How to create a social media marketing plan in 5 steps

18th Apr

Social media has grown to become an essential part of any business marketing toolkit. Even though the importance of social media has been widely documented, there are many businesses who market their services using social networks without having a social media marketing plan in place.

So, before going any further let's see what a social media marketing plan actually is. A social media marketing plan is a detailed written plan of everything you plan to do and accomplish for your business through social networks. The plan should comprehensively detail your starting point, what you hope to achieve and how you are going to get there.

Your social media marketing plan must work in complete alignment with your overall marketing strategy for your business, so that you can determine if you're achieving your goals.

Do you have a social media marketing plan? If you do, that's great! If you don't or the one you do have isn't working as well as you hoped, no worries!

Let's get started and starting creating your 5 step social media marketing plan.

STEP 1: Carry out a social audit and create social media marketing goals

The first step to your social media marketing plan is to review where you are now on social networks and how well you are doing. Having completed this social media audit you need to decide where improvements can be made

Once you've done this groundwork, you'll be ready to start setting goals. Although you would have created goals already as the improvements you've identified will become your goals.

Setting goals allows you to instantly determine if you are meeting your goals or not, as well as documenting your return on investment.

These goals are usually geared towards achieving your end goal for your business that becomes part of a larger marketing plan for your business. As you write goals you must remember to keep your ideal customers top of mind.

STEP 2: Create or improve your social media channels

The second step is to carefully select the social networks that would be most beneficial for your business marketing goals. You don't need to appear on all the social networks but you must be visible to your audience where they hang out. That's why a key point within any business marketing activity is to have identified your ideal customer so that you can market your services with pinpoint accuracy and achieve a higher rate of success.

I strongly recommend you tackle one social network at a time as trying to deal with all the social media networks simultaneously may become overwhelming. Once you've established which social network you wish to market your services, you can start optimising your social media accounts. A key tip is to make sure you have filled out all the relevant sections whether that be text or images.

STEP 3: Add engaging content

The next phase in creating a social media marketing plan is to create unique engaging content for your audience. To do this you need to know what's happening in your industry and how it can help your audience. So where do you find this? Well, you need to keep yourself in the loop through news that appears on the networks, engaging with other businesses and thought leaders.

STEP 4: The social media marketing plan

Finally! This is the stage you've been waiting for, creating your social media marketing plan. You need to bring together your engaging content, your ideal customer persona and your social media distribution calendar. In case you were wondering, a social media distribution calendar is a calendar that clearly defines when specific pieces of content will go live and on which network they will appear.

STEP 5: Evaluate and Improve your social media marketing plan

You've now distributed your content on your social media accounts and so the next stage is to evaluate how well it's doing by testing what day or time works best for your individual social media accounts. Document what type of content works best for each social media account such as text based content, images or video. Use the built-in analytics software within the social media networks as they will give you insights in to valuable data in regards to engagement. If it works then keep doing it, whilst looking in to how you can improve it and if it's not working try something else. One size does not fit all when it comes the social media networks. We are all individual and all learn and connect in many different ways from visual to auditory and reading and writing to kinesthetic, so make sure you cater for them all when creating your social media marketing plan.