5 Steps to Building Your Social Media Marketing Plan #MarketingPlan

The following excerpt is from Robert W. Bly’s book The marketing plan handbook. Buy it now at Amazon | Barnes & Noble | itunes

Robert W. Bly explains how you can develop comprehensive marketing plans for pennies on the dollar with his 12-step marketing plan. In this edited excerpt, Bly offers a five-step plan for successfully managing your social media marketing strategy.

The first step in any social media marketing strategy is to establish objectives and goals that you hope to achieve. Having these goals allows you to react quickly when social media campaigns don’t meet your expectations. Without these goals, you have no way to gauge your success and no way to prove your return on investment.

You don’t want to get carried away, though; too many goals are worse than none at all. This is why you should limit yourself to two main objectives and two secondary objectives. For example, a primary goal might be to increase brand awareness or increase customer loyalty. A secondary goal could be to drive more traffic to your website or build your list of newsletter subscribers. Depending on these goals, you will choose the social networking sites you will use.

The second step is to conduct a social media audit. It’s important to assess your current use of social media and how it works for you. This requires determining who connects with you through social media, which social media sites your target market uses, and how your social media presence compares to that of your competitors. It will become obvious which accounts should be updated and which should be deleted once you see the numbers.

Once you’ve audited your accounts, it’s time to move on to step three, when you’re perfecting your online presence. Complete all profiles completely. If you don’t already have social media profiles on every network you focus on, create them from scratch with your broader goals and audience in mind. If you have existing accounts, it’s time to fine-tune and update them to get the best results possible. If authenticity is as important as the experts say, you’ll want your social presence to be honest and unique. So, in step four, you will find your social voice and tone. It can be helpful to look to your competitors for inspiration when it comes to what types of content and information get the most engagement on social media.

Your consumers can be just as inspiring, not only through the content they share, but also through the way they frame their messages. Don’t forget to also look to industry leaders for inspiration. Many companies have managed to distinguish themselves through advanced social media strategies. Follow them faithfully and learn all you can from their successes.

Here’s the essential truth of any social marketing plan: you need great content. So, in step five, you’ll get details about the content itself, adding those specific pieces of content to a full editorial calendar. Your plan should answer the following questions:

• What type(s) of content do you intend to post and promote via social media?
• How often will you post the content?
• How can you target the specific audience for each type of content?
• Who will create the content?
• How will you promote the content?

When it comes to posting frequency, recent research has shown that you want to post regularly, but not too often. The top brands on Pinterest post five times a day, tweet three times a day (although engagement drops slightly after the third tweet), and consistently post three times a day on Google+. You can post twice a day to Facebook before the likes and comments start rolling in; once a day (20 posts per month) on LinkedIn is enough to reach 60% of your audience. Your editorial calendar should list the dates and times you intend to post blogs, Facebook posts, Twitter updates, and any other content you plan to use in your social media campaigns . It is suggested to create the schedule and then schedule the messaging in advance, rather than constantly updating throughout the day.

One more thing: despite the need to be specific in step five, your social media plan should be constantly evolving. As new networks emerge, you may want to add them to your plan. As you reach goals, you want to adjust them or find new goals for each network. This is a plan that is meant to change, so be flexible and open to change.