6 Steps to Your Effective Social Media Marketing Plan
Are you amazed by the increasing number of business pages on Facebook and Instagram? Many new businesses start their promotion by creating a page of their brand on social media sites.
If you are the owner of a start-up, social media can be a great platform for promoting your brand and advertising your products. It is mainly because social media marketing is cheap and highly effective. Gone are the days when social media was only meant for personal chatting with different people. At present, social media is used by 7 out of 10 Americans, as compared to a mere 5% in the year 2005.
We spend a good amount of our time on the various social media sites. Hence, by using it, your company can reach out to a large base of consumers. Research shows that at least once a month, 30% of millennials connect with a particular brand on the social media platform. Thus, it is not enough to have a presence on social media, but it is absolutely crucial to have an effective plan.
Since you are just starting out, it might get overwhelming in the beginning to create a perfect social media marketing plan. But, once you begin, you will eventually get the hang of it.
In this blog, we have provided some steps to help you get started with your social media marketing plan.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Decide what you want to achieve
The first thing that you need to know is why you are building this social media marketing campaign. You should set an achievable goal. This will help you to identify the pathway to the goal and recognize the factors that will assist you to attain your dream. Here are some goals that are common in social media marketing planning:
Brand awareness-As a startup, it should be your number one priority to increase your brand awareness. With the help of a powerful brand personality and valuable content, you will be able to build a brand awareness that will last.
Increased sales- Just like the primary objective of every marketing campaign, your goal for the social media marketing campaign can also be to generate leads and increase sales.
Customer loyalty- Another thing you can target to achieve through social media marketing is building a strong base of loyal customers. Having loyal customers can benefit your company in many wonderful ways.
Step 2: Know your target audience
You can never reach out to your potential customers if you do not target the right audience. In the case of social media marketing, knowing your target audience is especially crucial. This is because, for different audiences, you will have to focus on different social media platforms.
Talking of Facebook, you will find a completely different audience than that on LinkedIn. Your product or service may appeal to one demographic and may not attract the others. For example, homework help service will attract students, but not new parents. If you are a B2B company, you can promote your business on LinkedIn. For a B2C, if your target audience is especially women, you can use Facebook as your preferred platform. If your business deals with a visual product, Instagram can be a good platform to use.
Thus, you need to know exactly who your target audiences are in which social media platform you have the highest chance of finding them.
Step 3: Build up your followers
Your brand will be in a much better place with more people following it on social media. You cannot expect to get a million followers overnight, but with time and the right strategy, you will eventually get there. You can get people to follow or like your page and track which of them will follow you back. You can also use other strategies to build a community of your brand on the various social media platforms.
Step 4: Develop a strong connection with your audience
Before you can connect with the audience, you need to gather enough information about them. Hence, do your research on their online behavior, know what makes them interested in a product or a service, etc. You will have to understand how your audience is spending their time on social media, and know how they are interacting with each other.
You can use this data to further your connection with them. Did you know that 71% of consumers will recommend a brand if they receive a good experience from the brand through social media? Thus, you must interact with the consumers as much as possible on social media to ensure that they have a great experience.
Step 5: Create helpful content consistently
Consistency is a very important thing when it comes to social media marketing. And by posting content that gives value to the consumers, you can keep them engaged. Creating content for social media will vary according to the specific social media site you are writing for. It is very important to choose the right words and present them in the right way to clearly convey your message to the audience.
You can use the techniques of copywriting, attractive beginnings, various types of informative content to keep your audience engaged. Also, post regularly to avoid a situation in which the consumers lose interest in your brand. With the perfect content, you can create more leads, get more followers, and also increase the engagement rate.
Remember, the content should be useful and valuable to the consumers and must not contain desperate sales pitches. This is the only way the audience will be able to build their trust in you. For maintaining consistency, you can take the help of automation.
Step 6: Keep an eye on your competitors
You should always do your research regarding the strategies used by your competitor- which social media they are using, which strategy they are following, if they have achieved success through a campaign, etc. Thus, you can get an idea of what works for the demographic you are targeting, or you can come across a strategy they are using, and improve it further to get a better result.
For example, you can examine how many times they are posting on their social media pages, and how the audience is reacting to the same. This way, you will know about the ideal number of posts to make each day and enjoy a better result.
Social media has great potential for bringing in the maximum number of customers to your brand. All you need to do is create the perfect social media marketing strategy. Use the above-mentioned steps to build the most effective plan which can get you immense success.
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Co-Authored With
Marceline Joseph is an online math solver, programmer and an academic writer associated with Tophomeworkhelper.com. Besides being associated with the education and teaching industry, Marceline is a passionate stamp collector and chess player.