More than 50% of the world’s population uses social media when they are online. And most businesses today use this opportunity to showcase their company’s face and get better reach.
Without the right social media strategy, it’s easy to fail to generate enough traffic. You could create tons of different social media posts, work across platforms, create detailed infographics and still fail to attract enough people. Well, that’s where a social media marketing plan comes in.
Here are 8 steps to get some good social media marketing ideas.
1. Create your viewer persona
Reach out directly to your audience. To get to know your audience better, track your regular viewers. Start creating the persona for at least five types of your ideal audience.
You may use this information to create your audience persona:
- Name
- Location
- Age/Gender
- Job title
- Average Income
- Goals and challenges
When you build the persona, analyze what you can give your audience, so they are more engaged with your offering.
This way, it will be easier to know which social media network you need to target. According to Statista, the 4 most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2022, ranked by the number of monthly active users are:
- YouTube
- TikTok
2. Set your Goals and Objectives
If you do not have a good idea of your goals and metrics, it will be tough to create a viable social media marketing plan. Most companies develop a social media marketing plan to achieve a set of goals, which often include:
- Lead generation
- Website traffic
- Brand awareness
Your goals should align perfectly with your metrics. This will determine your return on investment.
3. Understand your Market
To succeed in social media marketing, you need to understand the market first. Is your audience looking for something specific? Is there any market gap you can tap into? What does your audience profile look like?
Observe your competitors and analyze their social media marketing strategies. All companies do not use the same types of social media marketing. Do some research and you will start sorting out the puzzle.
Deliver content your audience is looking for. Look for blog posts and feeds that resonate with your viewers’ demands, not what you think is good.
4. Choose your Platform and Schedule your Posts
Social media platforms have different audiences and hence can serve different purposes.
- Facebook, for instance, is widely used for displaying the company’s loyalty.
- LinkedIn is great for business development
- Instagram is best for visual engagement
- Twitter is best for community building
First, check your audience type and then consider which platform to approach. You can even look at when your audience is logging onto the targeted platforms and choose the best time to post accordingly.
5. Create Content
Let’s break down the content into three different categories.
- Visual – A lot of the visual content gets easily shared on social media platforms. Videos of any kind can be great content for your social media marketing. Visual content is often recorded and saved for future reference. You can learn how to record a screen on Mac or Windows.
- Useful – Are you talking about gadgets, education, or life hacks? According to statistics, people like to share What-Post, Why-Post, How-to Article, and List.
- Emotional – Content which raises any emotions in viewers can also increase engagement.
To create more accurate and engaging content for your users, develop a voice and tone for your content. To make this happen, perform some self-assessments about creating your marketing personas. Here are some questions you may ask:
- What is your brand’s personality?
- What is your brand’s relationship with your audience?
- What kind of impression do you want to set for your audiences?
6. Set your Budget
Set your budget according to your brand’s needs. Cross-check the total marketing budget of your brand and ensure that your social media marketing budget fits comfortably in your marketing budget.
Also, check if your social media marketing budget covers your plan’s primary aspects. It should be enough to cover all the listed requirements, which normally include:
- Paid promotions
- Analytical tools
- Campaign content
- Social media management tools
7. Track Results and Rebuild the Plan
In a social media marketing plan, re-evaluating the plan is crucial to the strategy. Use analytical tools to monitor content performance. To analyze and perfect the social media marketing strategy, you can:
- Set your benchmarks: Check the performance of the posts published in the past few weeks or months. Get a clear result of the engagements and set it as your benchmark, which you will keep chasing every time. You can always increase the number as your audience starts growing.
- Trial and repeat: Try something new that might increase audience engagement between your regular posting periods. If this new strategy works and crosses your set benchmark, implement it in your regular social media marketing strategy.
8. Engage with your Community
Social media marketing implies talking to your audience through digital posts. So, when your audience talks to you, talk back.
For example, updated patch notes can be delivered beforehand through social handles if you have a gaming company. At this point, the audience will ask several questions related to your posts and share their needs. Talking back gives them a sense of trust, which is crucial when trying to create a strong community.
Besides just building a community, brand conversations are too important to ignore. It’s what helps build word of mouth and create overall impressions about your company. You can’t just survive with paid marketing over the longer term. Instead, you need to focus on customer retention and loyalty, and that’s where having an active social community helps.
Final Note
Choose your social media according to your business needs. Rechecking the marketing plan monthly, quarterly, and annually is important. If required, conduct some real-time interviews with your audience.
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