12 Essential Elements Of A Social Media Marketing Strategy

Do you need some help to get started with your social media marketing plan?

If you want to attract and engage social media marketing strategy fans and followers—and convert them into paying customers — you need to map out a clear, goal-oriented social media plan. If you don’t, it will be obvious to your fans and target market that you are disorganized. In addition to damaging your brand, you’ll risk losing sales by sending your audience to your competitors.

If you’re starting from scratch, it can feel overwhelming.

You know that others have been successful at social media marketing, but there are so many moving parts that creating a plan of your own can be daunting. If you are brand new to social media and looking for a straightforward way to start, follow the advice below.

12 Steps to Social Media Marketing Success

1. Research and know your audience.

What topics and interests are they most social about? What problems are they trying to solve? What are their pain points?

2. Use the same social networks as your audience.

Are Facebook and Twitter their platforms of choice? Do most of them use Pinterest and Instagram? Go where your target audience is to create awareness, engagement, and brand ambassadors.

3. Identify your KPIs (key performance indicators).

They measure progress toward your goals. What do you want your social media efforts to accomplish? What does success look like in quantifiable terms?

4. Write a social media marketing playbook.

The playbook should detail your KPIs, audience profiles, brand personas, campaign concepts, promotional events, contests, content themes, crisis management plan, etc. Make sure to tailor strategies that are unique to each of your social media channels.

5. Align the people at your company with the plan.

Get everyone on board with your strategy. Divide responsibilities among your team, such as who is in charge of posting to your blog and each social media network, who will respond to comments and @mentions, and who will own metrics tracking and reporting.

6. Set aside some time at the beginning of each week to prepare.

Take 30-60 minutes to schedule tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, Pinterest pins, and other social media content. Come up with some original ideas, links to your content, and links to outside content that is useful or interesting to your audience.

7. Develop a content marketing calendar.

Use one of the example spreadsheets I’ve created as a starting point to plan content topics, headlines, related links, desired scheduling, names of authors, etc.

8. Post content that is relevant to newsworthy topics and events.

As soon as breaking news comes out about anything related to your brand or industry, you should share your opinion and become part of the conversation.

9. Treat all of your social channels differently.

Don’t post the same message everywhere; remember who the audience is on each platform and how they interact. What works on Facebook will fall flat on Twitter, and vice versa.

10. Assign someone to act as a customer service rep.

It’s vital to be responsive to user-generated content, comments, and feedback (positive or not). CRM (customer relationship management) is fundamental to social media marketing success.

11. Schedule metrics reporting.

Reporting metrics can occur weekly, monthly, or bimonthly depending on your goals and desired outcomes.

12. Reanalyze your plan regularly.

If something in your plan isn’t working, switch it up or do some A/B testing to determine what your audience responds to better. Use 2 versions of your content simultaneously and measure to see which one is more successful and use it going forward.

Infographic via BIGEYE

Article Written by: Pam Dyer