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Social Media

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan

to Promote your Business in 2022

By Sophia Young
October 29, 2021

A marketing plan is a roadmap for how to approach your marketing strategy. It encompasses all of the important data like key performance indicators (KPIs), budgets, and timelines. This will dictate what you need to do to reach your goals and promote your business. Marketing plans can be designed to cover a lot of different aspects. You could make a broad marketing plan that documents your team's goals and strategies for the year ahead, or you could build a more specific marketing plan to help you execute upcoming projects. Regardless of your marketing needs, the information in this article will help you create a successful digital marketing campaign.

Define Your Marketing Goal

The first step to creating a winning strategy is to define your objectives and goals. Without goals, you'll be wasting your time and money because there's no way to know if you're reaching your targets or not.

Before you can create an effective strategy, it’s important to have a clear idea of your goals. Do you need more sales? How much more? What about recurring customers? How many does your company need? Do you need to rebrand your business? Will increasing brand awareness help with attracting new customers and ultimately increase revenue too? To whom and how much will additional brand awareness help grow your company in the long run?

It's important to decide what you want to achieve, why it's important, and how you'll measure the results. This will help you understand how well your marketing plan is working. You can refer back to these key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout your plan.

Track your KPIs

Even though vanity metrics are easy to track, they aren’t always the best way to measure value. Focus on data that matters, like how your content is driving sales or convincing new customers to sign up. You should always optimistically track click-through and conversion rates as they matter for different social networks. You might want to track different goals for different platforms or even for each one separately. For example, if you use LinkedIn to generate traffic to your website, you'll typically calculate click-throughs. Instagram is for brand awareness; you may want to track the number of story views and engagement. Facebook advertising is usually measured by cost-per-click (CPC). CPC is the amount of money you pay for each click you get.

Learn about your audience

It’s key to have an audience in mind when you set out on marketing strategies, as it can help you make informed choices and avoid wasting time and money.

Who is this campaign targeting? You may just want to plug in the appropriate persona, but if you haven't yet worked out your buyer personas, it'll be a good idea to think some more about who would best fit with this campaign.

Knowing demographics and psychographics can be useful depending on what your product and industry are and who you're targeting. Demographics help you identify a large target audience while psychographics help you narrow that down to just your specific customers. Demographics tell you “who” the customer is while psychographics help you understand their behavior and motivations.

Have a marketing budget

You can use marketing strategies to make your tiny marketing budget go a long way. By strategically prioritizing channels, messages, and tactics, you'll be able to stretch every budget a lot farther. Determine the amount of money you’ll need to set aside to fund the things you want to accomplish. Sometimes, you'll need to spend additional money at the end of your campaign for it to be successful.

Set your deadlines

Deadlines create boundaries for your marketing campaign. Many marketers believe that you can't have a successful plan without them. Without deadlines, it's like there's no end date and your campaign could just drag on and on with no discernable payoff.

Pick your deadline. Make it something that is ambitious but also realistic. The faster you reach a goal, the sooner you can work on your next objective, which eventually should lead to progress for your business.

Choose marketing channels

You will need to pick different channels based on your audience and the product or service you are advertising. For example, if you appeal mostly to moms, it might be a good idea to advertise on social media sites like Pinterest as well as Facebook. If you are starting a small venture or a bigger company such as a construction firm, a website for your business where you can showcase your products and services will give you opportunities to reach a wider audience.

The most popular marketing channels to consider are email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing.

These channels – social media, email marketing, also provide information on what is proving most successful for you. For example, by monitoring these channels you can work out which is the best way for your business to advertise. Unlike traditional outbound marketing and its estimated impressions and influence, these digital outreach strategies provide you with a clear understanding of the number of targeted prospects they will reach.

Do market research

Research is very important in any social media marketing campaign, so if you want your social media strategy to succeed, don't forget to do research. It is also noteworthy to recognize how customers view your brand. Social media insights can also provide a wealth of information for you, such as what your target customers are talking about online and their wants and needs.

If you already have followers on social media, ask them what they want from you. Follow through on what they say & update your content accordingly.

Exploring your competition on social media is also an excellent way to learn from their strategies. Your competitors are likely using social media in some form, which gives you access to new tactics and practices.

Create a social media calendar

Sharing great content is essential, of course. However, you'll want to have a plan in place for when you’ll share it to get the maximum possible impact.

Your social media content calendar lets you know when and what type of content is going to be published on each social media channel. This will help you create a cohesive strategy for all your postings and publishing on every channel.

Craft your content

When it comes to creating content for social media, you want the contents of your posts to be specific for each of your channels. All your unique pages must have a unique voice.

People respond best to a variety of things in their social feeds, which is why you want to mix up images, videos, and text posts. For example, if you are a corporation, try mixing content from blogs to corporate video productions. This way, viewers are more likely to pay attention and consume your content.

While social networks provide their users with a variety of content types, some platforms only allow you to post one or two different content types. You can still alter the mix of posts within a medium to reach your audience and maintain your online presence.

Evaluate and recalibrate

Businesses need to make sure they have a social media strategy in place. Many companies need to do some trial and error when it comes to coming up with the best strategy for their company.

As you implement your plan, you might encounter a time where some strategies work better than expected. On the other hand, you might sometimes find that certain strategies turn out to not be as good as first anticipated.

Once you start to see the data, you should reevaluate your strategy regularly. You can also test your posts, campaigns, and strategies against one another with the help of this data.

Constant testing is vital so you can determine what works and what doesn't. It is also an important skill to keep up to date with your social media marketing strategies!

About the Author

Sophia Young recently quit a non-writing job to finally be able to tell stories and paint the world through her words. She loves talking about fashion and weddings and travel, but she can also easily kick ass with a thousand-word article about the latest marketing and business trends, finance-related topics, and can probably even whip up a nice heart-warming article about family life. She can totally go from fashion guru to your friendly neighborhood cat lady with mean budgeting skills and home tips real quick.

We Know Construction

Construction Marketing is a full-service marketing and advertising agency that works exclusively with clients in the construction industry. We provide a wide range of effective marketing strategies to help your brand stand out in this oversaturated market. Our team will create an entire marketing plan that is unique to your brand and is directly targeted to your desired customer base. We help your firm achieve its goals and reach the next level of growth. Call us to schedule a meeting to discuss your business goals and we’ll take it from there.

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