A short guide that explains how to make an effective and fully functional social media marketing plan
To entrust a part of their online communication to social networks, companies need to know how to make a social media marketing plan. Compared to previous years, there seems to be a greater awareness of the techniques to be fully exploited and of the potential of social media in general, both old and new. Unfortunately, more information is not enough to have the operational skills necessary to make the most of social media for communication and marketing of value.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are those that have the greatest difficulty in approaching social media profitably and in general in carrying out successful web marketing and social media marketing actions. If larger companies also have greater investment opportunities and therefore can afford to delegate their online communication to specialized agencies or to hire qualified employees and offer them good training, for the smaller ones invest an adequate budget on web management marketing can be heavy.
Those companies that decide to take care of corporate social media marketing on their own often do so by entrusting the work to insufficiently trained internal staff, with the effect of not obtaining significant results. The main cause is often the lack of an overview of the communication and marketing activities to be carried out on social media. In other words, it is not known how to make an effective social media marketing plan capable of seizing all the opportunities that the company could have on the current web. Here are some tips for creating a 4-step social media marketing plan.
1. Who is our audience?
The first thing to do is to understand what our ideal target is; once this point is clarified, everything else will be easier to outline. We identify with precision and attention what are the characteristics of our audience including age, educational qualification, and gender and, should we be able to outline more than one, we will proceed to a diversified and personalized communication for each one.
2. Create and complete profiles on social networks
Before planning the actions to be done, we need to study the social platforms that are best suited to us and our business. Once we have made our choice (the advice is to be present and available at least on Facebook and Twitter in any case), we can move on to creating the accounts. Let’s be sure not to leave anything unfinished and if in the first phase we had opted for a social network and then abandoned it, it is better to make a clear choice: either we proceed to complete and update this account or we delete it.
3. Set SMART goals
We must not forget that we are talking about social media activities aimed at marketing operations and therefore an essential part of our plan will be the objectives. Without objectives that are Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and scanned over Time it will be impossible to measure and test the success of our actions. In this sense, it is essential (also based on the duration of the campaign) to define a series of parameters to be kept under control (or KPI or Key Performance Indicator) to evaluate the progress of the activities carried out. Setting intermediate objectives can also be very useful: if they are not achieved, it will be possible to follow up with timely and corrective interventions that will allow the final objectives to be achieved in any case.
4. Choose content and create an editorial calendar
Having clear objectives, audience, and social networks on which to post our messages, we can proceed with the choice of contents, remembering to adapt them to each social media.
But if we want to leverage above all the posts of the company blog, probably the platform that is right for us to give them the maximum visibility is Facebook. In order not to find yourself overworked and confused among the many activities to be carried out on the various social networks, it is of vital importance to build an editorial calendar that also takes into account recurrences throughout the year.
If you need support in creating an effective and profitable social media marketing plan for your company, contact us now! We will put our experience in the field of online marketing at your service and we will support you in the development of your business, helping you to make the most of the internet and the web.
