With over 3.6 billion people using social media, you must have a social media presence of your own with an effective social media campaign. Your social media campaign is an adage to your website that has impeccable website design features, a way for you to connect with your target audience. Although the website is your home or your online store per se, your social media accounts are your way to connect with your target market – promoting your services, providing information about your service and your industry, answering questions, and replying to client reviews.
With this in mind, you must create a social media marketing campaign that would speak to your target market and address their specific needs. So how do you do this? You’d need to create an effective social media plan as a blueprint for your social media campaign.
An Effective Social Media Plan Is the Key to a Successful Campaign
Your social media plan is a complete overview of everything you want to do and what you want to achieve for your social media campaign. It includes:
- The objectives and goals of your social media campaign
- Social media content
- The workflow of content approval
- Performance measurement and analysis
When you don’t plan out your campaign, you’ll end up with content that’s not in line with your brand, a confusing marketing message, poor results on traffic and engagement, and waste on ad costs (especially if you use paid ads).
With this, you need to do your research, lay down your strategies, and also come up with ideas that would make an impact on your target audience or effectively relay to them the message you want to tell them.
So, How Do You Create an Effective Social Media Marketing Plan?
Being in the business of helping our clients with online marketing, our team at Proweaver shows you the steps in crafting an effective social media marketing plan for your small business:
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Identify Your Goals and Objectives
What is the purpose of your campaign? This can be determined by the goals and objectives you set.
Your campaign’s goals are what you want to achieve through your overall marketing campaign. They talk about what you want to acquire long term.
For example:
Goal:
- Acquire a loyal following for the brand
- Increase ROI within 5 years
- Increase website traffic
On the other hand, your objectives define the strategies or ways you plan to get to your long-term goal. These objectives need to be specific and measurable, and must have a definite completion date. That way, you can track your campaign’s progress and know if you’re meeting them.
For example:
Objectives:
- Gain a total of 50 engagements by December 2021
- Increase traffic by 5% by June 2021
- Convert 10 prospects November 2021
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Know the Target Audience
Knowing who your social media campaign is for is crucial for achieving your objectives and goals. Gather data about your target audience to know what kind of tone, messaging, visuals, or types of content will get more engagement.
Here’s one marketing piece of advice you should remember when identifying your target audience: When you target everyone, you target no one.
Hence, you should have a clear picture of who you should be talking to when creating your content. Here’s a guide as to how you can come up with a customer or client profile:
- What is their age range?
- What kind of jobs do they have?
- Do they live in the city or rural areas?
- What do they like or dislike?
- What is their social class?
- How much do they make?
- What kind of brands do they like?
You can even add more questions and use stock images to paint a clear picture of your audience.
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Research Your Competition
Of course, monitoring your competition helps you know what works and what doesn’t work for your specific nature of business. Gather a list of your competitors and check what type of content they are producing and what is gaining the most engagement.That way, you can also incorporate the strategy in your own way and in a way that is in line with your brand. At the same time, you can scrap ideas that may not work well, should your competition have done the same thing but gained poor results.
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Identify Which Social Media Channel to Use
Did you know that an Internet user spends an average of 144 minutes on social media per day? That means through scrolling their newsfeeds, they will be bombarded by countless content and countless ads, and only a few chosen content would catch their attention.
Know that not all social media platforms may be a perfect fit for your social media campaign. Now that you have an idea as to who your target audience is and what your competition is doing, you need to use this information to find the perfect platform to use.
What do you think are the social media platforms that your target audience would use?
The top social media networks are Facebook and Youtube with the most active users. And for the business side of things, you have LinkedIn. Some businesses also make use of Instagram to sell items or services online.
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Identify the Type of Content to Use
The Internet is full of content, from video and image to written content. With this, you must be smart about the types of content you will use on your business’s social media page, as well as what type of content would work for the platform you will be using.
Think of it this way, if your small business relies on imagery and aesthetics, then Instagram would be the perfect place to market your product or service. Using curated photos and engaging captions to sell your product or service will be effective in getting you conversions.
On the other hand, if your business deals with B2B marketing, then you can make use of LinkedIn. There, you can promote video content, Ebooks, online courses, and the likes to get more people to know about the service that you are offering.
If you’re planning to use Facebook, the content you can use may vary, whether it’s video, infographic, and the likes. Just make sure that you put out content that reflects your brand, is in line with the message you are trying to say, and specifically targets the people you plan to sell your product or service to.
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Have a Posting Strategy and Content Calendar
Having your very own content calendar allows you to keep track of your social media posts. When you have a content calendar for your social media campaign, you can visualize your ideas and organize them in a way that will be easier for you to implement once the time comes.
You should also research the best times to post your content on the platform. Would your target audience scroll through social media at night? What days would they be available to take a look at your content? Once you have this information, build your social media calendar off of that.
Nowadays, there are tons of applications wherein you can schedule your social media posts and the platform would post them on your page automatically. However, if you don’t have the time to handle your social media account by yourself, you can always enlist the help of an online marketing expert.
These are what you need to take note of when coming up with an effective social media plan. When you’ve posted content for a couple of weeks or months, it’s time to track your progress, so you can get an idea as to what types of content can get the most engagement or traffic.
Measure and Analyze Results
Having detailed metrics of how your content is performing helps you see if you are meeting the objectives and goals of your social media campaign. Typically, social media platforms have features wherein you can check the amount of traffic and engagement your content is getting. But you can also turn to other applications specifically for analytics to get a more comprehensive breakdown.
How Proweaver Can Help Your Small Business with Planning Your Social Media Campaign
Proweaver, Inc. has helped numerous small businesses around the world with their social media campaign, working with them in creating an effective social media plan that would increase traffic, generate leads, and boost ROI. We have social media marketing experts, content writers, and graphic designers who work together to help you put out quality content that will reflect your business’s brand and capture your target market’s attention, resulting in increased following and loyal customers or clients.
If you want to know more about how we can help you, feel free to get in touch with us at +1 (877) 300-6564.