How To Put Together A Great Social Media Marketing Plan

A social media plan is a summary of everything which you plan to do and hope to achieve in social media marketing. It directs your actions and also lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing. The more specific your social media marketing plan is, the more effective it will be. Keep it concise. Don’t make it so lofty and all-encompassing that it’s not attainable or impossible to measure.

Social media is a very important marketing channel for companies of all sizes. The common question a number of years ago, “Why should our organisation use social media?”, is now being replaced with, “How can our business flourish with social media marketing?”.

As social media marketers, this makes us very excited. What doesn’t make us excited is how many organisations are still trying to market on social media without a documented strategy.  So, in this article, we’ll go through a couple of steps – which you can take – in order to develop a world-class social media marketing plan.

Decide On Social Media Marketing Goals That Align To Your Business Objectives

Establish S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Establish your objectives and goals because without goals, you have no way of measuring success and return on investment (ROI).

Each of your goals need to be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

This is the structure of S.M.A.R.T. goals. It will guide your actions and also ensure that they lead to real business outcomes.

Here’s a good example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal:

“We will make use of Twitter for customer support and lessen our average response rate to lower than two hours by the end of the year.”

Track Meaningful Metrics

Vanity metrics – such as the number of followers and likes – are pretty easy to track. However, it’s difficult to prove their real value. Rather, focus on things such as engagement, click-through as well as conversion rates.

You may want to track various different goals for various networks, or even different uses for each of the networks. For instance:

• If you utilise LinkedIn in order to drive traffic to your site, you would be measuring click-throughs.
• If Instagram is utilised for brand awareness, you might decide to track the number of Instagram Story views.
• If you choose to advertise on Facebook, cost-per-click (CPC) is a very common success metric.

Choose Your Social Media Networks

You should ultimately choose the social networks which best fit your social media marketing plan as well as the goals which you want to achieve on social media. You don’t need to be on them all — just the ones which matter to you and your audience.

Some things which you need to consider that can assist you to choose not only which social networks to try however also how many to try:

• Audience – Where do your prospective customers hang out? Which social network has the correct demographics?
• Time – How much time are you able to devote to a social network? Plan on no less than an hour per day per social network, at least at the beginning.
• Resources – What personnel, as well as skills do you have to work with? Social networks such as Facebook emphasise quality content. Visual social networks – such as Pinterest and Instagram – require images and videos. Do you have the resources to put together what’s needed?

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to become a social media marketing expert? If you do then you need to do our Social Media Marketing Course. Find out more by following this link.