social media
To create a brand, to improve your company’s online reputation, as a sales channel, social networks are necessary for any business that wants to survive in this era. Because it is not enough to have a good product or service at a competent price. You need to get a social media moderation services for making your social media accounts more attractive because your potential customers wants to know that your business exist in social media networks. Now companies can monitor their brand, check what the competition is doing, create interactions with their public, get feedback from them on services or products to improve, etc.
But publishing without any planning is no longer working if you want to make a profit, start by defining your own social media marketing plan. These are currently more influential than other traditional media such as television when making purchase decisions by users. So much so that networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn have improved their business pages, Instagram increases its possibilities in terms of advertising and new tools to promote itself, to give a few examples.
Step-by-step social media marketing plan
Social media marketing
Organizing and planning the different social networks in which a business is present (or wants to be present) as a communication channel with users requires a prior social media marketing plan, a defined strategy that we can create by following these steps:
1. Find your goals
What we are looking for with our presence on social networks? Depending on the type of business and when our company is located, we will have different objectives to achieve with our social media marketing plan: increase customers, increase sales, improve our digital reputation, etc. For each of these objectives, we must carry out different actions:
- If we seek to increase the number of clients: carry out actions that increase the number of followers or fans of the community, share quality content and interest for our public, create paid campaigns through Facebook Ads, etc., that make us visible to a more significant number of Internet users, etc.
- If we need to improve our online reputation: we must take great care of what we publish on each social network, how we do it, and the response from users. In this case, social networks act as a customer service platform, maintaining direct communication with them to help us offer the image we want to project.
- If we want to increase sales: now social networks facilitate the option of direct purchase from their platforms in a much more obvious way. The ‘Buy’ buttons are a reality that businesses must exploit and publish content that encourages the user to buy, make them see the ‘need’ to use our products or services, etc.
The different online advertising options on each social network and Google can achieve these objectives that we must not ignore in our digital marketing services strategy.
2. Creation of the Buyer Persona
The buyer persona is the prototype of the ideal customer within a population segment. Those people we want to reach with our marketing plan. To define them, we need to carry out an exhaustive study and analysis of the data of our potential and actual consumers such as:
- Marital status, sex, whether or not you have children and their age, whether they live alone or as a couple.
- Profession.
- Level of studies.
- Where and how you look for information about what you like.
- Other aspects that may interest us according to our business.
Social Media
We have different buyer personal profiles of to put a name and a photo to make it more visual. However, it is best to have no more than 3 to focus the efforts of our social media marketing plan on them.
Once our buyer persona has been defined, we can create content that directly addresses their needs and is more effective. For example, let’s write articles on our blog that are interesting to our potential audience. Then, we offer them valuable content that is more likely to be shared on their social networks, thus making our content viral and attracting more traffic to our site. That’s why professional managed social media posting takes into consideration what the buyer persona is.
3. Determine in which social media networks we are going to have a presence
It is not necessary to be present on all social networks. However, depending on the type of business and according to the social networks in which our buyer persona is, we must plan a content strategy to report an ROI. Marketing automation tools such as bid management software can help you choose the ideal advertising platform for your business and also where you can get your best ROI.
In each platform, the content strategy to be followed must be different:
Social Media
- FACEBOOK: it is the most social; its users connect at any time from any device; its periodicity must be daily and requires content, interaction and generating community.
- TWITTER: the most ‘ephemeral’ because everything happens very quickly (according to Moz, the statistics affirm that a tweet is about 18 minutes old, it is used mainly from the mobile phone, its periodicity is daily, and the objective is to generate content and interaction with the community.
- INSTAGRAM: very visual content, easy to consume. The image is the main content, although, more and more, small videos in the form of stories take centre stage.
- YOUTUBE: multimedia content focused on building loyalty and community.
As an example, this could be planning according to the network in which we decide to have a presence:
4. Create a planning calendar
Planning is an essential task in any content marketing strategy. An editorial calendar will serve as a guide in the organization and publication of the content we generate.
Social Media
Some of the advantages of having an editorial calendar are:
- Offer your target audience (buyer persona) what they are looking for or need.
- Offer varied content in format and theme without resorting to repetition due to not having a prior organization.
- Define a content strategy to direct readers/users to your page.
- Reuse and re-disseminated the contents already published that do not expire and are of interest without falling into repetition.
- Publish the right content at the optimal time.
In the same document, and with just a glance, we must see all those that interest us when publishing our content: publication date, topic, an objective we pursue, social network in which we publish, text, type of content, etc.
5. Analysis
Once we publish, we must know what works best and what does not give us the result we expect from what we have proposed in our marketing plan on social networks. Therefore, analytics is essential to understand user behavior and change strategy if necessary.
The social networks themselves provides statistics and reports to understand what works and what does not graphically.
Thanks for reading.
