We often think that defining a strategy on Social Media may seem simple: it is enough to publish content on Social Media (texts, images, videos …) so that Internet users share them, visit your website …
Furthermore, it consists of much more than:
• What are its current performances (and those of competitors), with what works or not • It is very important to define a strategy to get your content to encourage people to buy. • While measuring the results of your actions to improve your performance, in continuous training mode. • Then, do not hesitate to try new things (networks, types of publications …)
There are 9 steps to help you create your social media marketing plan:
Assess your current presence. Set your goals. Find your target audience. choose a positioning. Discover the works of your competitors. Define an action plan for content creation, the editorial calendar and the promotion mechanism. Create a publication calendar Promote your content by allocating resources. Evaluate performance and measure the results of your eReputation.
After all, social media is a great platform to reach a large audience, increase brand awareness and increase sales. In addition, social media can help you connect with your audience and build your brand’s reputation.
Why create a plan First of all, it should be noted that out of approximately 3,773 billion Internet users (Internet Live Stats, 2017), 2,789 billion users are active on social media. For example when the Seb brand with the presenter Oprah Winfrey marked a publicity stunt which praised the fryer “without oil”, and which thus made jump by nearly 5% the share price (as well as sales! ).
This example of strategy on current Social Media, presents the power of communication and resonance of the web. While there are many benefits, building a social media plan from scratch can seem like a daunting task. To help you, we have put together this step-by-step guide for social media marketing.
1. Assess your current presence.
In order to move forward in any direction, it is imperative for all activities to determine where it is and then take the step in order to improve. Elements such as the following will help you better orient yourself to resolve this question. here are some things to consider regarding your presence on Social Media: • What is the nature of the requests and the results obtained (sharing, number and types of messages, etc.). • The social networks on which you are currently active, ie the number of subscribers, traffic from traffic from these networks, traffic from your blog and the most read articles … • Maximizing your online presence such as: (profiles, cover images, biography, personalized urls, prospect capture tools, conversion rate, etc.) • The behavior of your employees / distributors / partners /… on Social media. That is to say the look of your employees’ profile (photo Pro …), sharing your news … • The traffic that is currently generated on your website via Social Media (including the Google search engine through your Blog). To do this simply use Google Analytics.
2. Set your goals.
Most or all effective social media strategies have one thing in common: they have clearly defined objectives. Before you start working on your strategy, you need to determine what you want to achieve. Is your goal to improve brand awareness? Or maybe increase your engagement and your number of followers. Whatever yours are, write them down. Divide these final goals into smaller parts so that they are feasible and realistic. This analysis can be perfected by visualizing your situation in the form of a SWOT (Strengths / Weaknesses and Threats / Opportunities) in order to identify your priorities.
The strengths and weaknesses being linked internally (eg expertise, the time available to produce content, etc.) then threats and opportunities (eg, a weak presence of your customers on certain emerging networks, etc.). The SWOT matrix offers to synthesize in a single visual the current competitive situation. Used well, it helps to circumscribe the field of possibilities while outlining the paths of development. Socialblade is a tool that can help you see a global vision of your competitors, it allows you to have a vision of Twitter, Youtube subscribers of your competitors.
3. Find your target audience
As a marketing manager, it is essential to understand what your target audience’s preferences are. To develop an effective social media marketing plan, you need answers to the following questions:
On which social media platform is your target audience most active? What type of content do they like on social media? What are their pain points? How do they interact with brands on social media? In addition to this, it is also advisable to create a target character for your brand. You have to take into consideration factors such as age, gender, lifestyle and interests.
Based on these factors, you will need to decide which social media channel is best for your brand and what type of content will work for you. So, if your brand’s target audience is mostly teenagers who love the game, you may want to focus on Twitch. Even though Facebook and Instagram are more common, Twitch is where your target audience is likely to spend most of its time. Here’s the bottom line: you need to align your social media and content strategies based on your audience’s preferences.
4. choose a positioning
After having defined your objectives, identified your target, detected what are its assets in terms of communication, you must choose your positioning and stick to it. To attract Internet users, what better way to distinguish yourself from others! Again, observe what your competitors are doing: what are the themes, how are they treated, how often, on which network (s) and try to do it differently? Change your angle of attack, be active on a social network where the competition is not necessarily (yet) present, be a pioneer.
Good positioning means choosing the right topics of conversation, the right topics, those that interest your target and those on which you are experts. This will make it easier for you to reach your goals.
5. Discover the works of your competitors
The best way to avoid common mistakes in your social media marketing strategy is to learn from your competitors’ mistakes. You need to take time and analyse the social media pages of your competitors to give you an idea of the type of content that is working well. the strategies of your competitors, and identify good practices to take as an example, as well as opportunities to counter them (eg keywords, themes, formats, etc.).
This approach will allow you to have ideas to innovate and to create your own campaigns on social media and not to copy those of your competitors. Examining your competitors’ campaigns will help you refine your strategy. At the same time you can decide to do it differently even in the same industry, totally different strategies may work for different brands.
To go to the next level, you need to stay focused on your own success indicators. – List the main influencers, and select the Top 10 with whom you must present to establish a first contact. The objective will be to capture a little of their notoriety via interviews, guest postings … – Set up a competitive and sectoral watch to find out what’s going on in your sector of activity via eReputation monitoring tools.
6. Define an action plan for content creation, the editorial calendar and the promotion mechanism. Content is central to any social media strategy. Before you start working on your content, you need to have a good idea of your brand personality, your goals, and the preferences of your target audience. From the information you gathered on him, you were able to draw up the mission of your various social media.
Here are examples of content you can create: • Images, Videos, • Blog articles (needs, problems… prospects), • Company news (product releases, etc.), • Infographics, • Books, guides… in PDF to download, • Interviews, • Contests, Gifs • Conduct surveys • Content generated by customers, prospects, fans…, • Etc.
All of these elements will allow you to create content that will generate a loyal user base. You must also define the availability of your community manager to interact with customers (eg, we will respond to you within 24 hours…). Indeed, if you are not available for Lives, it is useless to offer live videos on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube … On lives is essential to respond quickly to interactions and ask questions.
Make sure you are available to answer all product concerns and questions. Once your content is posted on social media, it is essential to engage with your community.
It is also important to vary the types of shared content. In fact, it’s even advisable to share content from other sources that your target audience likes (but doesn’t compete with). On social networks you must dare to surf on news, trends … like for example doing newsjacking. Here is an example with Game of Thrones, The “royal baby”…
You can also use your existing communication channels and contact bases to promote so that more people follow you.
This is the best way to quickly reach your audience, and make sure that all of your messages are seen to the maximum. Here are some examples of channels to promote your new social media: • Your website: Add buttons to your social channels so that visitors to your website can easily find your social accounts. • Your email list: Once you’ve launched your social accounts, let your mailing list know. Next, include buttons to your social channels in the footer of each email marketing. • Your email signature: Add social media links to the signature of your business email. • Social Selling and Employee Advocacy: Encourage your staff to follow your social media channels and invite their audience to do the same. • Showcase social media in store: Place posters in your store using your social media ID or URL. • Your other social media channels: Encourage your audience to follow you on several channels. • Social ads: You can place an ad to make yourself known to new members of the audience. •…
It is essential to think “cross-channel” and deploy your strategy in all of your brand’s communication spaces. For example, a blog article written can become an infographic, a podcast, a screencast video, an image that summarizes a quote … It is by pooling your content and reusing it on several channels that you will make the most of your time.
7. Create a publication calendar
Setting up an editorial calendar or a publication schedule is not only useful for creating content for your blog or website. In social marketing, defining an editorial schedule is very useful, it will help you organize your time, which is so essential in a social media strategy. So the first questions to ask yourself to build an editorial calendar for social networks are: • How much time should I allocate to social marketing? • How much time to reserve for each network? The ranking algorithms promote frequent publication on social networks. You will therefore probably have more visibility by publishing publications more often.
At the same time, it tells your customers that you are active and accessible on social networks. You can also use various social marketing tools to maintain a consistent calendar on social media. A publication calendar will help you to check what has worked in terms of information sharing and what has failed (zero reaction, no comments, no likes, no sharing, etc.). You can easily find on the internet many shared examples of social media publication calendar, to reuse or adapt to your needs. Hootsuite is one of the best tools you can use.
8. Promote your content by allocating resources
If you want your content to reach a large audience, you need to promote it well. While it is best to get organic traffic, you may need to rely on paid social media ads initially to gain traction. It can help you gain more visibility quickly. It is up to you to assess the time that you are ready to invest and which collaborators you will assign to this task. If you are independent and work solo, this step is crucial in your organization.
To help you arbitrate your ambitions, know that there are always 3 constraints: • Either you take time, and in this case it is cheaper but slower • Either you put money in it, in this case it is expensive but fast • Either you agree not to see results quickly, then it’s cheap and not too long Remember that Cheap / Fast / Effortless will not give good results…
Depending on the social media platform of your choice, your budget and your industry, the cost may vary. But one thing is common on all platforms: advertising on social networks is expensive. According to a WordStream study, the average CPC for Facebook ads in 2019 across all industries was $ 1.72.
Here are some tips you can follow to reduce the cost of your social media ads: Post high quality content that is relevant to your brand and niche. Facebook gives you a “relevance score” which has an impact on the performance of your ads. You must cap your bids. Do not set a daily budget for Instagram and Facebook. On Twitter, start slowly by bidding manually. As you increase traffic, increase your bid. On LinkedIn ads, select the “Matching audience” option to increase your return on investment. It sends your ads to a very targeted audience likely to convert.
To achieve these paid objectives in order to increase the visibility of your content, you have numerous advertising agencies or paid promotion tools that you can use. • Facebook Ads: to boost a publication, to target similar profiles, to retarget visitors to your site… • Google Ads (on the search engine, in retargeting…) • Purchase of publications (articles sponsored by influencers, purchase of links for SEO, etc.)
9. Evaluate the performance and measure the results of your eReputation.
Developing an effective social media marketing plan takes time. You can make a lot of mistakes along the way. If you continuously analyse your campaign, you can reduce the number of mistakes you make. For example, you can use URL reducers and UTM codes to track your links. For example: Bit.ly, Clickmeter.com etc…
Start by listing 3 key indicators to monitor (eg number of leads generated, traffic generated, number of Fans, etc.) that you will constantly refer to measure your performance.
Keep in mind that your social marketing must be linked to your overall marketing goals. For example, if your goal is to increase the sales of your products from your merchant site, how can social media help you in this regard? What is the level of traffic you want to reach through these channels … And how to measure traffic and its contribution to sales. Here are some examples of metrics you can use to calculate the ROI of your social media strategy: • sales • generated leads / leads, • transformation rate of these same leads, • number of appointments • dissatisfied customers caught up before they go to competition • number of page views on your site & number of clicks, •…
In addition you must also make a dashboard on the performance linked to your visibility on social media (these are the Vanity Metrics, that is to say the indicators that flatter the ego but that do not have an immediate marketing effectiveness ): • number of subscribers to your accounts / unsubscribers • number of visitors / readings, • number of comments, • number of registrations, • rebound rate, • interaction with other blogs and other social platforms •…
As you reach your goals, define new ones for each social network. You can even consider diversifying your communication languages to ensure your presence in other countries. Regarding reporting and dashboards, generally you make 1 report / month in order to have enough perspective on your actions.
You can possibly make a larger quarterly report in order to draw up reports on actions that have long-term impacts (e.g. creation of blog articles, specific themes on a quarter). Weekly reporting is only necessary if you are on a service and you have to report to a client. You can get statistics such as the number of subscribers, fans … from the account profile or from the statistics. For example on Facebook, all the information is in the “Statistics” tab
Conclusion
Social media is constantly evolving. You must be at the top of your game to succeed in your campaigns. This can be overwhelming if you are creating a plan from scratch. We hope this guide will make your social media campaign easier. Certain steps will take time and effort, but applying these steps will allow you to better identify social media habits and the needs of your customers. Be aware, however, that between strategy and reality, there is often a gap … be ready to evolve your strategy according to customer feedback.