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How to Create an Effective Social Media Plan
  • Contest Factory
  • November 2, 2022

Social Media Plan

How To Create an Effective Social Media Marketing Plan

Nearly every business nowadays needs a social media presence to establish brand awareness and drive customer engagement. Whether it’s Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook, social media channels generate billions in visitors and annual revenue for businesses in all industries.

Contest Factory has some useful insights on optimizing your social media marketing plan. Read on for more information on cultivating an engaging social media presence.

Set Goals

The first step with any digital marketing plan is defining what you want to achieve. Plans with clear, defined goals are more successful because they have objective standards for evaluating progress and effort.

Perhaps your goal is to increase revenue or brand awareness, or maybe your plan involves lead generation. Nail down the specifics of your end target first so you can figure out the social media KPIs to track. Your choice of goals will ultimately determine your budget and which social media channels you use.

Take some time to write out your goals and rank them in order of importance. Afterward, break those larger goals into smaller, tangible milestones so you can keep track of them.

Establish Target Audience

One of the basics of social media is defining your target audience. Different demographics are more active on different platforms and are responsive to their preferred types of content. Consider the following questions when thinking about audiences.

  • Which platform is the most popular with your target audience?
  • What kind of social media content does your target audience prefer?
  • What is your audience’s average income?
  • What problems does your audience have, and what kinds of solutions do they want?
  • How does your audience interact with social media brands?

For example, Facebook is most popular among Millennials, while Snapchat and Instagram are the preferred social networks for Gen Z. Additionally, Gen Z and Millennials prefer visually based social media content over text. You want to be specific when describing your ideal customer so you can fine-tune your content to hit those demographics.

Develop Brand Identity

Your brand identity encapsulates your tone and how you engage with audiences on social media platforms. Your company’s identity and personality can drastically influence public attitudes regarding your brand on social media.

Developing your brand’s voice is a matter of finding relatable ways to communicate with your audience. For instance, if your audience is small business owners, keeping a more professional and informed tone might be the best option. Alternatively, funny videos and captioned images might be a good way to communicate with consumers and younger audiences.

Think about successful social media campaigns in recent years. The thing that unites them is they all found a way to resonate with their target audiences. Analyzing competitors’ successes and failures is key to making your brand’s voice stand out against the others.

Create/Curate Quality Content

Many businesses focus so much on technical metrics and appearances that they forget the most important part of a social media marketing plan: quality content. Spammy, repetitive, or irrelevant content will only put people off your brand, undercutting any marketing goals you may have.

Fortunately, you have a lot of options for social media content, including:

  • Video
  • Images
  • Blogs
  • Newsletters
  • eBooks
  • Animations
  • Podcasts
  • Memes
  • Infographics
  • Live streams

Content should always match your brand identity and values, so it’s best to focus on a handful of key content types to maximize effectiveness. Repurposing older content in a different format is another way to maximize content usage. For example, you can create animations from specific infographics or base a podcast on a recent newsletter or blog post.

Track & Optimize

You can just wind up a social media campaign and let it go. You need to monitor your results and tweak things to get the desired performance. Tracking results is about more than just reaching your goals but offers insight into creating effective campaigns.

Your campaign should have clearly defined performance metrics you can track to determine its effectiveness. Examples of these kinds of indicators include:

  • Conversion rates
  • Mentions
  • Content reach
  • Total shares/likes
  • Total post engagement
  • Times of most/least activity
  • Generated leads

Tracking key metrics can help you optimize content performance, find the best times to post, tailor your content for target demographics, and improve content reach. You can also weigh metrics to compare two marketing methods to see which is more effective.

Contact Us Today!

Contest Factory offers a wide range of software products and platforms to increase customer loyalty, engagement, and awareness. Our gamification products will have your customers lining up for more! Call us today for more information about our gamification marketing services!

Read our blog to learn more about the psychology behind successful social media marketing.

 

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