Social media marketing is currently one of the most effective ways of boosting businesses. Social media platforms have a unique global audience reach companies have ever faced. So, masses of money are being spent by brands to grow their circle of customers and build their bottom line. Of course, not all of these investments will lead to a considerable increase in sales.
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The reason is that many business owners who are active on different social media platforms do not have any certain management plan. Please do not expect that random content generation and posting on social media can produce results.
With a glimpse of your rivals’ activities, you can figure out that posting pictures and say “please buy it” will not make a difference. Every teenager can post colorful pictures and gain followers these days. So, you should stick to a perfect management plan to be able to distinguish your account from others’.
Devising a certain social media management strategy will firstly save your precious time and of course money. Secondly, it will definitely bring about better results in terms of followers, traffic, leads and finally sales. With meticulous engineering on your plan, you can also track and analyze the results in order to optimize your efforts day after day.
The thing is that many businesses, especially small brands, do not have limitless resources. The importance of an exact plan will better be understood in these situations. In other words, you need to make the plan as mush simple and cheap as possible.
By the way, to have a good plan, we first suggest that you should:
Define certain goals and missions
Before any action, you should clearly define what you want to accomplish using social media marketing. You can start with your brands’ missions and overall goals. You should also know about the results social media marketing can bring about in reality. Because not all missions and goals can be achieved simply by digital marketing.
So, it is important to prioritize your social media goals as bullet points like:
- Increasing followers,
- Increasing engagements,
- Deepening relationships at the personal level,
- Keeping existing customers in touch,
- Finding new customers,
- Getting feedback on customer service,
- Increasing online shopping.
As a recommendation, you can start with a three-goal plan for your first months on social media. You can optimize your plan each year adding more details and defining more complicated goals. Bear in mind that building a community from zero and growing it is not an easy task. So, do not expect astronomical results in the first months of your activity.
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It is necessary to define a concrete schedule for your activities on all your social media accounts. You can also define some deadlines for your goals. For example, generating a certain amount of content or getting a specific number of backlinks. Being realistic in defining goals is of paramount importance for every business, especially small ones.
Determine the target audience
After defining the goals you must focus on recognizing your target customers. If you want to adopt a specific approach in your marketing, you should be aware of the characteristics of your audience.
In other words, you had better know specifically what type of people will spend money on your product or service. The lack of attention to your customers’ titles, positions, race, age, gender, etc. can prevent your marking plans from being effective.
Of course, one may say that their customers are not a certain group of people. That is true, but you should prioritize your activities and focus on the most probable and of course the most profit-making circle of people.
In some cases, you can devise different plans for different kinds of customers separately. Then, you will be able to target each one of them by its specific plan.
For instance, if you are manufacturing high-tech sports facilities, you can sort your audience in the below categories:
- Professional sportspersons
- Women
- Old, paralyzed, or other people with difficulty in movement
- Children
Each of these categories needs to be taken care of by a specific approach if you want to optimize your sales results. As a suggestion, you can always focus on women separately in almost all niches because of the different requirements and expectations they have.
Think of the type and the theme of your contents
Content is a focal point Nany digital marketing plan. There are two general kinds of contents you can use: contents you should create by yourself, and contents generated by others that you can share.
Usually, beginners do not feel very confident in generating their own content. So, as a recommendation, until the moment you have high self-esteem, you can repurpose and share existing contents.
Bear in mind that at this stage you must build credibility and trust in the public eye. In other words, you should dictate your place as an authority in your niche who can be referred. Simultaneously, you should make considerable brand awareness and build a confident sales funnel.
Of course, sharing others’ posts cannot solely be effective. You need to add as many insights, comments, links, pictures, etc. as you can. Also, engaging with your followers after sharing any content is of paramount importance.
After being experienced in a content generation you should start creating high-quality content as much as you can. It would be useful for you if you could study different aspects of the left and the right sides of the human brain. This can significantly affect the quality of your work as you are considering both logic and emotion in your different contents. According to your customers’ general characteristics, now you can generate fine contents.
Determine a time schedule for your social media activities
There is not any definite number for a suitable posting schedule. But the thing is that sticking to a schedule is a must. This approach can save you time and money and also results in increasing visitors. Because if your audience faces a timely posting along with high-quality contents, they will highly likely stay in touch.
You can test different posting times in a week to reach the schedule with the most visitors. Maybe there is not a specific hour. Sometimes you may need to separate posting for local and global customers, depending on how vast your business is.
The most important matter in your schedule is consistency. Bear in mind that sometimes it is not important that how many hours you spend on content generation and posting. In other words, marketing needs time to establish your social community, to build leads, to increase followers, and finally to see the results. So, do not lose your patience during this task.
Determine social media platforms,
There are plenty of social media sites and applications (more than fifty). But there are several globally important social media platforms with the unrivaled number of active users or unique growing rate.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are the world’s leading social media platforms. Your knowledge of the target audience should expand in this stage so that you know on which platforms you can reach your customers out. If you want to boost your business, you need to have a significant social presence on these platforms and perhaps some other social networking sites like LinkedIn.
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Usually, all of the mentioned platforms are essential for businesses to boost their sales. It is highly likely that you can make great brand awareness focusing only on the above platforms. But you should recognize channels, groups, personalities, and in general, users acting in a relevant niche on all these platforms. Consequently, you can act more efficiently in terms of engaging with your target customers.
Remember that every one of these platforms has its own procedure of posting and engaging. So, we strongly recommend using automation tools to manage all your social media accounts. We offer some of the most sought-after automation tools you can easily access and use: Agora, Pulse, Hootsuite, Buffer, Crowdfire, and CoSchedule.
Be sure that by using these tools you will be able to show a fast and errorless performance on social media. Of course, selecting a suitable tool that fits into your marketing goals needs a little more investigation.
Recognize and prioritize relevant Influencers
Without the shadow of a doubt, influencer marketing is one of the most effective methods of affecting customers and boost sales. People usually tend to agree with what a famous person thinks or suggests, especially a celebrity. So, you need to think about this option and include it in your strategies and budgets. If you cannot afford a considerable marketing budget, think of partnership with common influencers with approximately 10,000-50,000 followers in your target niche. Remember that many influencers cannot keep their audience in touch, and even many of them want to sell their pages. So, be careful in choosing the right influencer.
Final word
By taking care of these matters, you can formulate your plan based on what you have and what you want to achieve. Bear in mind that you should not hurry up at this stage. Because the foundation of your strategy will be laid down exactly during this process. The more time you spend on defining the above points, the more efficient your plan will work. Be sure that having a social media management plan will maximize your results.
