How to create a successful social media marketing plan for your business

Authored by Hiren Joshi

The whole world is on social media today. Be it consumers or brands, they are spending the majority of their time on social media. For brands, it is a lucrative channel to be able to promote themselves to the target audience cost-effectively. However, social media is vast, and to promote optimally, brands need to weave out a strategic, robust social media marketing plan to garner success in this space.

A social media marketing plan is a guided approach that you take after understanding the answers to some of the necessary questions to host a particular social media marketing campaign. The plan helps you with your actions and is a reminder to help you with measurable insights to infer whether you are succeeding or failing with a particular campaign. 

With more specific filters being added to the plan, its effectiveness increases gradually. Let’s dive deeper to know how to create an effective social media strategy:

• Set SMART goals aligning with your brand’s objectives: The foremost step in creating an effective social media marketing plan is to know your objectives and goals. Tangible goals help you measure your success and ROI. Every social media marketing plan goal must be SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. 

• Know your audience better: Without knowing your target audience, you are just taking a shot in the dark with your planned social media strategy. Understand your followers on your social media account, existing customers and the untapped target prospective consumers who are there on social media but you have been unable to tap as a brand. You can get into knowing your ideal consumer’s age, location, income, industry, interests, etc., to create a persona that can help you work on your social media strategy more specifically. 

• Know your competitors: There are highly likely chances for your competitors to have already tapped the social media space. You can learn from them about which campaigns garnered an effective response from the users. Having scrolled through the content of an array of competitive brands, you will be able to witness a wide range of trends. While you can be adaptive to their techniques, you can add a little creativity of your kind that you feel will garner more traction from the viewers’ side. 

• Churn out convincing content: You need to churn out content that your audience connects with and will give a shot to consume what you are serving them. To create compelling content, you must keep the content considering your audience’s interest and how you can align the same with your brand goals and what you have to offer as a brand. Content creation isn’t simple and it may take some trial and error to understand what kind of content is working for your brand.

• Know which social media platform best suits you: Based on where your target audience is in abundance, you might want to be more active on that platform. For example, if you are an Edutech brand, your promoted posts might attract candidates to your upskilling courses from LinkedIn. On the contrary, for a lifestyle brand, Instagram and Facebook are the right platforms to connect with your audience. You can however use a mixed-platform approach to promote diverse content. For example, on Facebook, you can promote your brand story in depth, whereas you can use promoted Instagram Stories to take the customers to the main landing page of your brand, etc. 

• Track and Improvise: Coming to the end, you need to know whether your campaign worked like magic or didn’t turn any heads at all. In the latter case, you can learn from the metrics that you fell short of to be able to convince the consumers. Testing the metrics continuously with diverse posts will help you understand what approach works for your brand and which ones don’t. 

Conclusion: Social Media is dynamic. It is seeing new ways to interact and engage with its consumers. A one-size-fits-all approach will not help you with your media strategy for a prolonged duration. Hence you need to keep upgrading and listening to your consumers and bring out intriguing social media marketing plans to effectively communicate and convert your consumers in the long run.

Hiren Joshi, Co-Founder, Ally Digital Media