If it isn’t your areas of expertise, using social media to market your business can be daunting. You may find yourself scrambling for content ideas and going through stages where you post every day, then never post at all.
That's why it's so important to plan your social media marketing in advance. Doing so can save you time, effort, and frustration in the long run. In this blog post, we'll discuss why planning your social media marketing is essential and provide tips on how to do it best!
1. Decide on Your Goals
When it comes to social media marketing, or any marketing activity at that, the most important step is deciding on your goals. Without clear objectives, you won’t have the direction you need to plan the right content and you won't be able to measure the success of your campaigns.
If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve, how do you know if you are doing a good job? So be specific when setting your goals to allow you to track your progress and better understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Some examples of goals you might set could include:
Increasing brand awareness
Building relationships/new connections
Generating more sales/sign-ups
Blog post reads or video views
Once you have a good idea of what you’d like to accomplish with your social media presence, you can better form your overall strategy.
2. Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience means understanding their needs, interests, values, buying habits, pain points and goals. A good way to do this is by creating audience personas to paint a picture of what each one looks like. You should also look at existing customer profiles.
When you understand your target audience, you can create content that speaks to them directly, and resonates with their pain points and the goals they want to achieve (which you product/service can deliver).
Knowing who your audience is will also help you determine the best platforms to reach them, so you can tailor your message accordingly. For example, if you’re targeting millennials, you might want to focus on Instagram, whereas a company with an older demographic may find more success on Facebook.
3. Develop a Content Calendar
Creating a social media content calendar is the best way to stay organised, ensure consistency, and plan content that meets your social media goals. It helps you to avoid scrambling for ideas at the last minute or missing important dates.
Look at the month/quarter ahead and note down everything you want to post about during that period. Place the post topics into a calendar, varying between posts that educate, ones that sell, and ones that have a more personal approach.
If you find you have gaps in your content, think about events or meetings you have ahead of you that month/quarter, and make a note to take photos and produce a post at the time. You can also look ahead at any holidays or special events that could help you with your post topics. Focus on quality over quantity and stick to fewer posts with better content if you need to.
4. Automate as much as you can
Even with your preprepared content calendar, trying to post several times a week and remembering to following you schedule can be challenging. Automation tools allow you to schedule your social media posts in advance, so you can add them all to your platform in bulk, and your posts will publish on the time and date you specify.
There are a many automation tools to choose from that allow you to post to multiple platforms at once. If you don’t want to invest in an online tool, most social media platforms have a calendar function so that you can schedule your posts in advance. It just means you doing them platform at a time rather than all at once. Either way, get them scheduled to post so you don’t have to keep doing it manually!
Evaluate and Adjust – Not part of planning but equally as important!
It's essential to evaluate your social media efforts to determine if you're achieving/working towards the goals you set out in the beginning.
Most social media platforms have built-in analytics tools that allow you to track your performance and provide insights into which posts are performing best in terms of reach, engagement, and conversions.
Take the time to get to know your analytics and what they are telling you. Use the information to make adjustments to your content strategy to maximize engagement. If you notice that certain post topics tend to get more engagement, for example, you might consider posting more of those types of posts in the future. You can also use analytics to determine the optimal times of day for posting so that your messages reach the most people.
In addition, you should also use your analytics to pay attention to what isn't working. If you find that certain post topics don't get any engagement, it may be time to take a different approach. Experiment with different strategies until you find something that resonates with your audience.
However you choose to plan, doing it at least a month in advance will help make your social media workload more manageable.
Below is our free Social Media Planning Toolkit to help you get organised and complete your planning goals!
If you are struggling with that workload, or finding the idea of planning overwhelming, Squish Marketing offers social media management packages that deliver without breaking the bank. Get in touch with us to find out more!
