Social media marketing plan

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) simply refers to techniques that target social networks and applications to spread brand awareness or promote particular products in order to achieve your marketing goals. Social media marketing includes activities like posting text and images updates narrating your products and services to drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising. Social media marketing pricing

Social Media Marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers through different social media platforms on the internet such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Linkedin, etc.

Many small companies now take digital marketing so serious because of their effectiveness in increasing brand awareness and affordability. But starting social media marketing without a social strategy in mind can be a disaster.

Setting goals for your social media marketing plan

Everything you post or do should be tied back to one of your goals as a business owner. To start, define what these goals are and think about how you'll measure the success of your efforts.

Social media marketing requires a lot of testing and trying things out; you can't improve any particular aspect of it without knowing what signals to pay attention to. You can even use these signals (which will vary from channel to channel) to define targets for your social media efforts to help you stay motivated on track.

Here are some of the goals you should consider for your social media marketing, which you can add to your strategy over time:

• Drive brand awareness: Reach more people to increase the likelihood of your brand getting seen by the right people. You can measure this using impression/reach, likes, shares, mentions, or any other signal that shows a real person has seen your post(s).
• Create demand for your products: Get people interested in your products with relevant inspiration or education, which you can gauge by clicks to your site, products added to a shopping cart, or comments/messages from interested customers.
• Acquire leads: Get your audience to convert into email subscribers, which you can then nurture into sales off of social media for free. This can also build an audience of interested shoppers you can retarget with ads.
• Get sales: These are paying customers that come from your social media efforts and can be measured by a number of orders or revenue.
• Drive offline traffic: If you're a retail business or are hosting events, one of your goals might be driving people to a specific location in real life.
• Network to form partnerships: Engage with influencers or like-minded brands for influencer marketing or co-marketing campaigns.
• Build a loyal following: Grow an engaged audience that wants to hear from you; don't inflate your follower count with fake or bought followers. You want to build an authentic community of people who are interested in your products, and who will promote your content or products to others. You can measure this by followers you've added or lost in a certain time frame, or your engagement rate (total engagement divided by the number of followers).
• Establish social proof: Source positive testimonials or content generated by customers/influencers that cast your brand in a positive light and can potentially be used in other marketing efforts.
• Provide customer services: A social media presence opens you up to customer questions, complaints, and inquiries. So one of your goals will be to provide this support to customers or direct it to another preferred, private channel. One way to measure this is through your response time for direct messages (This is displayed as a badge on your Facebook page, for example).
• Become a thought leader in your target market: Social media gives you a voice that can use to not only participate in conversations but shift them in the direction you think they should go in and build credibility around your products or services.

All of your choices should aim to tick one or more of these boxes, and any ideas and new tactics you plan to test out should be evaluated on their potential to achieve these goals. Some of them may be long-term investments while others are more immediate.

Keep these objectives in mind as we get into the next article: figuring out who to be reached on social media.

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