6 Steps to Create a Robust Social Media Plan

As of 2019, 4.388 billion people are using social media platforms. Hence, it’s a powerful tool for brands to connect with their target audiences, drive traffic to their websites, and generate more sales.  Also, it’s a cost-effective way to expand your reach, increase your brand’s credibility, improve your search rankings, and boost your engagement rate. Brands have realized the power of social media platforms. Brands understand that, with the help of social media, they can not only reach their target audiences but also boost their ROI. However, to achieve these goals, it’s important that brands have a social media strategy in place. Before formulating a social media strategy, brands need to learn about the crucial components of it. Let’s talk about some of the crucial components of a social media strategy. It includes goals, target audience, social media channels, content types, and tools.

1. Goals

What do you want to achieve from your social media strategy? This is one of the crucial components. Before you start creating a social media strategy, it’s essential to figure out what you want to achieve for your brand. You need to analyze the business requirements of your brand. You can aim to widen your brand’s reach, increase awareness, drive traffic, generate sales, build brand reputation, or something else. Now, that you have identified your goals, you can easily create a social media marketing strategy which can help you achieve those goals.

2. Target Audiences

The next important component, after identifying your goals and objectives, is to identify your target audience.  If you don’t know to who you are going to sell your products or services, you may not be able to devise a fail-proof social media strategy for your brand.  The simple yet effective way to identify your target audience is to filter them using parameters like gender, age, income, preferences or region. To reach audiences in the other areas, you might need a surfshark 3 year deal VPN.

3. Social Media Channels

One of the most critical components of your social media strategy is to select the right social media channel.  You should not just pick any social media platform based on your preferences. You need to choose the social platform based on the presence of your target audience. So, find out on which social platforms your target audience spends most of their time on. Once you figure out that, you need to leverage those social channels as your primary platforms.  You need to post content on each of those social media platforms based on the popularity of each channel.

4. Content-Type

In addition to the components mentioned above, the type of content is also a crucial component of social media marketing.  You need to create appealing, informative, and engaging content as it will help you strengthen your presence on social platforms. It will also help you widen your brand’s reach, connect with your target audience, generate more sales, and increase ROI.  However, you cannot use the same content format on all of the social media platforms. For instance, Instagram is more of a visual platform when compared to LinkedIn or Twitter. So, you cannot use the same piece of content created for Instagram on Twitter or vice versa. Hence, you need to create content according to the social platform. You can create content in the form of text, videos, podcast, or images.  Then create content which is suitable to the platform and helps you get the attention of your target audience. Always ensure that the content represents the voice of your brand. Also Read: Free Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing

5. Tools

There are many social media marketing tools which you can use to dominate social media. You can use tools such as Grum, Animoto, or Venngage. With Grum, you can easily post your Instagram content from your laptop. You can also schedule your posts to be posted at later times. If you are struggling to create attractive infographics, then you can use Venngage. It will help you create engaging and interesting infographics in no time. And Animoto can help you with video creation.

6. Measure Your Results

The most important part of any marketing plan is to identify –

• How are you going to determine whether this is actually making a difference in your business?
• What key measures will you use to evaluate social media strategy effectiveness?
• How will you measure your likes and engagement?

Selecting KPIs (key performance metrics) helps you to track your brand’s sentiments to see how people feel about your brand. It sets organizational expectations about how the ROI of your social media efforts will be measured. A social media strategy is an exercise plan, not a quick fix. it’s success will be seen, but only through patience and perseverance. Thoughtful KPIs and realistic quantifiable quarterly goals are necessary for maintaining leadership buy-in for the long haul. For a closer look, you can check out the infographic created by UTM.io. It will help you create a fail-proof social media strategy for your brand.