With 50 percent of the world’s population accessing social media, your business must be on it to grab the eyeballs of the target audience. Regardless of the scale of the business or the industry where you operate, social media platforms can help you to build your presence and leverage it to foster brand loyalty.
However, in the absence of a marketing strategy, businesses can find it challenging to optimize the full potential of social media. That’s why we have compiled the critical steps involved in developing a social media marketing plan from scratch.
Use these pointers to develop an effective social media marketing plan for your business:
1- Review Your Social Media Presence
A social media audit helps you to understand where do you stand currently. You can use the audit findings to identify better opportunities to grow on social media and engage with your audience.
Start by tracking down your accounts on various social media platforms. It is possible that some accounts were created right when you started and were abandoned later. Make sure to locate these dormant profiles through a thorough Google search or a search on various social media platforms directly. Identify impostor accounts and reach out to the account holder for shutting down these accounts.
The audit gives you a fair idea about which social platforms generate more value for your business and how your competitors are doing on social media. It also helps you understand if your accounts are properly optimized for the platforms. For instance, you can check if your bio is complete and if you have uploaded a profile pic.
2- Define Your Ideal Customer
A marketing strategy works when you communicate the right message and also identify the ideal recipient of the message. Painting a detailed portrait of your target customer makes it easy to sell your service. That’s why your customer’s detailed persona should take into account factors such as age, key concern, preferred social media platform.
For example, you sell premium baby food through an Instagram store. Identifying parents as your ideal customer will cast a vast net. Instead, you will have more success if you narrow down the persona as parents between the age of 30-40 years, residing in Dubai, earning more than 250000 Dirhams, who primarily use Instagram, and are looking for baby food for a newborn.
3- Develop a Brand Voice
If you want your business to stand out in the crowd, your brand needs to have a distinct personality. It helps you to engage with your target audience in a better manner. For instance, Apple wants people to buy Apple products. Instead of bombarding the audience with too many technical details about their products, they use a direct and casual communication style, peppered with vocabulary commonly used by small business owners, to get to the point.
So prepare a documented strategy setting out your brand’s personality traits and the common vocabulary and phrases that you want to use. This will help you create consistent social media posts.
4- Know Your KPIs
Data drive social media marketing strategy. However, a successful strategy should look beyond getting more ‘likes’ for every post or gaining more followers. Here are some key metrics you must take into account
Engagement: You can find a post’s engagement by dividing the total number of social interactions by the total reach. A higher engagement rate means that your target audience finds your posts interesting and wants to interact.
Reach This metric lets you know if your content is showing up on your target user’s feeds. It also helps you to understand the potential impact of any social media post. For example, you notice that the reach of a particular post is incredibly high. This indicates that it is an excellent piece of content that you can repurpose in the future to draw more traffic.
Click through rate: This refers to the number of times the audience clicks on a landing page button. Tracking clicks is important for understanding the journey of a potential customer through the marketing funnel. In other words, clicks are a crucial metric if you want to know what works and what doesn’t work with your audience.
5- Create Content That Keeps Your Audience Hooked
This may feel like a no-brainer, but it is easier said than done. Many businesses jump straight away this step without a clear game plan and end up creating mediocre content that fails to make an impression.
One of the best ways to create engaging content is by diversifying it. For instance, if your business is active on Instagram, make sure to engage with your audience through Instagram Stories, in addition to regular posts. You can also upload interesting tutorials about using your product. For instance, if you are selling a makeup line, show your audience how to use different products to create a look for a night out.
Is Your Social Media Marketing Plan Ready for Take-Off?
A well-crafted social media marketing plan is vital for the success of any business. However, no strategy should be cast in stone -- you should have a dynamic approach to keep up with the changing trends in the world of social media.
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