So you’ve decided it’s time to start marketing your business on social media. Before you begin, it’s ever so important to develop a social media marketing plan to help you understand your goals and objectives, and how you’re going to meet them.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create a social media marketing plan…
1. Set Goals
Why are you marketing on social media? What is your product/service? Do you want to increase sales, or do you want to build brand awareness? Your goal could be almost anything.
Before you get started, you need to figure out what is you want to achieve on social media. You will need to draw back to these goals as you progress through your social media marketing plan.
It’s important to keep in mind that your goals will change a lot over time as your brand evolves.
2. Choose Your Social Platforms
Now that you have defined your goals, you need to figure out which platforms are best to deliver your message. If your brand is more ‘commercial’, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat are possible platforms to consider, but if you’re more ‘corporate’, then perhaps LinkedIn or Twitter is the way to go.
If you’re not sure which social media platforms are most suited to your brand, then check out one of our recent blogs: ‘Choosing the right social media platforms for your brand’.
3. Conduct a Competitor Analysis
Once you have decided which platforms you’ll be using to market your brand, it’s time to take a look at what your competitors are doing on those platforms.
Have a thorough look at what they are doing and assess what things they are doing right, and what things you think they could do better. Do they post lots of photos and videos? Do they link to lots of external websites? This will help you gain ideas on what your brand should be doing on social media.
4. Create Your Profiles
Here comes the fun part; creating your social media profiles! When creating the artwork for each profile, think about whether it will look good on both desktop AND mobile, as most of your audience will be looking at it from a mobile or tablet device.
5. Create a Content Plan
How often are you going to post on social media? Once a day or multiple times a day? Do you have enough content to post at that frequency?
How far in advance you write your content plan is up to you. We recommend writing them weekly or, at the very most, fortnightly. A lot can change in the space of a week!
In your content plan, write out the posts you’ll be sending out on each platform and the content (photos, video, GIFs, links, etc.) that will be included with them. Make sure everyone involved is happy with the content that has been produced and then go in and schedule your posts.
6. Report and Analyse
Has your social media content been well received? Is one platform performing better than another? Go back to the goals you wrote in the beginning. Does your social media report support and reflect these goals?
Once you’ve analysed the data from each platform, it’s time to evolve your social media marketing plan.
Want to learn more about how to create a social media marketing plan? Give us a call on 1300 29 77 16 or shoot us an email: info@astonsocial.com.au
