A Social Media Marketing Plan

Social Media Marketing can be complex. There are many social media environment you can invest your time and money. However, resources are limited, so one needs to choose the battle that is winnable in a very short time.

A good plan is 50% of the battle won. Spending lots of resource in the planning phase is of paramount importance. This is where you should have a plan that is easy to implement. You need to put a process in place to ensure the plan can be carried out by people who are assigned to implement it.

Goals of the Social Media Marketing Plan

The plan should contain the following elements to improve your social media presents:

Increase Your Social Likeability

If people do not like your brand or your company they tend to stay away from it. You want to have people who are happily engaged in conversation about your company. This can be done by Social likeability.

The more fans you have, the more people you have to spread your message.  This is because all messages posted on social media have a way of reaching your fans.  Secondly, you can direct ads specifically to reach fans of your company. This in turn will help distribute your message.

Increase Web Interaction

Most visitors already know your business website. The disadvantage of websites compare to social media environment is that websites are mostly static. Social media is interactive and dynamic. To keep the attention of your web visitors and let them engage in your Social conversation you need to introduce this targeted traffic to your social media presence.

It is important to have a plan to interaction with the potential clients (fans) and also have a plan to allow the clients to have interaction with each other. That is what social media is all about. Using the right plan will ensure that people will get others involve in talking about your business.

Keep Your Audience Motivated
One of the most powerful ways to keep your fans motivated and to keep coming to your social gathering is to provide incentives. Getting good result in social media marketing by using giveaway can only give the right result if done properly. If you are going to use incentives it must be perfectly planned out.

Create Effective Social Media Content

People are getting overwhelmed with too much information. People have so much information that they do not know what do to with it. The goal here is not to produce more information but to present your audience with educating, and engaging content that will help them to either buy or promote your product freely.

You need to plan contents that would educate, entertain and empower your audience to keep them engaged and coming back for more. People are different in how they learn, entertain and absorb information therefore, adjust your content to meet the different types of learning pattern of your audience.

Motivate and Intervene in Brand Conversation

Social media is a double edged sword. It can be used by others to destroy your brand or your product. Before social media, if a customer is not happy with your service they can go home and tell their friends and family about it. Today, if your customer is not happy they get to tell the whole world about it. As a result, it is important that your company have a system in place to monitor the conversation taken place about your company on social media and intervene in these conversations either to quell a bad rumor or fix any grievance they may have.

Cultivate and Engage With Audience

Social media is dynamic and mostly multi-user interactions. To be successful your company must find a way to initiate and stimulate multi user interactions. These interactions are essential to help invite others into the conversation.

Consistently call for action

People who visit your sites or social media pages may not always know what to do. Your task is to give them an easy access to your services and products. The best way to do this is to have a plan to consistently call for action. This sound simple and yet not many companies are doing it. For the fact that your site may be successful already does not mean this is the best you can get out of the site.

Help Visitors Share Your Message

The visitors to your website need to have a clear way to share your messages with others on social media. Statistics have shown that facebook users often have at least 130 friends. These friends are potential people to share your business information with. However, you need to provide these visitors and easy way to do this.

Combine Social Media with Mobile media

There are more mobile devices out there today than there are computers. The trend is now going towards the use social media on these mobile devices, such as iPhone. iPad and Andriod. According to Google, there are more people now than ever using mobile devices to search for information. The best approach is to combine these two media to reach your target audience in the optimal way.

Are people able to access your site using their mobile devices? If not, you could be losing business.  Plan this into your social media program.

Tooling

Knowing the steps involved in this methodology will help you find the right tools for the job. The right tools are essential to your social media marketing. You need to get access to battle tested tools which are produced by reputable companies. For example, how are you going to monitor and measure your activities and report on them?  Using the right tools will ensure you can make this methodology to work for you.

The implementation guide has list of tools for the job

What should be included in the marketing plan?

Your marketing plan must do more than just say what you want to happen. It must describe each step required to make sure that it happens.

Define Key Tasks and who will be involved

The plan should therefore include a schedule of key tasks. This sets out what will be done, by whom, and by when. Refer to the schedule as often as possible to avoid losing sight of your objectives under the daily workload.

The Project Plan

Resources

It should also assess what resources you need. Decide if you need to assign tasks to third parties and how to source them. You might also need to look at how much time it takes to prepare the designs and extra materials that will be needed.

Budget

The cost of everything in the plan needs to be included in a budget. If your finances are limited, your plan will need to take that into account. Don’t spread your marketing activities too thinly – it is better to concentrate your resources to make the most of your budget.

Management

As well as setting out the schedule, the plan needs to say how it will be controlled. You need an individual who takes responsibility for pushing things along. A good schedule and budget should make it easy to monitor progress. When things fall behind schedule, or costs overrun, you need to be ready to do something about it and to adapt your plan accordingly.

The plan must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic/Relevant, and Time-bound). This means you must decide exactly what you expect to create, and how you will recognize it when you are done.

Define the marketing methods and tactics

Marketing online requires different methods and tactics.  These tactics should be used in line with the “terms and conditions” of the social media sites. You might want to organize social events, provide giveaways and use online video to promote your business.  At this stage you will need to specify these methods and fully understand how to implement them or have someone to implement them for you.