost, high-return avenue to grow your business and revenue. But, don’t go in blind. Gather your team and craft a strategy that will attract and retain your customers over and over again.
So what makes a great social media marketing plan? Essentially, it boils down to research, metrics, and organization.
Set intentional goals for your social media marketing strategy
No matter how much you may want to skip this step and get right to actually creating, it is imperative that you first sit down and articulate what your goals are for your social media marketing plan.
These goals will dictate how you spend your time and resources and will determine what platforms and content styles you’ll use. Your goals could be one or more of the following examples:
- To increase overall brand awareness for a newer business
- To increase followers in a particular demographic
- To increase engagement with your existing followers
- To see a specific increase in revenue for one or more of your products
Conduct research about your audience and how they spend their time online
This step is a no-brainer and easier than ever to accomplish. Before you put together your actual marketing plan, you need to learn the patterns of how your target audience spends their time online. So, narrow down your audience to an age range, gender, or other demographics (for example, “young moms” or “highly educated middle-aged professionals”). Then, find out what platforms and content style each audience interacts with the most.
For example, if your audience is “highly educated middle-aged professionals,” you probably shouldn’t put much, if any, effort into a Pinterest marketing plan. LinkedIn and Facebook, however, should receive the bulk of your time and attention for that target audience.
Conversely, if you’re targeting our “young moms” example, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram should make up the majority of your marketing plan.
And, as you can imagine, your tone, imagery, and content will vary greatly for these two audience groups.
Create a content calendar with themes to pull from
Now that you’ve set your goals, and identified your audience’s social media habits, you can begin creating a content calendar to organize and simplify your action steps for a chosen amount of time. Some businesses plan one month at a time, while other brands plan anywhere from 6 months to a year in advance.
Start small. Even if that means just one week ahead, put together a spreadsheet or document that will give you the “bigger picture” for your content approach. This is a huge time saver for your business. There are tons of great social media content apps and programs that will allow you to schedule posts days or weeks in advance.
But what do you post about? We suggest creating “content banks” to pull from. These are essentially themes that you write or share about on a consistent basis. Start out with just three and really dive into those topics.
For example, if you run a wedding photography business, the content banks you pull from might include ideal shooting locations, client spotlights, and general photography tips.
If you run a financial planning business, you could write endless articles on investing, retirement planning, and budgeting.
Analyze your metrics and adjust accordingly
At this step, it’s time to start posting! But, your job doesn’t end here. Once your marketing plan has been in place for a week or more, you should begin religiously tracking your metrics to assess how well your plan is working.
Decide which metrics you care most about. Is it likes? Click-through rates? Comments? Audience reach? Sale conversions?
Pick your metrics and then run different campaigns at varying times of day, with different writing structures, or with diverse tones of voice. Most social media platforms provide you with in-depth post analytics that make it easy to try out different strategies.
It’s hard to understate the importance of a solid, sustainable social media marketing plan for your brand. No matter what age or demographic you serve, there is a space online where they spend time and can be reached with your services or products.
Don’t let that opportunity slip away. If you need help formulating and executing a social media plan, we can help. Get in touch with our team at Deal Digital for a consultation about how we can work together to connect you with your ideal customers.
