Do you have a social media marketing plan for your business?
If you don’t, you’re missing out a big time.
What is a Social Media Marketing Plan
Social media is a huge jungle and you can be lost easily if you don’t have a road map to reach your destination. Social media is a long term strategy and without a plan you can be distracted easily.
It will be really hard to manage and align following aspects of your social media marketing efforts towards your goal without a social media marketing plan.
- Content strategy: (Fuel of the social media marketing)
- Which social media tool suits best for your industry (Resource management)
- How often should you create / share content (time management)
- How to build and nurture community (key to success)
- How to drive traffic back to your website / blog ($$$)
Why You Need a Plan
You don’t need to have one if you are getting the required results from the time & and money you are spending on social media marketing efforts.
If you are not happy with the results and think you are spending lot more time than what you are getting in return, most probably you don’t have a social media marketing plan. Social media marketing has quite a few important parts and often you don’t get results if all the parts are not working together.
What You Must Have in the Plan
You social media marketing plan should include:
- Social media marketing goals: You must be really clear about your short term and long term goals. Often ultimate goal for most businesses is to increase sales, which can be really hard to achieve at first place with social media marketing because people don’t like to be sold on social networks. Therefore, building community must be your top priority before you should ask them to buy.
- Selection of the best social media tools: There are hundreds of social media tools if not thousands out there. Do you really have time and resources to use every tool? Absolutely no, you should hand pick those tools which are required to achieve your goals in a simple and easiest way possible. Complicated tools and processes often don’t last long.
- Optimisation of social media properties: Why do you need to spend time and money on every new social media channel, If you can target over a billion people on earth with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + and YouTube ? You don’t need to chase every social media channel instead you need to improve your presence on the big fives. Your blog and 3 to 5 top social media channels must be fully optimized to achieve your marketing goals.
- Your ideal customer persona: Biggest mistake is to please everyone. You must be laser focused about your target audience. It will help you in great deal to create / curate content and speak in their language to get their attention.
- Content creation strategy: Content is the fuel of social media marketing plan. Your content must be aligned with your desired marketing goals.
- How to create visibility: According to Gary Vaynerchuk, we are living in a stream economy. No will remember you, if you will not be going through their stream (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + ) regularly.
- How to maintain quality: It’s easier to get the attention of people and really hard to maintain it for a long period of time. We are going through an information overload and every one is looking to grab our attention with their content. If you are building a community, don’t sacrifice on your content quality.
- How to build community: This should be your ultimate goal social media marketing goal to build a tribe who must be waiting for your content. Engaged community can be like a hen who gives a golden egg every day, once your community start clicking on the links you share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google + . Do you know how to build a community like this? If not contact us today to find out.
- What action (s) do you want your website / blog visitors to take: By now, you can imagine the hard work you need to bring people over to your website / blog. Last thing you want to waste all the hard work is to have a poorly optimized website/blog to convert your visitors into leads and ultimately sales. Don’t leave it on chance, optimize your website properly.
- How to measure success: One of the most important parts of the social media marketing plan. You must measure your success regularly. You should cut off those activities which are not working and increase which are bringing results. You must do this regularly.
- Cost estimations: Finally, your social media marketing plan must include all the costs involved such as, content creation & social media management etc.
We hope this will give you enough information to create your own social media marketing plan. Feel free to get in touch with us, if you need any help.