What is a Social Media Marketing Plan?
A social media marketing plan is a document that maps out the following things:
- Set Your Goals
- Define Your Target Audience
- Establish Your Brand Personality
- Create a Social Media Content Calendar
- Content and Channel Strategy
- Campaign Planning
- Budgeting
- Evaluate Your Campaign Performance
- Competitor Analysis
The success of your social media marketing plan depends upon the resources you put into it – including time, budget, and team.
Businesses can use a social media marketing plan to increase reach and engagement. Apart from all this, it also drives traffic to your website and generates sales. Proper planning is essential for social media marketing to uncover the emotional drivers that create real connections with your audience and build a loyal following.
What are the Elements of a Brilliant Social Media Marketing Plan?
The elements of Social Media Marketing plans are listed below.
1. Set Your Goals
There is no way you can start your social media marketing plan without setting your goals. Even if you don’t have a solid understanding of everything, you still need a goal so you know what you are working for.
Having a goal keeps you grounded and works as a reminder of why you are doing what you are doing. Social media can take up a lot of your time and if you are not setting goals and planning accordingly you might end up sinking up all your time with no real outcome.
2. Research Your Target Audience
The target audience is the group of people that might buy your product or whatever you have to offer. But only if you advertise to them properly. If you are a marketer you know how important it is to know your audience and what type of advertising will work for your audience.
Different advertising strategies work on different audience types. It can differ depending on the age, gender, or people with specific interests like running, cooking, hiking, and many more.
3. Find Your Brand Personality
Brand personality is your brand’s unique identity. If people cannot distinguish your brand from your competitors then anything you do is gonna be in vain. You need to find your brand personality and advertise it to your audience.
Keep it real and decide if you want to keep the message of your brand emotional or simple and straight. A good brand personality is what you need to keep your brand relevant.
4. Make a Social Media Content Calendar
If you want your social media journey to go smoothly, you need a social media content calendar to work as a guide. If you don’t know, a content calendar is a document that includes the whole schedule for your social media posting what you need to post when, and how much.
Additionally, it helps you stay organized and if you plan it properly and keep it simple, this will save you tons of time and energy. However, making a content calendar according to your needs can be difficult if you are not experienced enough. But no need to worry, you can always rely on Pedris AI-Generated Content Calendar. Predis automatically generates a content calendar with post ideas, creative ideas, and captions appropriate for YOUR handle and audience, with the power of AI. Furthermore, this can make the process easy and not overwhelming for the users.
5. Content and Channel Strategy
A brilliant social media marketing plan should have a content and channel strategy. Your content strategy helps in deciding what type of content to publish (e.g. video, articles, photos) and which channels to post on. To get this part of your planning working effectively, I recommend creating a comprehensive buyer persona to inform your decisions at this stage. If you haven’t created a buyer persona before, then check out this buyer persona planning tool.
6. Campaign Planning
Another element in a brilliant social media marketing plan is establishing your campaigns. Campaigns are a series of posts with a common theme or goal. They can be created for any audience, from current customers to prospects or even the general public. Depending on your business needs, you can use many types of campaigns. These include – customer retention campaigns, referral campaigns, product launch campaigns, etc.
Additionally, if you need inspiration for coming up with themes for your campaigns, start by populating a content calendar with seasonal campaigns, such as Halloween or Christmas. For a more varied content calendar, check out websites such as AwarenessDays.com. Then find international awareness day campaigns, such as International Talk, and create content for your brand around those dates.
7. Budgeting
A distinct facet of your plan is budgeting. It also includes choosing how much of your campaign will rely on organic vs. paid-for-promotion. You also want to consider the recruitment of influencers for paid promotional posts on social media platforms which could also include high-profile figures in your niche and prominent bloggers who have a large follower base.
If you’re just starting out on social media, then use organic content to build your audience. Also, limit your paid advertising to remarketing campaigns for people who have already engaged with your content. This will make your paid advertising work more effectively for generating sales quickly.
8. Evaluate Your Campaign Performance And Make Adjustments
Always pay close attention to the stats and don’t be scared to make tweaks and changes in your plan to adjust it according to your campaign’s needs. Not every plan will be successful on its first try. You have to evaluate it and then make necessary changes along the way.
If you don’t evaluate your progress in the beginning and make adjustments for that, then you might not be able to achieve your goals. So always be careful and alert when it comes to evaluating your marketing strategies.
9. Competitor Analysis
Finally, you’ll want to conduct some competitor analysis to identify the sort of content that works well within your industry. This is where Predis.ai comes into its own. You can use the competitor analysis tools to see what type of content is working for them.
How to Define Your Objectives for Social Media Marketing?
The social media marketing strategy should start with a set of objectives and KPIs. The objective of a social media marketing strategy should link directly to your higher marketing objectives. Some examples of an objective for social media marketing are:
- Reach more customers
- Generate leads
- Drive website traffic
Vanity Metrics
Be sure to avoid vanity metrics when choosing your social media marketing objectives. Vanity metrics are any metric that can be faked or easily gamed. They measure follower counts, retweets, likes, shares, or other types of stats that are easy to manipulate. Moreover, it is important to not get carried away by these metrics unless you can demonstrate how they contribute to your higher marketing objectives.
Vanity metrics are often used in social media marketing due to the ease with which they can be manipulated. There are technologies that can buy followers. Apart from this, certain tools can also program bots to retweet content. The use of vanity metrics may make you lose sight of what’s really important for your brand’s success.
The Best Tools for Creating A Strategic, Targeted & Measurable Social Media Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is complex. It can be intimidating for many marketers who lack inspiration. Also, for those who feel they do not have the right skills to create high-quality content. They invest in the process without knowing which path to take.
As a result, they produce content that is generic and does not really provide value for their audience. Digital marketing pros know the right way to go about content marketing, with help from tools like Predis.ai, SocialBlade, and others.
Marketers who want to make sure their social media channels are regularly updated with good-quality content can use artificial intelligence tools, such as Predis, to create a full month of content with ease. The best thing about these tools is that they create text and image content. Apart from time, they also replace the need for a graphic designer and copywriter!
Content marketers can use these social media marketing tools to create strategies that are targeted and measurable. These tools let them measure the effectiveness of their content by analyzing the:
- Number of shares
- Number of likes
- Retweets on social media channels.
Conclusion: How to Use These Social Media Strategies in Your Own Business
It can be difficult for small businesses to keep up with the ever-changing trends and marketing strategies, but here are some tips to help you out.
1) Make a Clear Plan: A social media plan should be effective but should not be too complex. A good marketing plan needs research, planning, and tests before you utilize the playing field. If you want you can speak to a digital marketing strategist for help.
2) Do Research: Research is the key to getting into the marketing aspect of any business. If you don’t do your research before creating a marketing plan then it won’t work for sure. So make sure you have done plenty of research to start your marketing journey.
3) Automate content generation: Now that we have so many AI tools easily accessible, you can make great use of them and make them work for your convenience. When you will do your research you will find out that there are several AI tools that can be used to generate content for your social media and can be used for marketing.
Author Bio
Martin Broadhurst the founder of Broadhurst Digital has helped businesses improve their digital strategies for over a decade. Since 2010, they have been creating digital strategies that attract new business and strengthen existing customer relationships for businesses around the world.
Connect with Martin Broadhurst on LinkedIn
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