Your Social Media Marketing Plan

Like all aspects of business, a random approach to social media marketing that does not follow a structured plan will produce, at best, disappointing results. Many businesses have tried and abandoned the idea of social media marketing, not because it does not work, but because they approached it with the wrong mentality. A solid, well-thought out and implementable social media marketing plan is the first step to achieving a positive outcome from your social media projects.

Creating a social media marketing plan is akin to planning a direct mail campaign.

1. Identify target audience
2. Obtain contact information for target audience
3. Create marketing materials
4. Distribute materials with call to action
5. Measure results

In order to create an effective social media marketing plan, it is essential to fully understand what you hope to achieve. Setting a goal or goals for your social media marketing efforts is the first step when developing your plan. Common goals include:

• Build brand awareness
• Establish ‘authority’ status
• Find out more about your customers
• Increase links to your web presence
• Disseminate information to customers
• Enhance customer service
• Monitor and manage reputation

These are just a few of the many legitimate goals you might identify for your social media campaign. Take some time to clearly establish what you are seeking to achieve, and write down the goals for your campaign before going any further with your social media marketing plan.

Develop Your Social Media Strategy

Investing time in researching your market and developing a solid strategy before implementing your social media marketing pays dividends. Your research should include the following:

• Determine whether your target market is online
• Determine who, and where, your target market are
• Research other social media campaigns – What worked? What didn’t?
• Plan realistically, with achievable timelines
• Put tracking methods in place

Only when this research has been completed are you ready to begin developing your marketing plan.

Key Components of a Social Media Marketing Plan

• Relationship Build
  Social media marketing is relationship based. No matter what your overall goal, you need to build relationships to achieve it. Hence, arriving on a social network and spamming your marketing message will not achieve positive results, and will in fact achieve almost universally negative ones. Treat users of social media as if you were meeting them for the first time at a real life social situation (eg a party). By getting to know them and interacting without marketing or promoting your products and services, offering value and helping them with problems, you create a relationship that will enable to start achieving your goals.

• Create a Schedule
  Random or haphazard blogging, tweeting, status updating or forum posting does not consitute a social media marketing strategy, and is both inefficient and counterproductive. By setting a schedule for your social media activites you save time, maintain visibility and efficiently leverage your efforts.

• Stick With It
  Social media marketing is not a ‘quick fix’ or a sprint, it is a marathon. Relationships, which are the key to social media success, require repeated and regular connections over an extended period to build. It is impossible to create the relationship quality needed to produce valuable market research, boost brand awareness or build business partnerships in days, or even weeks. It takes months, perhaps even years, to fully harvest the benefits of social media marketing.

• Measure Results
  How you can quantify success depends on the goals you have set. For example, the goal of boosting brand awareness and maintaing a good reputation could be measures using ‘conversation discovery’ tools, such as Google Alerts. Measuring success is very difficult to do by guesswork, so implementing a strategy to monitor and quantify performance is an important point in your social media marketing plan.

• Tweak & Test
  As you implement your social media marketing plan and monitor performance, you can (and should) tweak and split test to optimise results. For example, if your goal is to build links to your website and you find that you are not gaining many (or any) links you may decide to change the style of your content, or to promote it through a different channel. The likelihood of achieving optimal results from the beginning of your social media marketing campaign are slim to none, continual tweaking and testing are essential to maximise performance over the longer term.

The importance of a sound social media marketing plan, and hands-on social media management cannot be over-stated. To achieve results, a long-term, focussed and strategic approach is essential to any social media marketing campaign.

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