How to Put Together A Social Media Marketing Plan

If you’re tired of posting without generating any engagement or leads or feel you’re just spinning your wheels when it comes to your social media marketing efforts, then what could be missing is a carefully put together social media marketing plan.

In fact, most businesses manage their social media inconsistently, with random posts at random times, without any clear goal in mind.

In time, not following a social media marketing plan usually leads to frustration and above all, no return on investment. Only a very small percentage of business owners have a carefully crafted social media strategy plan.

By having a social marketing plan, it will enable you to bridge the gap between where your business is at now and where you want it to be.

A social media campaign strategy could be the difference between getting no results or accidental results at best and actually experiencing an increase in business with real evidence behind it.

This is why you shouldn’t do anything on social media before putting a social media strategy plan together.

A social media campaign plan is simply the summary of everything you plan to do and achieve for your business using social networks.

In order to put together a social media marketing plan, it is important to follow a specific set of steps.

You can download our social media marketing plan template here.

Step 1: Audit your accounts

Before even thinking about what you would like to achieve thanks to social networks, it is important to know where you are at on social media. In other words, identify how many social media networks you have joined to market your business.

Then, make sure the usernames for each account is the same across all social networks so there is a certain level of consistency, identify how large or small your audience is for each account, notice the level of engagement on each, check when they were last updated and if the branding is congruent across all social networks and up-to-date.

Once you have gathered all the information from your audit, it is important to know how behind or ahead you are of your competition on social media, which leads us to step 2.

Step 2: Identify your competition

What is great about social media is its transparency: the ability to know at all times what your competitors are up to. By simply looking at their profiles on social media and where they are at in terms of engagement and audience size as well as seeing what is working for them or not, you then have a clear road map of what you should be focusing on and what the easiest and fastest ways are to achieve your goals.

Once you have audited your own accounts and compared them to your competitors’ social media accounts, you can fill in the grid below:

The last column allows you to identify what needs urgent attention and will allow you to identify what goals are important to set for your business, which leads us to step 3 of putting together a social media strategy plan.

You can download our social media marketing plan template here.

Step 3: Set goals

Goals are a very important part of any social marketing plan because goals will shape the social marketing plan you will implement.

Goals can vary from business to business depending on how competition is performing and what the business needs to achieve to turn social media into an important marketing channel.

Goals can be any of the following:

• Increase audience size
• Increase conversion rate
• Increase traffic (number of clicks to links)
• Increase engagement rate (number of comments, shares and likes for every post)
  Etc…

When setting goals make sure they are specific and have a timeframe.

For example:

• Increase our mailing list by 500 new subscribers each month
• Build a social audience of 20,000 people within 6 months
• Generate 300 clicks a week to the blog
• Generate 10 sales a week as a result of Facebook ads

Once goals have been set, you’re ready for step 4.

Step 4: Create a content plan

Having a content plan, also known as an editorial calendar will enable you to easily execute your tactics to reach your goals, and also allow you to identify the resources you will require in terms of staff, time, tools and budget.

To put a plan together, start by listing all the different types of content you can publish within a month and allocate the ratio for each type of content so your editorial calendar is balanced and multi-dimensional.

For example:

• Blog posts 20%
• Promotional posts 20%
• Testimonials 10%
• Product reviews 5%
• Inspirational quotes 15%
• Infographics 5%

Etc…

Then, create a table with columns and rows like the one here, that lists the posts that will be published each day, including the hashtags and links to include in each post if applicable.

Once you’ve created your table, you can actually write the posts in advance on a word document, so every day, all you need to do is copy and paste them.

Sometimes, you’ll need to create custom images for some of your posts, so create them in advance and have them ready for when it’s time to publish them.

Or you can schedule your posts using various scheduling software available.

Once you’ve outlined your content plan, you’re ready for step 5.

Step 5: Tracking

Depending on the goals set prior to creating your social media campaign strategy, there are a variety of tools you can use to track your progress to see whether you’re getting closer to achieving the goals outlined in your social media campaign strategy or not.

For example, if your main goal is to increase the number of clicks to your website from Twitter, you can use clickmeter.com as a tool to monitor clicks generated from Twitter in general, or from individual tweets.

Should the goal of your social media campaign plan be to increase the size of your audience on Facebook, using “Facebook insights” will help you monitor your progress.

There are of course many social media tracking tools that are very effective such as sproutsocial.com

Remember, a social media campaign plan is never set in stone and evolves as your business goals change and should be adapted based on the results generated.

You can download our social media marketing plan template here.

Remember to also subscribe to our Youtube channel for the latest social media marketing tips and tricks.

About the Author

Corinna Essa

Corinna Essa is known internationally as the go-to person when it comes to social media marketing.

Corinna owns a social media marketing company helping businesses around the world leverage the power of social media without doing any of the legwork. Her company has been featured in many media outlets including Sky Business news, Working Women magazine, Ymagazine, Tasmanian Times, Channel 7 and 101fm.

Corinna is also the author of 2 bestselling books “Money On Demand – The 16 Fastest Ways to Becoming a Millionaire Online” and “Reach: The SECRETS to converting your social media audience into your network marketing downline fast”