Social media keeps taking up more room in how brands communicate. With the growth of digital life and the demand for interaction online, you can’t afford to skip it anymore! You’ve decided to put more budget toward your social media marketing, but where do you start? With a solid plan! How do you find your footing? Our specialists share their advice for building a plan that fits your business!
Why building a plan matters
Your presence on social media can’t be improvised. You need a plan in place to keep your actions consistent.
Thinking through your plan gives you a chance to step back and rethink both your goals and the ambition you hold for your brand. What messages do you want to share? What values do you want tied to your company and your products? Who makes up your audience? In this way, your plan guides your actions and shows you whether you’re on the right track to reach your goals.
Working through your plan also matters for pinpointing exactly what resources you need to carry it out. What budget do you want to set aside for your digital marketing? Do you need to hire someone in-house or bring in a specialized agency?
What steps should you follow to build a plan?
To build a plan that works, you need to break it down into different parts so you cover everything worth defining. Keep in mind that any good plan is meant to change over time as you look at the results and adjust.
1. Set your goals
What do you want from your social media? Do you want to improve your image, boost your sales, or reach a new audience?
The first step is setting goals that are clear, precise, and easy to measure. Your social media goals need to line up with your broader marketing goals so your overall plan holds together. These goals might include:
- Building brand awareness;
- Selling your products and services;
- Promoting your business;
- Interacting more with your audience and deepening your customer service;
- Winning new customers;
- Rolling out your (new) brand image;
- Gathering reviews on your products and getting feedback.
You can absolutely pursue different goals depending on the platform. For example, TikTok might work well to modernize your brand image, while LinkedIn could promote your B2B services.
Once you’ve set your goals, make sure tracking is properly set up across your platforms and your website so you can follow the data. It’s especially worth tracking the conversions and visits your social media sends to your site, so you can gauge how much weight it carries in your overall results.
For each goal, you need a way to measure how it’s paying off. It’s common to look at follower counts and visits, but also at the engagement rate of each post or its reach, so you can zero in on the right users and keep improving your results over time.
2. Define your audience
Knowing your audience is a must if you want to figure out the kind of content and topics that will resonate and spark engagement on your social media.
To really understand your audience, and by extension your potential customers, you need to gather all the information that lets you sketch out the different personas that make up your public, based on things like age, gender, occupation, hobbies, and interests.
Think about their day-to-day life to spot situations and problems you could speak to. Take time to map out your personas’ customer journey so you deliver content that fits where your audience stands at each stage. For instance, use testimonials and case studies if a prospect is checking your social media at the decision stage, or lean on educational content like blog posts if they’re still at the very start of their journey.
This kind of digging lets you tailor and frame your messages the right way, at the right time, and on the right platforms, so you reach your audience and make them feel like you’re speaking to them directly. And in the end, that’s what turns your followers into customers.
3. Watch what your competitors are doing
There’s nothing wrong with keeping an eye on your competitors, quite the opposite! It’s actually something we recommend doing, so you can spot openings to take advantage of, borrow what’s working, and notice what isn’t landing.
You can take note of the kind of content they use, the topics they cover, and which ones draw the most attention. This isn’t about copying your competitors’ plan, but about giving yourself every chance to stand out. Be sure to compare your positioning and your audiences too, so you can factor that into your reading of things.
4. Choose your platforms
There’s no point spreading yourself thin trying to be everywhere. It’s better to focus on the platforms your audience actually spends time on and keep them stocked with good content regularly. Pick the social networks that fit your goals and your audience. Make sure you adapt the kind of content you post to match each platform.
Once you’ve settled on which social networks belong in your plan, you’ll need to set up and fill out your company profile on each one. Take care to write your descriptions using the words that represent your brand well, and use your company’s visual style throughout.
5. Build a social media style guide
The last step before you actually start putting posts together? Build a style guide that spells out your editorial direction and the tone your content should take. Make sure it lines up with your brand image so it reinforces that image and makes you instantly recognizable across your digital channels.
In this document, you can lay out your goals and personas again, define your writing voice through tone, style, and preferred vocabulary, set the main content categories, and finally capture the whole visual world you want to bring to life on your social media. This means choosing the colors for your images, your photo style, your typography, and the filters you’ll use to keep your posts looking unified and consistent.
Your style guide then becomes something you’ll turn to again and again when building your calendars! To save time, you can also build templates you can reuse month after month.
Our specialists can help you shape your brand image and create content that feels like you, ready to share with your community. Take a look, for example, at how our specialists helped strengthen the visual identity of a well-known Montreal eyewear brand.
6. Build a posting calendar
The rule to live by for your calendar? Consistency! Don’t set yourself a posting pace so intense you can’t keep it up over time.
It’s better to aim for steady, quality posting than to try to post too often. Factor in the time it takes to write and put together visuals for each post. You might also want to set aside time for photo shoots so you can keep feeding your channels fresh, original content. And leave yourself room to keep the conversation going and engage with your community.
Make sure you mix up your topics without ever losing sight of the goal you’ve set for each platform. It helps to set a few categories to draw topics from, such as:
- News
- Job openings
- New products
- Promotions
- Media mentions
- Tips and advice
It’s also worth putting your blog to work, or starting one on your site if you don’t already have one. Blog posts are easy to share on your platforms to drive traffic to your site and offer fresh, original, quality content. It’s also a way to showcase your expertise and services through what you know about the topics tied to your business.
You might follow the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your posts inform or entertain your audience, and 20% directly promote your brand.
7. Pick the right tools
There’s a whole range of tools that save you real time day to day when it comes to planning and scheduling posts. Some cost money, but most offer a trial period. A few worth mentioning are Buffer, Agorapulse, Hootsuite, and the Facebook Business suite, which our team at Hamak uses.
8. Set up your advertising
As you probably know, you can pay to boost certain posts, meaning you set aside a fixed budget to get them in front of people who don’t already follow your page.
You can set a monthly budget as part of your plan and set up your ads manager with your goals and audiences, which you can break down into segments. Here again, knowing your audience well can only help you get the results you’re after by reaching the right leads.
9. Track your results and fine-tune your plan
There’s no point putting a plan in place if you’re not tracking how it’s paying off. You need to keep a close watch on the numbers you’ve set up to gauge your actions and adjust your plan if it’s not moving you toward your goals.
Taking the time to look at your results really does pay off, since it lets you use what you’ve learned to sharpen your content and keep pushing your social media performance forward.
Just keep in mind that results on social media don’t show up overnight, so you’ll need some patience to watch your community grow!
