A successful social media strategic plan needs to be clear, concise, and measurable. Additionally, it needs to outline your organization’s goals for the coming year and lay out how you’ll achieve them. For more effective and efficient social media strategy planning, the following are five actionable steps your company should consider in order to ensure that your brand produces a successful and attainable social media marketing strategy.
Audit Last Year’s Social Media Performance
Carefully analyze last year’s metrics from each of your social channels so that you can determine how and where leads have been generated and conversions increased, what has pushed social following, and what has driven traffic to your site. Make sure those results align with last year’s goals. While racking up lots of likes and shares of an individual campaign may encourage you, it’s more important that you ensure that each marketing campaign achieved its specific pre-defined objectives.
Define Your Social Media Marketing Goals
Your social media marketing goals should align closely with your company’s broader goals. While your company’s marketing goals can vary greatly based on your specific industry, company size, competition, target audience, and other factors, typical social media marketing goals may include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating leads
- Raising conversion rates
- Boosting sales
- Driving traffic to your website
- Building a community on social platforms
Create Target Audience Personas
No matter what your business or industry is, your target audience typically consists of multiple audience ‘groups’. By breaking down your data you can determine who your audience groups are, what social media they use, and what content they are engaging with. Once you’ve identified the individual groups, create a persona for each to define who they are. Use these personas to inform marketing campaigns, content creation, ad targeting, and to tailor your social media marketing strategy to each, ensuring you are engaging with all your audiences on social media.
Identify Distribution Channel Posting Times
While it is important to identify your company’s key distribution channels and define a strategy for each channel, it’s also important to make sure your messaging is reaching your audience while they are engaging on that channel. Study your audience and determine when they are most active on different social media platforms. Identify when you should be posting on different channels in order to ensure you are connecting with your target audience. Use this information to create a posting schedule that is accurate and successful as part of your overall social marketing strategy.
Check Out Your Competitors
When creating a successful social media strategy, it is crucial that you check out your competitors and identify:
- Who are your main competitors?
- What are they doing well?
- What are they not doing well?
- Which social channels do they utilize to connect with their audience?
- What type of content do they produce and how is it performing?
- Where could they improve on social?
The most effective way to do check out your competition is by engaging in active social media listening. By monitoring audience sentiments within your niche and around competing brands, you will better understand how competitors’ marketing strategies are evolving over time, what campaigns and content your audience is responding to, and which key industry terms are currently trending.
By planning your media marketing strategy efficiently and keeping tabs on your previous year’s effectiveness in reaching goals, you’ll be placed well to drive a workable and precise social marketing campaign strategy moving forward.
