Simple and Sweet Social Media Marketing Plan that Always Works

Simple social media marketing plan is the most important part of your marketing efforts.

No plan is a plan to fail.

Without simple and clear goals you can waste as much hard earned money and time on your marketing efforts as you like.

Here is how I describe simplicity and clarity.

Decide Your Marketing Goal (s)

Focus is power and when you are doing so many things at one time, can you be focused?

You can, but generally It is quite difficult and you can’t get those results which you can get by focusing on a single goal.

Therefore, I would suggest you to set one big marketing goal if possible or maximum three.

Here is the deal!

Always write clear and measurable goals e.g.

“I want to generate 100 new customers”

This is an example of vague and unclear goal. Because there is no time frame by when you will achieve this goal plus it is not clear whether you just want 100 new clients or 100 monthly / yearly clients.

A clear and measurable goal would be like this:

“I want to generate 100 new customers in next 12 months”

Focus

I said this earlier that, focus is power and to me this is the key to success in any field.

• Focus on clear and measurable goals
• Focus your efforts on those marketing channels which are producing results
• Focus on marketing your area of expertise (don’t try to be jack of all trades)

Your Target Audience

Some of the best results we achieved for our clients when we managed to target the best audience for their businesses.

The more your dig down to target your audience the more success you will achieve.

How can you do this?

Ask your self, who will be your ideal customers and jot down following things about them:

• Profession (doctors, solicitors, estate agents, restaurants etc)
• Average Age
• Gender (Male / Female percentage)
• Income levels
• Hobbies etc

Product Creation

People do not buy products, people buy solutions to their problems.

This is crucial when creating or designing your product.

Ask yourself what problem your product will solve for the customer and communicate that very clearly in your marketing message.

If you fail to address this point, your all marketing efforts can be wasted

Call to Action

This is why you are doing all the hard work i.e. you want people to read your marketing message and take action.

Action could be:

• Pick up the phone and ring your office
• E-mail you
• Go to your website and buy your product

Could be any other action you want them to take but the key here is to provide them simple and clear call to action.

We are living in a tense society and people do not have long attention time. Therefore keeping really simple and straight forward is important.

Persuade People to Take Action

You followed the above marketing points and phone start ringing with new customer enquiries.

It sounds great isn’t?

I hope it should exactly as planned but most of the time you need bit more to persuade people to take action or increase the number of people take action.

For that you can do the following:

• Offer free consultation, discount, bonus etc
• Use limited time offers
• Free guide or report etc.

By following this method you can increase the call to action ratio and generate more leads.

Marketing Channels

There is a huge list of social media marketing channels.

I would say concentrate on one or two when you are starting out and increase as you go along.

You can start with the blog, facebook and twitter. It all depends how much time and money you have. I believe on quality instead quantity.

Your blog should be the center point of your marketing effort and use facebook and twitter to drive traffic to your blog.

Facebook and twitter are so big, I am sure you don’t need to look else where if you plan and execute the plan well.

Few other ways to drive traffic to your blog:

• Search Engine Optimisation
• Forum
• Article Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Paid Marketing

There is a long list, I would say take one step at a time.

Content Creation

Social media is all about sharing, sharing happens through content such as tips, articles, pictures, videos etc.

You can share following types of content:

• How  to’s
• Your Industry News
• Interviews
• Reviews
• Anything which can interest your audience

Social media is no different than socialising in person.

Try to be helpful and interesting as much as possible when creating content. Try to become an authority in your field instead of selling, when you do that sales will happen automatically.

Don’t afraid to share other people’s stuff, instead share more for others than yours.

Content Implementation Plan

Here is a simple plan that you should be working on:

• 2 Blog posts minimum per week
• 5 Tweets daily
• 3 to 5 Facebook status updates
• 5 Forum question replies daily

Measure Success

For me marketing isn’t 2+2 = 4

You have to be on top of measuring success to achieve your big goal.

If you want to achieve 100 new customers yearly, you should break it down to monthly or quarterly goals and measure it regularly.

E.g. After three months if you have increased to 33 new monthly customers, it means you are on top of achieving your big goal at the end of the year. If not then you should be reviewing your marketing efforts.

Marketing success = find and test new ways > measure results > drop those are not working and increase your efforts on what is producing results.

Beauty of clear goal is that you can measure it easily.

Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below.