Social Media Marketing Business Plan
In this age and time, the use of social media in marketing your business is already a norm and a necessity and this gave birth to what we call as social media marketing business plan. Even if the use of social media for personal purposes might be easy, it’s a different story if you are going to use it for your business. You will need to have an extensive planning that will help in promoting your business the right way using the right measure.
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At a glance, having a social media marketing business plan may sound easy because you will just “simply” make use of the various social media sites should you want to raise visibility and awareness of your products and services across the Internet. Unfortunately, it is not, because as mentioned, you will need to have an extensive planning first before you dive into the unfamiliar waters of social media.
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If you are just starting your business, making use of social media sites is very helpful because it helps you in building networks and it also helps you deriving feedback, generating ideas, and even criticisms from your targeted social media audience. As the use of social media in business is growing and running at a fast pace, it may seem that social media is here to stay, like the Internet, and it is even bound to become a bigger thing in the business industry in the years to come.
With its rapid growth, the need to leverage proper social media site or channel in the best way possible also increases, for the reason that it is the “in thing” nowadays. Social media is powerful and if your business will have that “social media touch,“ you hit two birds with one stone: one bird is that you will be able to generate more business and the other bird will help you connect, serve, and even collaborate with your customers on a much different but higher level.
What Is a Social Media Marketing Business Plan?
A social media marketing business plan is as simple as a comprehensive strategy that you should follow in order to make your social media marketing an effective and successful one. These are the indicators that you have created a well-built social media marketing business plan:
- contains a clear and comprehensive list of goals and objectives
- consists of an audit of your social media presence that is being currently used
- includes a competitive analysis
- has an outline of a basic social media content strategy
- includes a social media calendar
- has established methods for you to be able to measure and analyze important matters
Even if building an effective strategy to create an equally effective social media marketing business plan can be tricky and time-consuming, all your efforts will be of great use in the end eventually. Having an effective social media marketing business plan is essential should you want to assure the success of your entire social media marketing efforts and endeavors.
Additionally, here are some of the other reason why having an effective social media marketing business plan can be of great help to you and your business:
- It will enable the maintenance of consistent posting schedules across all of your existing social media sites or channels.
- It will help you in avoiding any last-minute brainstorming just to have a content to share and post in your existing social media sites or channels.
- It will make possible for you to stay on track of the current trending topics since you have already included it in your marketing business plan to make sure you will be able to do so.
To sum it all up, having an effective social media marketing plan will ensure that you will be able you perform better in marketing and promoting your business and work even more efficiently with lesser stress in the equation.
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Steps for an Effective and Efficient Social Media Marketing Business Plan
Since the social media is here to stay as a vital marketing channel for any kind of business out there, you just have to make sure that you will be able to adapt to this without breaking a sweat. With that, here are some steps you can follow if you want to create an effective and efficient social media marketing business plan for your business:
Step 1: Audit your current or existing social media presence
Before you start to create a strategy for your path toward a successful social media marketing, make sure that you will be able to take at least a very quick look at where you currently are. Here are some of the areas you need to consider looking up as you would already audit your current business’s social media presence:
- The current social media networks that you are currently active in
- The optimization or your current networks such as having an optimized photo and cover images, bio, and URL
- The current social media networks that are giving you the most and the highest value
- The comparison of your business profile and your competitors’ profile
Step 2: Determine your ideal target customers
You have to make sure that you will not only have ideal customers in mind but you should also make sure that you will be able to have very specific target customers.
For example, you have students as your ideal customers, to make it more specific and targeted, you could make it as fourth-year students in college that are living in the United States, who are aged between 21 and to 30, and who are already earning their own income. Additionally, you also have to make sure that your target customers are primarily using Twitter.
To get you started, here are some of the things that you need to identify if you want to come up with a highly focused, ideal target customers:
- Age
- Location
- Job title or job position
- Income (monthly or yearly)
- Pain points (that your business’s products and services can solve)
- Social media network of preference
Step 3: Have your business’s mission statement established on your social media
Having a mission statement established on your social media network of choice can be an instrument for your business’s future actions. Through your mission statement, you will be able to make it clear for you and even to your ideal target customers how you are going to use your presence in the social media. This very same mission statement can also be used to reflect the identity of your brand.
As you create your social media mission statement, always keep in mind your ideal target customer so that you will also be guided by the appropriate words to use. Do not just use your social media presence to just sell your business’s products and services. You can use your social media as a way to establish your mission that is not related to just selling your products and services.
Do not also randomly post your mission statement on social media especially if that social media channel does not align with your missions statement.
Step 4: Identify your success metrics
To know whether your social media marketing business plan efforts are successful, you have to make sure that you have already identified your success metrics to whether you have already succeeded on your own standards.
It is important that you will base your success metrics on the money that you earn due to your use of social media channels and not on your number of followers (although the number of followers can affect the numbers). Because let’s be real; it’s still all about business. And additionally, you should know that you were spending time, money, and effort on something that is not giving any benefit to the business. With that, here are some metrics you may consider:
- Brand Mentions
- Conversion Rate
- Sentiments
- Time Spent on Website
- Total Number of Reach
- Total Shares
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Step 5: Create and curate engaging relevant and related content
Most businesses would go straight to this step even if there are still other steps they have to do in order to make this step effective. Even if this is the make or break of your social media marketing, you still have to deal with the first few steps since this will build a strong foundation for your social media presence.
If ever you have followed and accomplished the first few steps, you can now proceed to the fun (although it can be stressful) part of your social media marketing business plan. Since you have already determined your ideal, target customers, establish your social media mission statement, and your preferred social media channel, it will now be easier for you to create and curate the right and effective content for your social media presence. Here are some content examples you should create:
- Blog Posts
- Company News
- Images
- Infographics
- Interviews
- Videos
There are a lot of other possible content ideas you could make use of and post on your social media channels but just ensure that you choose the content that is appropriate for your business. What makes social medias running are its contents—this makes content as a crucial factor to your business. Do not just create high-quality content; create something that is also engaging enough for you to acquire a larger and more relevant network.
Step 6: Secure and invest in a Social Media Management Tool
It is an open secret that most marketers would leverage management tools that enable them to boost their statistics or productivity. Without such management tools, they will constantly experience burnout. There are also management tools that can help you in managing the social media networks that you use for your business. Such social media management tools can possibly help you to scale your marketing efforts easily.
One of the most remarkable benefits that you can possibly get from social media management tools is the fact that it has an ability wherein you can schedule your posts at a time you want to publish it. You can still provide content for your social media channels even if you are having a day off from work since you get to prepare your content in advance and let the social media management tool publish it for you during your day off.
Step 7: Keep on tracking, analyzing, and optimizing
There are three things you need to do in this step and this is to track, analyze, and optimize. To remember, keep the TAO mnemonics in mind. For you to succeed in your marketing venture in the world of social media, you need to constantly track your results, analyze the data, and optimize your preferred social media channel. These things might be basic but failure to miss them can affect your progress toward having a successful social media marketing business plan.
Final Words
Having a perfect strategy to have that perfect social media marketing business plan does not exist and it is never set in stone too. Any social media marketing business plan out there are constant works in progress that, whenever there are changes, the marketing business plan would also change. Do not be afraid to continuously create new strategies and start optimizing because you will still continue to grow and learn more about this venture that even if your initial social media marketing business plan seems to be the “perfect one,” it will still have changes any time in the future.
The use of social media provides a lot of benefits and advantages to both start-ups and established business. But with poor planning, such venture will never last and go to far. There are also a lot of challenges that you could face every day such as continuously updating your social media marketing strategy, constantly improving your search engine optimization or SEO, constantly being conscious of your traffic, continuously ensuring healthier customer satisfaction and a whole lot more. But despite all these challenges, just don’t give up and never give in to the pressure your competitors might directly or indirectly giving you and always remember that if you start as early as now, the faster you will see growth in your business with the help of social media.
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