About 97 million people in the U.S. shop on social media. It’s a powerful medium to connect with people who are ready to buy. Therefore, you can’t treat your business’s social media presence as an afterthought! You absolutely need to develop a social media marketing plan to make the most of your social media budget, resonate with customers, and close sales. Here’s how.
Why You Need a Social Media Marketing Plan
Anything without a plan is simply a wish! That’s why you 1000% need a social media marketing plan before you jump into posting. Creating a social media strategy will keep you on task to reach your specific social media marketing goals like:
Raising Awareness and Creating Brand Recognition
People can’t purchase your products and services if they don’t know your business exists. Social media gets your business name out there amongst the competition.
Improving Customer Engagement
Social media marketing lets you engage directly with your customers to meet their needs and build relationships. Customers who feel connected to your business are more likely to buy your products and refer your business to friends.
Gaining a Competitive Advantage
Everybody is doing it, so yes, you have to jump on the bandwagon. Social media makes it possible to compete with big brands and show up naturally in your target demographics’ feeds.
What Does a Strategic Social Media Marketing Plan Entail?
A social media marketing plan has key components that help guide your social media strategy. That way, you won’t just post randomly, inconsistently, and on platforms that don’t align with your target audience. Your social media marketing plan will keep you on track to meet your goals efficiently and effectively.
1. Objectives
What do you want to get from social media marketing? Determining specific, measurable, and time-sensitive objectives will help you hone in on what your business aims to get out of social media marketing. This can include how many followers you’d like to have within one year. Your objectives could be to make $1,000 per month from Instagram advertising within six months.
Whatever your objectives, your social media marketing plan will clearly outline them so that everything in your strategy caters to reaching these goals. Download our 50-page Social Media Guidebook to help develop your strategy.
2. Target Audience
Who do you want to reach with your social media posts and ads? That is your target audience. Your social media marketing plan will identify your key demographics so you better understand their personas, buying habits, and needs. That way, you can tailor your marketing and posts to their preferences.
3. Social Media Platforms
You don’t need to be on every single social media platform. Instead, choose those that attract your target audience. Our Social Media Strategy Guidebook breaks down demographics of every social media channel to help you determine which are best for your business.
4. Content Strategy
To really hit it out of the park with your social media marketing plan, you need solid content strategy. That entails marrying your brand guidelines—the voice, tone, and aesthetics of your business—with post topics that resonate with your audience and business.
Not so simple! Make it easier by downloading 365 days of social media post ideas to tailor to your brand. Or, read more resources about how to generate content buckets and create a content calendar. You may also want to hire a social media manager to help.
5. Social Media Advertising
Do you plan to spend some of your social media budget on social media advertising? Doing so will fast track your visibility and help make direct sales from social platforms.
If you plan to implement social ads, incorporate budget and strategy into your social media marketing plan.
6. Social Media Posting Schedule
It’s easy to let organic social media posting slip through the cracks. After all, you have a lot to do running your business! You can imagine how easily you could get to the end of the day and think, “Shoot! I forgot to post.” Following a posting schedule keeps that from happening.
Download our social media planner to streamline your content creation and publishing process. You can also use our favorite social media schedulers to make this process faster and easier.
7. Metrics
You always need to incorporate KPIs, or key performance indicators, into your social media marketing plan. In short, the metrics used to measure your progress toward your goals.
Think about markers like engagement rates or click-throughs. Use the insights in your social media scheduling accounts and directly in your social media platforms to keep track of your progress. Don’t forget that you can adjust metrics and strategy at any point in time!
Getting the Most from Your Social Media Marketing Plan
Get Organized ASAP
Creating a social media marketing plan might seem like a steep hill to climb, or something you don’t have time for. However, if you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?!
If you’ve been playing catch-up instead of preemptively planning for social media, this is your opportunity to stop, regroup, and make a formal plan.
Stay Consistent
Consistency is perhaps the most challenging part of executing your social media marketing plan. Life happens, after all. However, part of your social media plan should be the plan to streamline your posting and content creation processes!
We recommend you batch-create content at least one month ahead of schedule. Doing so will help you stay proactive instead of reactive. Then, you can use a social media scheduling tool, like Later, Planoly, Canva, or Buffer to get everything ready to go live.
If you change your mind or want to post on breaking news or a trending event, you can always add or move things around. Although, this way, your foundational stuff will be ready to go so your feeds never grow stale.
Always Opt for Quality Over Quantity!
This leads to the next point, which is don’t post for the sake of posting. Yes, we did just tell you that you must post consistently. However, that doesn’t mean you should ever post off brand or useless content just for the sake of it. Doing so will dilute your message and lose followers. You’ll also waste time and money in the process.
It’s always challenging to create interesting content that stands out. Millions of people post on social media every day. How will you get your brand noticed? Our best advice is to be authentically you while also watching what others are doing and borrowing ideas to make them your own.
Our Complete Social Media Strategy Bundle will help you generate and outline ideas and master your social strategy. But remember, go ahead and jump on the social media bandwagon. If that new TikTok dance fits your brand and will get you some attention, strap on your dancing shoes
Engage
You need to use social media as its intended: to engage with fellow users. You’ll get so much more out of your social media marketing plan when you organically engage with your audience.
Visit your social media accounts daily to respond to comments and like and comment on other accounts’ posts. Since, hopefully, you started scheduling your posts, you should have more time to pop into the apps to build relationships with followers and prospective partner brands and influencers. This relationship building will pay off for your brand long-term as people feel more connected to your business.
Do you hate social media and just don’t want to spend your time on social media marketing? That’s okay too! A big part of a social media marketing plan is outlining opportunities and bottlenecks in your process.
Charm School can handle all of your social media marketing, so you don’t have to. Contact us today, and we’ll give you back the 20+ hours a week it takes to manage social media. You’ll be glad you did!
