From LinkedIn to TikTok, social media has become a crucial component for any successful marketing strategy, giving you access to millions of devices across the globe. While most businesses have gone through the process of creating an Instagram profile or Facebook page, simply having a presence on social media is not enough to achieve your business goals.
To maximize the potential of social media, businesses need to have a well-thought-out social media marketing plan to target specific goals. A marketing plan should also be able to define your target audience, the right social platforms for your business and a digital strategy that is based on your social media objectives, whether it is creating brand awareness, generating leads or boosting website traffic.
In this article, we’ll explore further why every business needs a social media marketing plan, how to create the right plan for your business, and how best to implement that strategy to achieve your company’s social media goals.
How a social media marketing plan can help your business
So, you’ve created your social media channels, uploaded your business branding and filled out the information sections of your profiles. Now what? For a lot of businesses, this is where social media marketing campaigns end, creating a few posts on occasion but not regularly updating their page for potential customers. Coming up with new ideas for content can be difficult and that process can be time-consuming, especially when you’re already managing a busy company.
But that’s where having a social media marketing plan can help. Instead of posting randomly, a marketing plan for your social channels allows you to have a clear understanding of your goals, target audience, and content strategy. This ensures that your social media activities are aligned with your overall business goals, and you’re able to measure the success of your marketing efforts. You will be able to know what content works for the channels you are using and have a defined structure that helps you deliver effective and engaging social content each week.
A strong digital marketing plan will also contain detailed marketing analysis of your industry. With so many businesses vying for attention on social media, having an understanding of what works and what doesn’t in your field is crucial. By analysing your competitors’ social media activity, you will be able identify gaps in their strategy, and leverage these insights to better engage your target audience across these channels.
Creating a plan for your business’ social media channels
The first step in any content marketing plan is working to understand your customer base, building out customer personas and demographic information to determine exactly who you’ll be marketing to. Here at Sky High Digital, we specialise in marketing research and can work with you to analyse the best potential audience to target for your business. Once you have that information in-hand, you then need to pick the social media channels that amplify your business’ voice and best engage your potential customer base. Working this out can be a tricky process, with the world of social media changing every day and new platforms regularly popping up.
For example, if you’re a clothing or homewares business, you may want to using TikTok or Instagram videos to showcase your products to a younger, trendier customer base. However, if you’re an accounting or law firm, LinkedIn and Facebook may be more suitable when targeting fellow business owners to engage. Having an online marketing agency on hand to guide you through this process will likely increase your results on these channels, picking the platforms and content you need to generate in order to perform online.
Once you’ve determined the best channels for your business needs, it’s time to start building your marketing strategy to effectively engage with your audience. Working your way through the following steps will help you build out that plan and create a way for you to monitor its effectiveness:
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Who are your ideal customers, and where do they spend their time on social media? Do they prefer watching video content from different brands or are they more interested in informative content based on their personal interests? Understanding your target audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviour will help you create content that resonates with them and build a community around your brand. Having detailed breakdowns of these items will assist you in marketing to them on social media and help to re-align your operations to target them more effectively.
2. Create a Content Strategy
The heart of any social media marketing plan is a content strategy. Your strategy should outline the type of content you’ll create, how often you’ll post, and the tone and style of your content. This should all be tailored to the social channels you are posting to and, of course, the audience you’re looking to engage. Part of this process should be creating business-branded social post templates, building brand recognition for your business and allowing you to develop content quickly, rather than creating new items from scratch.
3. Plan Your Posting Schedule
With your strategy and branded templates in place, it’s time to plan out your posting schedule. Consistency is key in social media marketing, and it’s important to establish a schedule that works for you and your audience. Depending on the social media platform, you may need to post more frequently or at specific times of the day to reach them. A great way to determine this timing is by using the social media analysis tools provided to you by the platform. Nearly all of the major social media platforms provide this information free of charge, helping you to better understand when the majority of your audience is online.
4.Utilise Paid Social Media Advertising
Like any marketplace, social media is full of competitors trying to reach and engage with the same customer base as your company. One way to stand out from the crowd is to use paid social media campaigns, advertising your brand using platforms like Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads or TikTok Ads. For businesses, social media can often be pay-to-play, requiring investment to properly engage with an extended customer base. But the good news is that while you may need to use paid ads to reach customers, you can specify exactly who those customers are, where they are from and what they are interested in when using social media. This gives you a huge advantage and will allow you to target customers with exclusive offers, services and products that you want them to engage with.
4. Maintaining Connection with Your Clients and Customers
Social media isn’t just a megaphone for your business, it’s a two-way conversation that allows you to build relationships with your customers and create brand loyalty. Always ensure that you respond to comments and messages promptly, thank your followers for their support, and ask for feedback and suggestions. Social media reviews are also incredibly important online, helping build trust online for any new customers that visit your page and intrigued by your business.
5. Monitor Your Results
The final step in creating a marketing plan is to establish methods to monitor your results. There are many social media analytics tools that can help you track your performance, including engagement rates, reach, and click-through rates. Understanding these metrics can be a difficult process and something that a digital marketing agency can help you optimise over time.
Implementing your plan to drive business growth
As mentioned above, many businesses start with strong intentions on social media, only to let it fall to the wayside as other priorities arise. While you may have a strong plan in place, business owners and their staff need to ensure that all the steps in their marketing plan are followed, working to maintain a steady stream of content that is analysed for its effectiveness and adjusted if needed.
For businesses without the time or resources to commit to this implementation this may be where a digital marketing agency can help. Instead of creating content, managing your channels and analysis your pages’ metrics, an agency can take care of this process for you, freeing up your time and allowing you to focus on other critical business operations.
At Sky High Digital we work with businesses of all sizes to help them engage existing and new customers in a highly targeted way. Our talented team of social media experts can create an effective marketing plan for your social media channels to drive growth and interactions with your business, giving you piece of mind that your channels are being managed by professionals.
For a free consultation about your social media marketing or any of your other digital marketing channels, get in touch today.
