Six Steps To Social Media Marketing Success

The Social Media Marketing Plan, Why You Need One.

Social media marketing plans are in-depth outlines of everything you want to achieve by making your company active on social media. Without a solid plan, social media marketing feels like a meaningless task, and your potential for success suffers greatly without direction. While social media might have seemed like the Wild West of a brand’s marketing efforts, the outlet for advertising has matured to the point where it provides companies with concrete, real, and measurable impacts on their business’ profits. Social media marketing has to work in sync with the rest of the business strategy to ensure that the overall goals of the brand are being attained. There are six steps to creating a social media marketing plan, which we’re going to explore in the remainder of this tutorial. Remember, a social media plan is just like any other area of your business plan, which means it requires details in order to be impactful on your business.

Step One: Make Goals for Your Social Media Impact.

Just like any other marketing plan, the first step to a solid one is to set goals. Outlining your goals provides you with a clear way to measure the success of your marketing plan, and it is a way you can keep track of the return on investment (ROI). Social media marketing helps your business reach numerous goals, but some of the most common ones you might want to include are:

• Brand awareness increases
• Improving customer loyalty and increasing sales
• Increasing customer and potential customer engagement with the company.
• Increasing traffic to a website
• Improving the customer service division.
• Increasing the number of followers or fans, which will increase the amount of potential customers.

While all of these goals are a great way to begin, it’s important that you begin by focusing on just one or two of them at a time. Creating goals for a social media marketing plan is just like anything else in life – you do not want to start out too broad with a goal, as this would mean that you’ve spread your resources too thin and you risk not achieving your main purpose. One of the best ways to set up a goal, whether it’s personal or business-related, is to create a SMART goal. If you’ve read about these before, it’s because SMART goals are just that intelligent, and they work. If you’re not familiar with the acronym SMART, it means, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Let’s take a look at each letter in more depth, in case you’re not familiar with this form of goal setting or you need a refresher.

Specific.

There isn’t any point in being vague about the goals you’re setting. Otherwise, you won’t have a clear target you can aim for. Therefore, be specific. 

For example:

Increase the website traffic to our company blog using links shared twice a week on social media profiles such as Facebook and Twitter.

Measurable.

If you want to know whether your social media marketing plan and subsequent actions are making your company money or increasing exposure to potential customers or clients, then you need to make measurable goals. Vague, immeasurable goals might allow you to see a slight improvement or guess at one, but a measurable goal is more specific than that. It could be something such as: Increase the website traffic to our company blog referred by social media channels by 20%.

Attainable.

This is the number one mistake many companies and individuals make when they’re setting a goal. They make it unattainable because they want to accomplish everything at once. There isn’t an easy button for goals. If you try to push too far, you’ll set yourself up for failure right away. Therefore, make your goals challenging, but also make sure they’re realistic. 

For example:

Increase the website traffic to our company blog with social media channels by 20% from 1,000 unique visitors to 1,200 unique visitors.

Relevant.

Make sure that your social media goals are actually in line with the rest of your business goal; otherwise, you’ll quickly become frustrated. 

For example:

Gaining traffic to your blog is going to expose audiences to your free product guides and industry insights, and encourage them to obtain a subscription to your mailing list for further information and updates that will, in turn, encourage them to purchase products and services from your company.

Timely.

Lastly, you need to set a timeframe for the goal. Without a timeframe, goals are open-ended and don’t encourage you to set up small goals along the way to meet a deadline. Timeframes help you stay accountable, driven, and less likely to stray from the path when it comes to putting a plan in action. For example:

We want to increase our website traffic to our blog using social media outlets by.the end of the fourth quarter.

Step Two: Create Social Media Profiles (Or Spruce up Old Ones)

You have your goals pinned down, so it’s time to start creating profiles that will wow your potential customers and clients. There are a few mini steps to this one. So let’s begin with the first one – figuring out what social media networks you should join.

What Social Networks to Join.

There are unique aspects to every social media outlet out there. What works on one social media network isn’t going to work on another, and the primary characteristics of each network can vary greatly. You don’t need to be active on every social media network! The key is to focus on just one or two that will help you best achieve your social media marketing plan. The audiences and demographics of social networks are arguably the most imperative factor you need to consider. You’ve most likely already obtained a good idea of where your customers tend to hang out online, but reports such as The Demographics of Social Media Users by Pew Research Center lay out some concrete data for the five largest social networks – Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Other factors to consider are how much time you have to dedicate to advertising on social media and what resources are available to you. These will help you figure out which social network is the best fit for your company.

Optimizing the Social Media Profiles.

An up-to-date, complete social media profile will give your visitors a good first impression. It will highlight your company’s professionalism, and show people you’re ready for business. It’s a good idea to refresh profiles from time to time, but it’s crucial you start off on the right foot.

• Upload the profile photos and cover photos that have been optimized for your social media profile.
• Complete the About and Bio sections for each network fully, tailoring the text to the audience of the social media network you’ve joined.

Perform an Audit for Yourself and Competitors.

If you’ve already created a presence on social media sites, the time you plan out a marketing plan is the perfect time to perform an audit. Audits ensure all your social media profiles are up to date, and it gives you an insight into how competitors are performing. Take a look at the following checklists to help you get started with an in-depth audit of your profiles and your competitor’s profiles.

Your Company’s Profile.

1. Find and take note of every social media profile your company has, unofficial and official. Profiles and fan pages set up by employees or followers should be merged or purged to avoid confusion.
2. Make sure your profile and cover photos are all up to date and consistent with your company’s branding.
3. Update the Bios and About sections with current information and messaging, using the tone and language that is best suited to the social network you’re using. For example, Facebook is more laid back than LinkedIn.
4. Take note of the follower and fan accounts of the profiles, and when the last activity was recorded. If one account is starting to lag behind the others, even if you’re still posting, consider whether it’s worth your time to carry on with that platform or whether your efforts would be best focused somewhere else.

Competitor Profiles.

1. Find a few social media accounts run by your company’s competitors,.either from one network or a variety of networks.
2. Take note of how often those companies’ pages are updated with new posts, what they’re posting, and what type of engagement the posts receive on average in the forms of shares, likes, and comments.
3. Write down the date and their current number of followers and likes on their profile, which is a benchmark for you to work out their growth versus your company’s growth at a later time.
4. Examine the branding of their profile – profile photo, cover photo, and their tone. Do they give a good reflection of the brand’s offering, the brand, and the brand’s personality? Is it something you’d like to emulate, or do you want to stay away from it?

Step Three: Establishing a Tone of Voice.

Just as with any form of marketing, the way you speak or write to your audience has a significant impact on how they view your company and you. Brand personality is a set of associative and emotional characteristics that are connected to a brand or company name. These things will shape how people view a company and how they interact with a company. Often, brand’s personalities mirror that of their target customers. You might already have a decent idea of what your brand’s personality is like, but the following set of questions will make sure everyone on your team has a consistent point of reference to use.

• If your company or brand was a person, what type of personality would it have?
• If your brand was a person, what would their relationship be with the consumer? Would they be like a friend, a coach, a teacher, a parental figure, etc.?
• Write down what your company’s personality is not, using adjectives.
• Are there companies that have similar personalities to your brand? Why are these companies similar?
• How do you want customers to view your company or brand?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you ought to have a good idea about the tone your social media marketing is going to have, and you’ll be setup to start creating and publishing content, but let’s look at step four before you get into that.

Step Four: Creating a Post Strategy.

You can have the best looking social media profile and the best intentions in the world, but when you don’t have a content plan and a posting strategy, all those efforts can go to waste. Rather than plowing ahead without a plan, take a little time to build a posting strategy that is going to knock the competition right out of the water. Consider the following points:

• What forms of content are you going to post, and who is going to be responsible for creating that content? Images are a necessity with most social media platforms, but video content is becoming a central medium to many companies’ content strategies. Other forms of content include statistics, quotes, quizzes, comics, and so much more.
• How often are you going to post, and at what times during the day? There’s always a debate going on about what posting frequency and times of the day are the best to post. The truth is, there isn’t a one size fits all solution to this. The answer to that question is unique to your company and audience. How often you want to post is going to depend on the industry you’re in, your capability to make and curate good content, your reach, and the social network you’re using. As a general rule, businesses ought to aim to post on Facebook one or two times a day, five times or more per day on Twitter, and once a day on LinkedIn and Instagram. What time of day you post content should be determined by past history, or by targeting your fans when they’re most likely to be active on social media, such as before work in the morning, after work in the evening, or anytime during the weekends.
• How are you going to promote content using both free and paid strategies? Without a loyal, large, and engaged audience, posting an update and hoping for it to do well isn’t going to work for you in the long term. With competition from attention in the social media feeds of your fans, posting the same content many times in different guises, as well as targeting them using paid promotions, should be a big part of your strategy.

An excellent way to keep track of your progress and when to post is to keep a social media content calendar. This will help you plan for weeks or months ahead of time and give you an idea of the content you’ll be posting on social media. This will help prevent you from posting inconsistently and randomly, and it will let you build themes into your updates weekly, monthly, and seasonally. Spontaneous posting on social media still does have its place, such as in response to breaking news or a customer service crisis that has to be addressed immediately, but for the main part of your marketing strategy, a content calendar is a good step.

Step Five: Experiment and Analyze.

There isn’t a magic bullet when it comes to social media marketing success. The most posts are put out by your company, and the more you experiment, the more you’ll find out what content is going to work best for your company, what times of the day are best for engagement activity, and how often you need to post new stuff. Most importantly, your social marketing plan ought to never be static. You should do more things that work, but always be open to experimenting with new content, especially if it’s new in the industry new for your company. Instead of guessing, the easiest way to know what’s working and what’s not is to use a reporting tool. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest have built-in analytics you can use that give you a good idea of the performance of your profile and growth, such as post and page likes, popular posts, audience demographics, and a lot more. However, you might want to consider a central reporting tool, such as Hootsuite, to keep it all in one place. Other ways you can measure the success of your social media marketing plan is to include link shorteners that keep track of the clicks on the link, and the social section of the Google analytics is a good tool for observing the impact of social media marketing on your website.

Structured Testing Method.

There are times when the amount of figures and charts become overwhelming, so here’s one way you can structure your social media experiments clearly.

1. Choose what it is you want to test. Is it the engagement rate on your video posts? The website referrals you get? The reach of your images? Pick just one.
2. Set a goal. After a certain period, a week or a month, check the statistics on the factor you’ve chosen to test and take note of it. This is going to be your benchmark for the following segment of testing.
3. Double-down or try something new. Experiment with variations of your posting strategy, and then revisit that goal after another period of time to see whether performance has declined, improved, or stayed the same. Depending on the results, alter the strategy to optimize it and make it a regular part of the marketing plan. If it doesn’t work,.then try something new again.
4. Did you meet the goal?

Step Six: Automate the Process, Engage with Followers, and Listen.

The most wonderful thing about a detail social media marketing plan is you get to prepare the bulk of your content strategies ahead of time, and then you can use automation tools to queue your content, publish it, and distribute it exactly as your marketing plan schedule has dictated. Hootsuite, Post Planner, and Buffer are all great tools to check out. When your posting schedule has been automated, you free up your time to engage with your audience. You can set aside time on a daily basis to chat and interact with customers who are engaging with your content, answer questions, and thank people who have shared your posts, as well as active searching and native notifications, tools such as Mention and Google Alerts send you emails when someone has mentioned your brand online, which prompts you to re-share or interact with that post. When you have a social media marketing plan in place, you feel a lot more confident about using social media to market your business. You’re much better prepared to reach your goals for social media marketing. Remember these steps, create your plan, and you’ll be well on your way to social media marketing success!

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