You’ve heard it before: to succeed in social media marketing, you need a solid, bulletproof social media plan. This social media plan has to be executed consistently over a period of before one can start seeing viable results.
But how do you create a really viable social media plan? To help you out, I’ve outlined seven great tips on how to rethink your social media strategy so that you can design a plan that is not only effective but easily executable.
1. Define Your Social Media Marketing Goals
As a marketer longing to grow your brand, you need to tackle social marketing from an informed approach. This pertains understanding the why, the how and the expected results. The goal you choose will then direct the next steps that your business needs to take and the manner at which you’ll choose to approach them.
Some of the goals you may choose include:
- Attracting targeted social traffic to your website
- Boosting your brand’s engagement
- Generating new quality leads for your business
- Nurturing the generated leads through retargeting campaigns and informational material in groups and pages
- Building a community where your customers and prospects share their thoughts and experience with your brand
- Establishing yourself and/or your brand as an authority in the industry
- Raising brand awareness
As you can already tell, by simply choosing to focus on any of the goals above, you are already having an idea on what metrics need to be tracked and what content needs to be created.
2. Define your brand positioning
How others perceive your brand is very important when it comes to growing your business. Thus, you need to ensure that your brand messaging is on point. Also, the manner at which you position yourself can determine whether your brand is gonna resonate with your target customers or not.
When positioning your brand, think critically about who your ideal customer really is, and how the world revolves around her. What part of the world is she from, what are her interests?
Other questions to consider include:
- Who is she and where is she from?
- What challenges is she encountering in the industry?
- What books, magazines and journals does she read?
- Which shows appeal to her the most and why?
- What causes does she care about?
- What income levels is she at? Low, middle or high?
By answering these questions you come really close to understanding your buyer persona, a critical concept that many marketers are still not paying attention to. This information will then help you decide on the best methods to reach your customers and to craft better copy that will resonate with majority of your prospects.
3. Define Your Own Success Metrics
Social media marketing involves lots of experimentation. It’s therefore important that you design a way that helps you gauge whether a particular strategy is working for or against you and your business.
The success metrics that you choose will largely depend on the social media marketing goals that you set at the beginning.
| Goal | Metric(s) |
|---|---|
| Engagement | Engagement features such as likes, comments, shares or its equivalents such as retweets and repins |
| Brand awareness | Social impressions and reach |
| Conversions | Referrals, sales, sign ups( |
| Brand positioning and authority building | Referrals, recommendations, mentions, testimonials |
| Website Visits | Clicks on your posts |
Most social media networks have inbuilt analytics that allow you to track most of these metrics without the need for extra tool. However, for more sophisticated metrics such as conversions, you need to integrate your accounts with analytic tools such as Google analytics, Facebook pexels and also setup UTM tracking that makes it easy to trace clicks and purchases to a particular source of traffic.
If you have a social media scheduling tool, then check in with them to see if they have advanced analytics features. Some prominent scheduling tools have this feature built in.
4. Natively Automate Your Social Content
One of the best social media marketing strategies is posting regularly. Even though this may seem easy to do, it actually is not, for two reasons: First, humans struggle with consistency. We start off excited and ready to see things through, but15 days later, this morale starts diminishing especially when it seems as if there are no apparent results being achieved.
Luckily, social media scheduling tools allow you to automate most of your social media marketing tasks, thus freeing you time to focus on the business side of your venture while also ensuring that you remain consistent in your marketing efforts.
Content automation means that you can release content at the optimal times when your audience are most likely to be online thus increasing the potential reach of each and every of your posts.
There are several of such tools, but Postoplan stands out for several reasons including:
- Ability to schedule posts beyond your typical social platforms: You can set to share posts to Telegram, Whatsapp groups or even Google My Business accounts.
- Integration with widely used tools such as WordPress and Slack channels
- Powerful yet user-friendly interface with beautiful calendar view available in 5 different themes
- Ability to add unlimited accounts, unlimited users
- Curated calendar post ideas and news hooks that you can schedule within the platform. Use these to fill up your calendar or when your curation psyche is really down
- In built social inbox that saves you the time that you would waste switching from one account to another to view messages and comments
If it interests you, you can try out Postoplan for free here
5. Improve Your Profiles.
Many people set up their social media profiles and company pages and completely forget about them. This is a costly mistake. Many individuals before deciding to follow profile or like a page, they always scan through to find what it’s really all about.
If your profile is incomplete or haven’t been updated in years to reflect your current messaging and the brand positioning, then you are sending people away to your competitors. There is nothing that screams ‘fake’ like a half-built company profile with infrequent updates.
Take a moment to assess your:
- Facebook page
- LinkedIn Company Profile
- Instagram profile
- Google My Business page
- Your Facebook group’s main description and privacy settings
- Twitter profile
When updating your social profiles, ensure that the brand messaging is consistent across all channels. Use the same profile picture, name and username where available in all the channels. This familiarity will help your followers in other platforms to recognize you and even follow you promptly in other platforms when they come across a suggestion of you or your company in the recommendations sections.
6. Get Inspiration from Competitors
Every great marketing strategy is often borrowed somewhere and modified to fit the particular brand’s audience demographics. By analyzing your main competitors’ social media content and promotions, you can determine what strategies are working in your space. You can then adapt them for your own profiles.
Competitive analysis is about determining who your competitors are and what they are doing differently that seems to be working. There are several competitive analysis tools out there, although many social media scheduling tools now have this as an inbuilt feature.
7. Start Social Listening
To boost engagement on social media platforms you need to show up promptly. This is where social listening comes in. Social listening tools help you track the mentions of your brand, particular topics, industry keyword or your competitor’s brand, and notify you quickly so that you can take a necessary measure.
In other words, you are being informed of the most important events for your business as and when they happen, thus putting you in a better chance to spot unfolding opportunities.
By social listening, you get to know what people feel about you or your competitors. This info is great as it helps you determine what marketing strategies need to be adapted, what needs to change and what social content you need to start creating either to take advantage of the opportunity to to salvage a crisis. Have a solid social media marketing plan that includes social listening is a great way to stay on top of your competitors who may be busy just churning out more and more content.
