Ever feel like your social media growth’s become stagnant? A lot of marketers do. With all the algorithm updates and changing trends, it can be hard to keep up.
But with a solid and dynamic social media marketing plan, marketers can breathe easily. In this article, we’ll be exploring best practices for crafting social media marketing strategies in 2024.
What is a social media marketing plan and why should you have one?
A social media marketing plan outlines actions for achieving marketing goals on social media. It includes target audience and competitor analysis, and a content calendar.
A good marketing plan has success measures based on metrics like engagement, likes, comments, and shares. This makes it essential for businesses to connect with their audience.
Businesses that want to thrive in the ever-competitive social media landscape need to have a good marketing plan. Done correctly, it can provide the following benefits:
- Brand Awareness – Brand awareness on social media helps establish identity and recognition for the target audience, increases the likelihood of top-of-mind consideration for purchase, and builds customer loyalty.
- Cultivate Relationships – Building a relationship with your audience creates a sense of community and connection. This can lead to increased loyalty, insights and feedback, trust, and credibility, ultimately resulting in increased sales and customer retention.
- Increase Traffic – A social media marketing plan increases traffic through organic, engaging, and relevant content. Marketers can also use paid advertising to target specific demographics and improve search engine rankings.
- Generate Leads and Improve Conversions – A social media marketing plan improves conversion rates through direct messaging, targeted calls-to-actions, and more on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
- Build Authenticity – A social media marketing plan builds a brand’s authenticity through a genuine connection with the audience, quality content, timely responses, and user-generated content.
9 Key Steps to Crafting a Successful Social Media Marketing Plan
A successful marketing plan should be able to handle the ebbs and flows of changing social media trends. Here are the key steps to take to ensure that it does:
Set Clear Monthly and Yearly Social Media Goals
A successful marketing plan includes both short and long-term goals. Outline what you want to achieve each month and create distinct, actionable, and realistic goals for the year.
List your goals, break them into smaller parts, and consider their impact on your budget and the platforms you want to target.
For example, if you’re just starting to build your brand on social media, you might consider having “x amount of followers” in a month as your goal.
After getting a considerable following, you might want to increase your engagement, lead generation, or conversion rates.
As a rule of thumb, always take time for goal setting. Identify your priorities and plan accordingly.
Outline Your Vision and Brand Personality
Each brand is different. Even those within the same niche. The challenge for marketers is figuring out what their brand’s personality is.
The way brands communicate to their audience, their demographic, and the content published are important factors in identifying their personality.
For example, if a brand’s target audience is millennials and gen-z, they might find success in posting casual and fun content such as memes or viral videos.
But if your audience is more mature, let’s say business executives or corporate decision-makers, you’d want a more serious tone in the content you publish.
You also need to maintain a consistent brand personality across all social media platforms. A simple way to ensure this is cross-posting content on all your channels.
Choose Social Media Channels Popular With Your Target Audience
For a holistic social media marketing plan, you want to target the most popular platforms. That means posting on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.
However, you need to identify where your target audience is spending time the most. This is so that you can allocate more time and resources to that channel.
To help you identify which platform to focus on, here’s a quick look at the statistics:
- Facebook is the most popular social media platform with over 1.79 billion users.
- Twitter has fewer active monthly users at 230 million. But it brings in 1 billion unique visitors via embedded links.
- Instagram has over 500 million active monthly users. The demographic in the platform is primarily younger.
- Pinterest 21% of all US adults on the platform. 84% of these users are female.
Study Your Competition
This is important as it helps businesses understand the strategies and tactics of their competitors, strengths, and weaknesses.
By studying competitors, businesses can identify opportunities to differentiate themselves and better target their audience. Competitor analysis also helps businesses keep up with trends.
Looking at your competition provides insights into the effectiveness of tactics and helps brands optimize their own strategies. This makes it crucial for a successful social media campaign.
Remember, there won’t be a one-size fits all social media strategy. What works for some brands might not be effective for yours.
The goal of competitor analysis isn’t finding a strategy to copy. It’s about optimizing strategies to make them work best for your own unique brand personality.
Optimize Your Profiles on Each Platform
Businesses need social media optimization to better connect with their target audience. This can lead to a better representation of their values and goals.
Everything on social media platforms from your bio to the content that you publish can be optimized. Let’s take Instagram as an example.
Instagram has its own search engine, the same as Google. Brands that want to increase their visibility can optimize their bio by using important niche keywords in their username.
They can also use hashtags on their posts, optimize for photo and video sizes, and more. Here’s an optimization checklist you can use:
- Optimize your Facebook URL.
- Add CTAs on key areas of your social media pages.
- Provide complete business details.
- Optimize for search engines.
- Pin important content or promotions for better visibility.
Create a Consistent Posting Schedule (With Publer!)
Social media algorithms love consistency. Having a consistent posting schedule ensures that your brand is publishing fresh content.
It helps businesses maintain a presence on the platform and keep their audience engaged. By posting on a regular basis, businesses can build trust and credibility with their audience.
Doing so can establish your brand as a thought leader in its industry. Consistently posting helps businesses stay top-of-mind with their audience and the chances of content being seen.
But manually scheduling your posts across multiple social media accounts can be a nightmare. To streamline the process, you can use social media automation tools like—Publer!
Find Inspiration From Evergreen and Trending Topics
Evergreen topics are ones users can always go back to. This type of content can stand the test of time. Creating content like this also helps create a consistent flow of traffic to your channels.
Common examples of evergreen topics include
- Health and wellness
- Personal finance
- Time management and productivity
- Parenting and family
- Relationships and love
- Career advice
- Education and learning
- Environmental sustainability
- Food and cooking
- Travel and adventure
On the other side of the coin, we have trending topics. These are the latest topics that are making rounds on social media. Creating content around this helps you stay relevant.
No matter your niche, brands can always hop on to trending topics on social media. For example, if there’s a viral meme, you can edit it to make it relevant to your brand.
Actively Engage With Your Audience
Actively engaging your audience helps build relationships with your followers and increase brand loyalty. Studies show that engaging with customers leads to them spending 20-40% more money on products and services.
Businesses can show they value their audience by listening to their feedback. A quick way to do so is by responding to comments, messages, and reviews of your products or services.
Engaging with your audience also generates new ideas for content and increases its visibility. Studies show that social media algorithms favor posts with high levels of engagement.
One of the most effective ways to engage with your audience is by utilizing user-generated content (UGC). You can also run competitions, giveaways, and events.
A good strategy is to create posts that encourage engagement. For example, posting a relatable photo on Instagram with the caption “tag a friend who’s like this”.
Track Key Performance Metrics and Make Adjustments
Tracking key performance indicators in social media marketing helps companies evaluate their efforts and make data-driven strategic decisions.
Businesses may enhance outcomes by measuring engagement, reach, traffic, and conversion rates. It also lets brands compare performances to competitors, which reveals industry trends.
Here are some examples of performance metrics to look into
- Engagement
- Reach
- Website traffic
- Conversion rate
- Followers
- Brand mentions
Key Takeaways
Every business that wants to build its social media presence needs a marketing plan. It outlines a brand’s goals for the short and long term and provides actionable steps to accomplish them.
If you want to craft your own social media marketing plan, consider the following:
- A solid marketing plan includes how your business can build brand awareness, cultivate relationships with your audience, and helps build authenticity.
- Before making your plan, set distinct, clear, and actionable goals.
- Social media algorithms favor active engagement.
- Track performance metrics to optimize your marketing strategies.
- Publish content consistently through scheduling.
If you want to take your social media marketing to new heights, look no further than Publer! Sign up for free today and experience what Publer can do for your brand’s social media journey.
Ervin Kalemi
