Social Media Marketing Plan: What To Include In Your Plan

A social media marketing plan has many benefits for your business including:

• Acts as a guide to help you accomplish your business goals
• Identify the audiences you want to target
• Increase brand awareness
• Boost sales and leads for your business
• Save money on advertising and get free traffic
• Meet the needs of your target audiences and engage with them in a friendly environment

So here are some key points to include in your social media marketing plan:

Who You Are Targeting

Knowing who you want to reach with your messages, offers and products is one of the first things to include in your social marketing plan. Whether they are existing customers, prospects or business customers, you should who they are and what they actually need.
Knowing who they are also helps you to identify which social media sites are important to them. For example, if you want to reach professionals in your industry and highlight the launch of a new service or product, then LinkedIn and Twitter are likely the best platforms to use.
If you are an online retailer of women’s fashion, then Facebook is likely a good site to help you boost brand awareness and create buzz around your products.

What Social Media Strategy You Will Implement

Your social media strategy covers all the tactics that you need to implement to reach your target audience and connect with them. So, it means you need to identify the main objectives of your social media marketing plan and then decide on which tactics will help you achieve those objectives.
For example, an objective to increase traffic to your website by 20% from social sites within 6 months means you should target the sites that can help you do this quickly and then decide on whether you should run paid ads alongside your regular posts and tweets.
There are many social media strategies to implement and your choice will depend on factors that are related to your goals and objectives.

What Messages You Want To Promote

The messages you send out on social sites are what people will identify your business with – so they should be of the highest quality. All messages, whether they are tweets, images, pictures, links etc, should be in line with your brand identity and brand values and they should reinforce the image that you want to put out there.
That may mean working with a brand strategy expert to help you create a unique positioning that is evident in your profile, cover images, logos, messages and everywhere else your target audience encounters your brand on social sites.

Which Third Party Tools You Will Need

There’s a whole industry of tools that has emerged with the growth of social media marketing. These tools help you to manage your social platforms on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and many others. You should start by testing the tools that are relevant to the social networks that you want to promote your business on and for Twitter you can choose two of the leading ones – Buffer and Hootsuite.
These tools come with a free trial of about 30 days and some have a basic plan that you can use on a smaller scale to manage your accounts. When you have tested them sufficiently, then you should choose one that is easy to use and does all that you need to manage your social accounts.

What Your Social Budget Will Be

Now that you’ve decided which strategy you will implement and chosen the tactics that will help you achieve your marketing objectives, it’s now time to include the budget in your social media marketing plan. Setting the right budget is important because it helps you to implement all the tasks that are important to your strategy.
So, start by making a list of all the tactics that are part of your strategy and then find out what the costs will be for each and then add them to come up with your final budget. Also include any costs related to hiring a social media expert that will help you to manage your accounts.

Which Tools You Will Need For Reporting

Many social media networks offer analytics tools to help you track metrics that are important to your business. You can track the click through rate to your website on sites like Twitter and you can also track impressions for your tweets and see how engaged people are with your messages and profile.
You should also implement Google Analytics for your website to track people that click through to your website and then track engagement metrics like bounce rates and time on site and measure conversion metrics like goal conversions and ecommerce conversions. You can also create events to see how effective your content is with people who read it and then share and like it with their social profiles.
Finally, you can study your multi-channel funnels reports to see how social media is contributing to conversions on your website.

Summary

Your social media marketing plan will help guide your strategy and help you reach the mission and goals of your business. Start planning your campaigns today and download the free social media marketing strategy template to plan your campaigns.