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Do You Have A Social Media Marketing Plan That Rocks?
Do you have a winning social media marketing plan that rocks?
Your winning social media marketing plan or strategy is a summary of everything you plan to achieve by using social media.
In other words, for you to be successful in your social media marketing, you need an effective social media strategy.
An effective plan guides your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing in your social media marketing efforts.
If you don’t have a solid social media strategy, you might be posting your content on different social media channels because almost everybody in your niche is doing so.
Brian Tracy, an expert in human achievement says, "Goal setting is the master skill of success."
So whether you want to boost your brand through social media or you just want to draw an insane amount of traffic to your website, your developing an effective and successful social media strategy is very important.
The beauty of having an effective and awesome social media management goal is that every post, reply, like, and all comment are driving your target audience towards your clearly defined goals.
Is that what you want?
The more specific your strategy is, the more effective the execution will be.
To save you from heartache down the line, please don't make your plan so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable.
It would be impossible to have effective social media marketing without understanding what a social media marketing strategy or plan is and why you need to have one.
From the get-go, the question assumes that you understand how important social media is in skyrocketing your online presence.
If you didn't get the memo, here it is.
Why Do You Need A Social Media Marketing Plan?
You see, starting your social media marketing campaign without a solid plan in mind is like wandering through a forest without an up-to-date map or GPS.
You guessed right, you'll only end up being lost.
Who wants to get lost?
Therefore, to be effective in your social media management efforts, every action that you take on any of your social media networks should be a part of your holistic social media marketing strategy.
That means that every social media engagement you make should be driven by a plan designed to achieve well-defined and laser-focused goals.
Creating an amazing social media marketing plan that rocks is not complicated.
If you spend the needed time to create an awesome and comprehensive content marketing plan, the rest of your social media marketing activities would flow seamlessly and effortlessly.
Anybody determined and highly motivated can craft a winning social media marketing plan.
After you've answered those questions, here are well defined social media marketing goals that are achievable:
Getting tons of website traffic.
- Conversions of that traffic.
- Creating a brand identity and positive brand associations.
- Communication and engagements with your target audiences.
Now that you have laser-focused social media goals, you need to define your audience.
#1. Who Is Your Target Audience?
"Let your originality – your specialness, your brand personality – come through in your online content". Ann Handley & C.C. Chapman - "Content Rules"
The lack of clarity about the target audience is one of the reasons why so many social media marketing campaigns fail.
All your brilliant marketing and branding campaigns, are not going to be successful unless you have a clear targeted audience.
It is unlikely you'd hit a target that you've not identified.
Interestingly, there are many prospects, who could become your customers, clients, or even your evangelists.
Good consideration of your target audience would not be complete without considering the social media websites, where they hang out.
Is your audience on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube?
You have to decide what channels are better suited for your business and your audience.
You see, each of these sites has a very distinct personality and culture, just like your audience.
#2. Conduct A Social Media Audit
Before you create your social media marketing plan, it is important and necessary to assess your current social media use and how it’s working.
What that means is that you have to figure out who is currently connecting with you through your relevant social media platforms.
You will also uncover which social media platforms your target audience is using and how your social media marketing presence compares to those of your competitors.
After you've conducted an effective social media audit, it should be clear to you which social media accounts are the best fit for your business goals.
You should also be able to tell who runs or controls them, and what purpose they serve.
However, you must maintain this inventory regularly, especially as you scale your business
The social media audit should show which accounts need to be updated and which ones that need to be deleted altogether.
Sometimes the audit uncovers fraudulent accounts.
For example, if you uncover a fake branded Instagram profile - report them.
When you report fraudulent accounts you help to ensure that people searching for you online find and connect with only the accounts that you manage.
During the audit, it is an appropriate time to assess which social media channels you want to continue using or potentially add to the mix.
By taking an in-depth look at your target audience or their personas, you will be effective in laser-focusing on the social media channels that are most relevant and successful for your brand.
After you've decided which social media channels fit your target audience and overall marketing strategy, take a deep breath and ask yourself these two important questions:
Is the audience that I am targeting on the social media platform I have chosen?
If they are on your chosen social media network, how are they using this platform and what can you do with such information?
#3. Create Or Improve Your Social Media Accounts
After the social media audit is done, it’s time to sharpen your online presence.
You start by choosing those social media networks that best meet your social media goals and overall marketing strategy.
Before you start creating your social media accounts from scratch, we recommend that you create a new email account to register all your social media channels.
This is highly important because you will be getting tons of emails from these sites.
In time, you find that is easier to manage and filter from a separate email account than your main email account.
You can make it as simple as social@yourbusiness.com.
It’s also a good idea to have a dedicated social media accounts email for security and privacy concerns if and when you decide to outsource your social media management.
If you do have existing accounts, this is an opportune time to update and refine them so that you can get the best possible results.
And speaking of the best possible results, optimizing your social media profiles for SEO can help skyrocket your website traffic.
By cross-promoting your social content, you can extend the reach of the content.
All social media profiles should be filled out completely.
The images you use for your different social media accounts should be the correct size.
They should be tailored for the respective social media platforms that you’re using.
Your images and text should be optimized for all the relevant social media channels.
After the social media accounts have been created and optimized, it is time to put all the content that would be posted on a calendar.
Your calendar.
#4. Why You Need A Social Media Calendar
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After defining your social media marketing goals, your plan requires a stellar content strategy that will support it.
You may be overwhelmed, or just conclude that creating and publishing awesome content is not for you.
Getting organized and putting in place a schedule that suits and works best for your business is very important.
When you’ve got a content calendar you can commit to, social media marketing becomes a lot less daunting.
It becomes a most welcome experience.
A social media calendar has all the necessary information available to all the people that need to know, in one place.
Your social media calendar takes into account all your social media channels and resources and organizes them in a pretty way.
That makes it ridiculously easy to access the information you need when you need it.
Additionally, a social media content calendar helps you organize the curation and creation of content, in addition to developing your editorial strategy.
A social media marketing calendar helps you cut out all the unnecessary time out of your content marketing strategy.
It also helps in determining how to allocate resources wisely.
This ensures that your brand publishes epic, well-written, compelling, and high-performing content consistently.
Any social media content calendar should be easy to read without a legend and should contain all the necessary information for your content marketing strategy.
Efficient content marketers organize their content calendars by using a separate sheet of paper or screen for each month.
If you have more than one copywriter, your calendar that rocks should also reflect on it which of your writers is responsible for writing, publishing and promoting ruthlessly, and massively, any of the pieces of content.
How would you know if you are achieving your social media goals?
“If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it.” – Lord Kelvin
Identify Key Success Metrics
Since you've worked hard to get to this point, it is time to measure the impact of your social media efforts.
But what would you measure?
There are two types of social media measurement, and they are:
Ongoing Analytics – As the name implies, it is ongoing monitoring that tracks activity over time.
Campaign-Focused Metrics – Since a campaign has a beginning and end, this is a campaign or event analytics with a clear beginning and end.
With ongoing analytics, you will be able to keep up with the overall pulse of the general interactions you have with your brand and company.
After setting up brand tracking, you can just sit back, let it run, and check in regularly to see the results of your social media efforts.
On the other hand, campaign-focused metrics provide you with information that helps you see the impact of your targeted marketing initiatives.
The metrics vary from campaign to campaign, based on the goals you set for each.
An effective social media measurement program will likely include both ongoing and campaign-specific measurement.
A few metrics to consider measuring are:
- Conversion Rate.
- Time Spent On The Website.
- Reach.
- Brand Mentions.
- Sentiment.
- Total Shares.
Do You Have A Balanced View Of Social Media Marketing?
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Do you have a balanced and realistic view of social media?
Before you embark on your social media marketing journey, it is important to be realistic about your social media goals.
Despite all the buzz and every other exaggerated opinion you've heard about social media marketing, it will not single-handedly turn your business around.
Get this:
Social media marketing alone will not make you a millionaire, skyrocket your sales to the moon, or turn you into an instant superstar.
It will never sell an inferior or fake product or make up for a badly designed website.
Social media is just a marketing tool, like public relations, your radio or TV ads, or good ole direct mailing and marketing tools.
However, it is a very potent tool. Look at what you can get out of social media marketing:
It can raise your visibility with your clients and prospects.
Using it, you stay in touch frequently with your team, customers or clients.
It improves your search engine organic results.
Makes it easier to connect with reporters, bloggers, reviewers, and influencers in your niche.
It draws more prospects to your sales funnel.
Importantly, when social media marketing is used strategically with well crafted and epic content for a target audience, it becomes a cost-effective, highly personal, adaptable and brilliant way to achieve the goals we highlighted above!
Social Media Marketing And Your Budget
Why discuss budget since most social media sites are FREE?
Well, they are free, in that, they don't have membership fees. Social media marketing takes tons of elbow grease.
If you're not careful, managing your social media marketing can drain you mentally and physically and stop you from concentrating on other aspects of your business or life.
Then there are membership sites that work like your free social media sites, except that they serve specialized audiences, like business owners or association members.
They charge monthly fees just to have access to their forums, profiles or libraries.
Companies that find these paid social media sites a good fit for their business will factor in all those monthly fees in addition to all the other logistics involved in getting a brilliant return on investment.
"Focus on the core problem your business solves and put out lots of content and enthusiasm and ideas about how to solve that problem". Laura Fitton
If your business has outsourced your social media marketing to an outside agency, the cost of retaining such an agency will be considered part of the budget.
If you want your marketing to skyrocket your business using social media marketing strategies, please let us know, and we will respond to you.
WhatsApp us at: +234 080 331 75396 or +234 080 579 37786
