How To Create An Effective Social Media Marketing Plan

Social media marketing is a relatively new concept, emerging from the dynamic growth of the social media landscape. Unlike traditional marketing, social media is geared towards engaging customers in a dialogue with the company. Yet, it is important to remember they both fall under the same broad umbrella of marketing. Just like any other type of marketing platform, to ensure the success of your efforts you need to lay down the appropriate foundations to guide your preparation and direction. To help you in this process, I’ll detail the similarities and differences between a traditional versus a social media plan that you must always take into consideration.

Similarities between traditional and social media plans

Research

Prior to writing your plan, you should conduct extensive research on the needs of your customers (as they are the ones that make or break your business), your product or service, brand, company, competition, industry and the current social metrics.

Summary of findings

Create a detailed summary to help guide the direction of your plan. This ensures that you don’t overlook objectives, goals or strategies. This is a must for agencies needing to justify the direction of their plan to clients, particularly those who are new to social media and its effectiveness.

SWOT Analysis

This refers to your business’s Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). This is essential to determining the focus of your social media campaign, as well as its potential effectiveness. You need to make sure that your social media initiatives are viable given your resources and competitors.

Objectives

Using your findings, you should be able to identify clear goals and objectives that are achievable for your business

Strategies & Tactics

Create a chart listing your strategies and tactics to achieve your strategy. Remember a strategy is the general ideas or options that you can consider to achieve the goal that set the direction and scope of your business. How are you going to get your target customer to spend money with you? What benefits are you going to deliver to them?

For example:

• Increase the sales generated by our women’s clothing department by 20% within 6 months (Goal)
• By introducing a range of in-house swimming range named “Synergy” for women aged 18-49 years old. (Strategy)

Tactics involve how you execute the strategy using the tools and resources available to you. For example:

• Sponsor local swimming events
• Create a dedicated website for providing information on exercising and the equipment and clothing needed.
• Promote through Twitter tool and Facebook tool
• Celebrity endorsement from Stephanie Rice who will appear across all forms of marketing communication as the company spokesperson.

Timeline & Calendars

A timeline will ensure you stay on top of various tactics. As the media landscape evolves at such a rapid rate, you should constantly reassess your goals, strategies and tactics every 2 to 3 months to make sure you are capitalizing on any changes.

Measurement & Reporting

Forecast expected results of your social media campaign. Continuously update this after analyzing and tracking results and adjust as needed.

The Differences between traditional and social media plans

• Social media has its roots in cultivating two-way communication between the business and the target audience which has its pros and cons. One important benefit is the almost instant feedback from your audience on a social media initiative. This means you can instantly respond and adjust your strategy accordingly at a much quicker pace than traditional marketing. At the same time, it becomes incredibly important to continuously monitor the online community and respond to any comments involving your brand in a prompt and consistent manner (particularly negative remarks).

• Social media has changed the way content and media is disseminated, as well as how users communicate with businesses and each other. You are no longer the solve owner of the communication surrounding your brand. Any user can easily and publicly broadcast content regarding your brand. So always keep in mind the social consumer evaluates and absorbs information differently from the traditional consumer.

• The best social media strategies for your business will constantly evolve as the industry evolves itself. Therefore it is a must to keep up-to-date with the latest news and marketing techniques. Remember if a particular tactic didn’t work, you must be quicker in terms of researching and moving on to your next strategy.

• Considering great content drives social interactions with your brand, there should be more emphasis on content as opposed to media placement.

This process will be no easy feat as this is a relatively new area. But as you build your strategies, creating an organized plan will provide you with the solid foundations you need to succeed in this space.

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