How To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan

What is a social media marketing plan?

A social media marketing plan is the summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business using social networks. This plan should comprise an audit of where your accounts are today, goals for where you want them to be in the near future, and all the tools you want to use to get there.

In general, the more specific you can get with your plan, the more effective you’ll be in its implementation. Try to keep it concise. Don’t make your social media marketing strategy so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable. The plan will guide your actions, but it will also be a measure by which you determine whether you’re succeeding or failing. You don’t want to set yourself up for failure from the outset.

Step 1: Create social media objectives and goals

The first step to any social media marketing strategy is to establish the objectives and goals that you hope to achieve. Having these objectives also allows you to quickly react when social media campaigns are not meeting your expectations. Without goals, you have no means of gauging success or proving your social media return on investment (ROI).

These goals should be aligned with your broader marketing strategy, so that your social media efforts drive toward your business objectives. If your social media marketing strategy is shown to support business goals, you’re more likely to get executive buy-in and investment.

Go beyond vanity metrics such as Retweets and Likes. Focus on advanced metrics such as leads generated, web referrals, and conversion rate.

You should also use the SMART framework when setting your goals. This means that each objective should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

SMART goal example:

“For Instagram we will share photos that communicate our company culture. We will do this by posting three photos a week. The target for each is at least 30 likes and 5 comments.”

A simple way to start your social media marketing plan is by writing down at least three social media goals. Make sure to ask yourself what the goal will look like when completed, and use that to determine how you will track it.

Step 2: Conduct a social media audit

Prior to creating your social media marketing plan, you need to assess your current social media use and how it’s working. This means figuring out who is currently connecting with you via social, which social media sites your target market uses, and how your social media presence compares to your competitors’.

We’ve created a social media audit template that you can follow for each step of the process:

Once you’ve conducted your audit you should have a clear picture of every social account representing your business, who runs or controls them, and what purpose they serve. This inventory should be maintained regularly, especially as you scale your business.

It should also be evident which accounts need to be updated and which need to be deleted altogether. If your audit uncovers fraudulent accounts—a fake branded Twitter profile, for example—report them. Reporting fraudulent accounts will help ensure that people searching for you online only connect with the accounts you manage.

As part of your social media audit you’ll also want to create mission statements for each network. These one-sentence declarations will help you focus on a very specific goal for Instagram, Facebook, or any other social network. They will guide your actions and help steer you back on track if your efforts begin to lag.

Take the time you need to determine the purpose of every social profile you have. If you can’t figure out its purpose, you should probably delete that profile.

Mission statement example:

“We will use Snapchat to share the lighter side of our company and connect with younger prospect customers.”

Before you can determine which social media networks are right for your business, you first need to know who your audience is and what they want. We’ve created a guide to help you learn which social networks your audience lives on, which tools to use to gather demographic and behavioural data, and how to target the customers you want.

Step 3: Create or improve your social accounts 

Once you’ve finished with your social media audit, it’s time to hone your online presence. Choose which networks best meet your social media goals. If you don’t already have social media profiles on each network you focus on, build them from the ground up with your broader goals and audience in mind. If you do have existing accounts, it’s time to update and refine them to get the best possible results.

We’ve created a guide on How to Set-up Facebook, Twitter, and Every Other Major Social Network to walk you through that process. Each social network has a unique audience and should be treated differently.

Optimizing profiles for SEO can help generate more web traffic to your online properties. Cross-promoting social accounts can extend the reach of content. In general, social media profiles should be filled out completely, and images and text should be optimized for the social network in question.

Step 4: Get social media inspiration from industry leaders, competitors, clients

Not sure what kinds of content and information will get you the most engagement? For inspiration, look to what others in your industry are sharing and use social media listening to see how you can distinguish yourself from competitors and appeal to prospects they might be missing.

Consumers can also offer social media inspiration, not only through the content that they share but in the way that they phrase their messages. See how your target audience writes Tweets, and strive to mimic that style. Also learn their habits—when they share and why—and use that as a basis for your social media marketing plan.

A final source of social media inspiration is industry leaders. There are giants who do an incredible job of social media marketing, from Red Bull and Taco Bell to KLM Airlines and Tangerine Bank. Companies in every industry imaginable have managed to distinguish themselves through advanced social media strategies. Follow them and learn everything you can. See if they’ve shared any social media advice or insight elsewhere on the web.

Here are a few suggested sources of inspiration in different areas of social media marketing:

• Content marketing: Unbounce, Virgin
• Social media customer service: Tangerine, Warby Parker
• Social media advertising: AirBnB, the American Red Cross
• Facebook strategy: Coca-Cola, Walmart
• Google+ strategy: Cadbury, National Geographic
• Twitter strategy: Charmin, Oreo
• Instagram strategy: Herschel Supply Co., General Electric

http://www.slideshare.net/hootsuite/smss-lookbook

Step 5: Create a content plan and editorial calendar

Having great content to share will be essential to succeeding at social media. Your social media marketing plan should include a content marketing plan, comprised of strategies for content creation and content curation, as well as an editorial calendar.

Your content marketing plan should answer the following questions:

• What types of content you intend to post and promote on social media
• How often you will post content
• Target audience for each type of content
• Who will create the content
• How you will promote the content

Your editorial calendar lists the dates and times you intend to publish blogs, Instagram and Facebook posts, Tweets, and other content you plan to use during your social media campaigns.

Create the calendar and then schedule your messaging in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day. This gives you the opportunity to work hard on the language and format of these messages rather than writing them on the fly whenever you have time. Be spontaneous with your engagement and customer service rather than your content.

An example editorial calendar

Make sure your calendar reflects the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile. If the purpose of your LinkedIn account is to generate leads, make sure you are sharing enough lead generation content. You can establish a content matrix that defines what share of your profile is allocated to different types of posts. For example:

• 50 percent of content will drive back to your blog
• 25 percent of content will be curated from other sources
• 20 percent of content will support enterprise goals (selling, lead generation, etc.)
• five percent of content will be about HR and culture

If you’re unsure of how to allocate your resources, a safe bet is to follow the Social Media Rule of Thirds:

• One-third of your social content promotes your business, converts readers, and generates profit
• One-third of your social content should share ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded businesses
• One-third of your social content should be personal interactions with your audience

Step 6: Test, evaluate and adjust your social media marketing plan 

To find out what adjustments need to be made to your social media marketing strategy, you should constantly be testing. Build testing capabilities into every action you take on social networks. For example, you could:

• Track the number of clicks your links get on a particular platform using URL shorteners and UTM codes
• Use Hootsuite’s social media analytics to track the success and reach of social campaigns
• Track page visits driven by social media with Google Analytics

Record and analyze your successes and failures, and then adjust your social media marketing plan in response.

Surveys are also a great way to gauge success—online and offline. Ask your social media followers, email list, and website visitors how you’re doing on social media. This direct approach is often very effective. Then ask your offline customers if social media had a role in their purchasing. This insight might prove invaluable when you look for areas to improve. Learn more about how to measure social media ROI for your business.

The most important thing to understand about your social media marketing plan is that it should be constantly changing. As new networks emerge, you may want to add them to your plan. As you attain goals, you will need to set new targets. Unexpected challenges will arise that you need to address. As you scale your business, you might need to add new roles or grow your social presence for different branches or regions.

Rewrite your social media strategy to reflect your latest insights, and make sure your team is aware of what has been updated.

#1: Identify Business Goals

Every piece of your social media strategy serves the goals you set. You simply can’t move forward without knowing what you’re working toward.

Look closely at your company’s overall needs and decide how you want to use social media to contribute to reaching them.

You’ll undoubtedly come up with several personalized goals, but there are a few that all companies should include in their strategy—increasing brand awareness, retaining customers and reducing marketing costs are relevant to everyone.

I suggest you choose two primary goals and two secondary goals to focus on. Having too many goals distracts you and you’ll end up achieving none.

#2: Set Marketing Objectives

Goals aren’t terribly useful if you don’t have specific parameters that define when each is achieved. For example, if one of your primary goals is generating leads and sales, how many leads and sales do you have to generate before you consider that goal a success?

Marketing objectives define how you get from Point A (an unfulfilled goal) to Point B (a successfully fulfilled goal). You can determine your objectives with the S-M-A-R-T approach: Make your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Using our previous example, if your goal is to generate leads and sales, a specific marketing objective may be to increase leads by 50%. In order to measure your progress, choose which analytics and tracking tools you need to have in place.

Setting yourself up for failure is never a good idea. If you set an objective of increasing sales by 1,000%, it’s doubtful you’ll meet it. Choose objectives you can achieve, given the resources you have.

You’ve taken the time to refine your goals so they’re relevant to your company, so extend that same consideration to your objectives. If you want to get support from your C-level executives, ensure your objectives are relevant to the company’s overall vision.

Attaching a time frame to your efforts is imperative. When do you intend to achieve your goal(s)? Next month? By the end of this year?

Your objective of increasing leads by 50% may be specific, measurable, achievable and relevant, but if you don’t set a deadline for achieving the goal, your efforts, resources and attention may be pulled in other directions.

#3: Identify Ideal Customers

If a business is suffering from low engagement on their social profiles, it’s usually because they don’t have an accurate ideal customer profile.

Buyer personas help you define and target the right people, in the right places, at the right times with the right messages.

When you know your target audience’s age, occupation, income, interests, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, likes, dislikes, motivations and objections, then it’s easier and cheaper to target them on social or any other media.

The more specific you are, the more conversions you’re going to get out of every channel you use to promote your business.

#4: Research Competition

When it comes to social media marketing, researching your competition not only keeps you apprised of their activity, it gives you an idea of what’s working so you can integrate those successful tactics into your own efforts.

Start by compiling a list of at least 3-5 main competitors. Search which social networks they’re using and analyze their content strategy. Look at their number of fans or followers, posting frequency and time of day.

Also pay attention to the type of content they’re posting and its context (humorous, promotional, etc.) and how they’re responding to their fans.

The most important activity to look at is engagement. Even though page admins are the only ones who can calculate engagement rate on a particular update, you can get a good idea of what they’re seeing.

For example, let’s say you’re looking at a competitor’s last 20-30 Facebook updates. Take the total number of engagement activities for those posts and divide it by the page’s total number of fans. (Engagement activity includes likes, comments, shares, etc.)

You can use that formula on all of your competitors’ social profiles (e.g., on Twitter you can calculate retweets and favourites).

Keep in mind that the calculation is meant to give you a general picture of how the competition is doing so you can compare how you stack up against each other.

#5: Choose Channels and Tactics

Many businesses create accounts on every popular social network without researching which platform will bring the most return. You can avoid wasting your time in the wrong place by using the information from your buyer personas to determine which platform is best for you.

If your prospects or customers tell you they spend 40% of their online time on Facebook and 20% on Twitter, you know which primary and secondary social networks you should focus on.

When your customers are using a specific network, that’s where you need to be—not everywhere else.

Your tactics for each social channel rely on your goals and objectives, as well as the best practices of each platform.

For example, if your goal is increasing leads and your primary social network is Facebook, some effective tactics are investing in Facebook advertising or promotion campaigns to draw more attention to your lead magnets.

#6: Create a Content Strategy

Content and social media have a symbiotic relationship: Without great content social media is meaningless and without social media nobody will know about your content. Use them together to reach and convert your prospects.

There are three main components to any successful social media content strategy: type of content, time of posting and frequency of posting.

The type of content you should post on each social network relies on form and context. Form is how you present that information—text only, images, links, video, etc.

Context fits with your company voice and platform trends. Should your content be funny, serious, highly detailed and educational or something else?

There are many studies that give you a specific time when you should post on social media. However, I suggest using those studies as guidelines rather than hard rules. Remember, your audience is unique, so you need to test and figure out the best time for yourself.

Posting frequency is as important as the content you share. You don’t want to annoy your fans or followers, do you?

Finding the perfect frequency is crucial because it could mean more engagement for your content or more unlikes and unfollows. Use Facebook Insights to see when your fans are online and engaging with your content.

#7: Allocate Budget and Resources

To budget for social media marketing, look at the tactics you’ve chosen to achieve your business goals and objectives.

Make a comprehensive list of the tools you need (e.g., social media monitoring, email marketing and CRM), services you’ll outsource (e.g., graphic design or video production) and any advertising you’ll purchase. Next to each, include the annual projected cost so you can have a high-level view of what you’re investing in and how it affects your marketing budget.

Many businesses establish their budget first, and then select which tactics fit that budget. I take the opposite approach. I establish a strategy first, and then determine the budget that fits that strategy.

If your strategy execution fees exceed your budget estimate, prioritize your tactics according to their ROI timeframe. The tactics with the fastest ROI (e.g., advertising and social referral) take priority because they generate instant profit you can later invest into long-term tactics (fan acquisition, quality content creation or long-term engagement).

#8: Assign Roles

Knowing who’s responsible for what increases productivity and avoids confusion and overlapping efforts. Things may be a bit messy in the beginning, but with time team members will know their roles and what daily tasks they’re responsible for.

When everyone knows his or her role, it’s time to start planning the execution process. You can either plan daily or weekly. I don’t advise putting a monthly plan together because lots of things will come up and you may end up wasting time adapting to the new changes.

You can use tools like Basecamp or ActiveCollab to manage your team and assign tasks to each member. These tools save you tons of time and help you stay organized.

As social media continues to grow as a proven marketing strategy, the marketing industry has seen an increase in clever and effective social media campaigns.

Many publishers and organizations have been compiling and publicly recognizing their favorites, and the top picks vary greatly in size, method and style. However, when you break down the details of various top-rated social media campaigns, you see that they often share some common elements.

Our most recent social media campaign, #JustSaidYes, taught us a number of important lessons about building a great social media campaign. Instead of running a broad campaign for all potential WeddingWire (my employer) users, we were able to identify a subset of our target audience and create a campaign that capitalized on existing social behavior on their favorite network: Instagram.

But for many businesses, a successful social media campaign may not be as easy to identify, plan or execute.

If your business is considering a social media campaign, incorporate these four main components to achieve your desired results and boost the impact to your bottom line.

1. A Carefully Developed Plan

The best social media campaigns start with a carefully developed plan. This plan should be specific to your campaign, but it should also fit into your overall social media strategy — meaning that your goals should not conflict, and the campaign should be a good continuation of your brand’s existing social voice and style.

To develop your plan, begin with research. Do a thorough analysis of your existing social followers across your networks and identify areas for improvement versus your competition.

Remember that different social networks exist for different purposes, so choose which social networks best fit your needs. For example, Instagram and Facebook are good networks to target Millennials — but you won’t find many Gen Xers or Baby Boomers on Instagram.

Understand where your target audience spends time, and research recent campaigns in your industry to see which existing trends you can leverage.

Once you decide what kind of campaign you plan to run on the social networks you choose, it’s important to allocate your budget and resources. Include in your budget whether your campaign requires any paid social efforts or if you plan to rely on organic tactics and owned media.

With 49 percent of global business leaders planning to increase their social media budgets this year, allocating budget for a social media campaign should be easier than in years past. However, if you need additional resources like a social media platform, CRM or automation platform to implement your ideal vision, remember to include that in your desired scope.

After you’ve researched your idea, decided on an appropriate budget and outlined a plan for your social media campaign, identify your dream team. Assigning clear-cut roles ahead of time helps to avoid confusion and overlapping responsibilities.

At a minimum, you’ll want to assign roles for messaging, design and promotion. If your social media campaign will be promoted across channels, make sure you’ve selected the right team members in ancillary departments to be responsible for your campaign.

The last part of your social media campaign plan should be to identify the metrics you’ll use to measure the success and ROI of your campaign. In order to do that, you’ll need to define your campaign’s goals — which is the next component of a great campaign.

2. Clearly Defined Goals

Before starting any marketing campaign, you need to clearly define your goals. Deciding on what you want to achieve at the beginning of a campaign makes it easier to measure and analyze your results.

Your social media campaign can have multiple goals, where each piece of your strategy serves a different objective. Each goal you select should be personalized for your business’ needs, but here are a few common ones most campaigns address:

• Increase Brand Awareness. If your business is relatively new (or new to social media), or if you need to distinguish your business from others in the same space, some part of your campaign should aim to increase brand awareness. If prospects and customers are unable to recognize your brand, your campaign will have little effect.

Incorporating a sharing aspect to your campaign is a great way to increase your brand awareness and online influence. To measure your brand’s social influence, benchmark key metrics, such as total number of likes or followers, total brand mentions/retweets, influencer brand mentions and site entrances or app downloads driven by social media.

• Drive More Website Traffic. I know what you’re thinking: Who doesn’t want more visits to their website or blog? It’s a natural goal for most marketing campaigns, but it also plays into your social presence. The more visitors your website receives, the more opportunities they have to share your site or content on social media and follow your accounts on their favorite networks.

To drive more traffic, direct users to a landing page on your site where they can take the next action. Use Google Analytics or your Web analytics platform of choice to benchmark key metrics like total Web visits, visits driven by social media, time on site and overall engagement of social users.

• Drive Visitor Loyalty. Do you want to increase your website visitor loyalty? Driving more website traffic is a short-term goal, but you can aim to increase the amount of time spent on your website and the frequency of return visits for the long term.

If visitor loyalty is one of your goals, consider a social media campaign that requires users to visit your website several times to enter or find information. To measure visitor loyalty, benchmark metrics like pages per session, average session duration and the percent of new sessions to your site.

• Improve Conversion Rates. If your business is well-known and already receives a lot of Web visitors, your campaign should focus on improving your website/app conversion rates. Whether your business considers a conversion a product purchase or an account sign-up or anything in between, you can align an aspect of your social media campaign with website conversions.

Consider campaigns that require users to fill out a form or sign up to get the benefit or value being offered — but remember to keep an eye on these conversions to see if you’re driving meaningful, long-term customers through your campaign. To measure your social media campaign’s impact on conversions, track metrics like total site entries, total conversions and assisted social conversions.

3. Cross-Channel Promotion

Unless you’re a major brand with millions of loyal followers, your social media campaign likely needs help from other marketing channels to achieve your desired results. The best social media campaigns are part of an integrated marketing campaign where your efforts on social media are supported on a number of other channels.

The benefits of promoting your social media campaign across additional channels are twofold: Those you reach via social media are reminded through other communications, and those who aren’t as active on social media are informed.

Your followers are already familiar with your brand, so they’re the most likely to see your campaign on social media; therefore, they will be more likely to engage or participate after being reminded through a different channel.

You can catch those who don’t follow you on social media or are less active via email, search or on-site content and ad units.

Reaching different people at varying times across many marketing channels increases the likelihood that your campaign will be successful. Just be careful with your segmentation and timing. You don’t want to overwhelm existing customers or bother potential ones with too much at the same time.

Gentle reminders and mentions across a number of touch points to different cohorts of your target audience will deliver better results than a social media campaign that’s only promoted on your social network of choice.

4. Thorough Analysis

So how’d your campaign perform? Was your social media program successful in reaching the goals you set out to achieve?

When it comes to analyzing the success of your campaign, you’ll be thankful you identified the key metrics associated with your goals ahead of time. It’s easy to benchmark your progress against your initial starting point.

Going beyond achieving your goals, are there any “downstream” metrics you’ve seen improve? In your given time period, evaluate whether or not you saw a difference in account logins, customer lifetime value or other engagement metrics specific to your business.

Perhaps the revenue from those customers acquired through your social media campaign is higher than revenue from those acquired through your search acquisition campaigns. (That has tended to be the case for our business.) Or maybe those customers log in more often or adopt tools more readily. There are a number of ways to think about the ROI of your campaign that aren’t tied directly to revenue.

Great social media campaigns should affect more than your follower count. Using these four components as the tenets of your next social media campaign will help your business extend your social reach, gain a better understanding of your target audience and achieve your long-term business goals.