Social media is a powerful tool that can connect you with an audience anywhere in the world at any time. With so much potential, it is important to have the right plan to launch a social media campaign.
Knowing how to properly set up a social media plan requires an understanding of where you are, where you want to be and how you wish to achieve it. When producing a social media campaign there are many steps to utilize social media to produce business leads.
The steps to creating a foundation for effective social media marketing
-Knowing social media’s purpose for you
-Knowing your audience
-Have a content strategy for your social media plan
-Know what KPIs to use for your social media strategy
-Integrating social media into other inbound efforts
Why do you use social media?
Social media is a powerful tool that changes the approach of advertisement. More important than how powerful of a tool social media is, it is important to ask why do you need it at all? Why does your business strategy need you to build an audience for social media? Is it to raise awareness, or to generate business leads? By understanding what you are marketing for, you will need to understand how to market for that specific audience. Social media can be used to establish familiarity with the audience. This familiarity can expand their audience to more than their organic customers.
Buyer personas
Buyer personas are the digital identity created by compiling your own current social media analytics. By having created an identity for your typical customer you can market content for that specific audience. The identity changes from generation to generation. This graph shows gen z, millennials, gen x, baby boomers and the silent generation’s response to ads.
Gen Z & millennials showed a 12% increase in purchases after seeing an ad over gen X. However Gen X had only 2% fewer clicks on the ad which implied they browsed different options instead of purchasing from the vendor. This contrasts Gen Z & Millennials which most likely purchased directly from the vendor with less consideration.
This second graph works together with the first to identify the response to both image and text mediums to see how the age groups would respond. Gen Z & Millennials showed a significantly lower interaction and purchase rate with text-based ads than they did image-based. This could mean brands should provide more images and visually interactive images when marketing to Gen Z & Millennials. Age groups alone helped determine the medium for advertisements. The use of a specific channel can be also decided by age, gender too, this is seen with 79.5% of Pinterest users are female (Source: Statista).
Knowing the demographics of your audience are infinitely useful to produce a social media campaign that receives more than just likes.
Using demographic tracking tools are important and are usually free to find, some services include;
- Google analytics
- Heap
- Matomo
- Stat Counter
- Amplitude
- Adobe analytics
- Mixpanel
Content Strategy
Knowing what content to put out is increasingly valuable especially in the social media age where more and more people are coming online. Knowing what medium to use is possibly one of the biggest determining factors to be a successful social media marketer. This is evident with a select amount of marketers releasing stats that images drove 29.6% of clicks. Images however paled in comparison to videos which drove 59.3% of ad clicks on Facebook.
Furthermore, a marketer revealed that posting more video ads than images increased conversions by 20-30%. This goes to show how significant the right choice of medium can be, especially on a platform such as Facebook which has 1.79 billion daily users (SMPerth).
Note that not all platforms may prefer video mediums and would rather use images.
Understanding your KPIs
KPIs, or key performance indicators, are used to identify key factors that can be used to measure success. By finding the right KPIs, your business can determine what the business is looking for to know whether the plan is succeeding.
Certain KPIs may be valuable for some businesses whereas others, not so much.
KPIs such as likes and views are a measure that doesn’t define success to many businesses unless their primary goal is awareness.
Other KPIs include returns on investment, social engagement and customer loyalty. These KPIs are more consistent with all businesses, especially in the social media industry. This is especially true about social engagement and customer loyalty.
Social media consumers are able to see the past experiences of others when dealing with the brand. Social engagement and customer loyalty fall under customer care. Which is stated by Harvard Business Review to generate a 6.7% increase in cross-selling, upselling, or reducing churn if proper social care capabilities are displayed. Conversely, if a company shows no social care capabilities they were seen to have a 12.1% decrease in value or, 18.8% less than those who did. KPIs such as social care is more valuable to most businesses trying to attain more than just awareness.
Goals
Knowing who your consumers are and how you can measure success, having goals will create a short/long term direction for the social media campaign. These goals should be formed around who you are producing for and what you are producing. These goals will maintain the direction of the campaign and allow you to accordingly allocate the right resources.
Goals should also be appropriately set, meaning you shouldn’t have too high of expectations or too low. Reaching an x% increase in a select KPI by x month is a universally appropriate goal, (e.g, 10% increase in comments responded to by the social team within 6 months).
Goals allow creating valuable pressure that social marketers need in order to know they are on the right track
How to get your business to back social media
Social media is a powerful tool that can generate many business opportunities. However, knowing how to make social media campaigns happen is the only reason why opportunities arise. Social media requires resources, and these can only be decided upon after choosing a goal to strive towards. By having goals to strive towards, a social media marketer is able to properly present a plan of whether the business should support social marketers. This could mean asking for help with increasing funding for projects, recruiting new and valuable team members and backing the social media team in any way they can.
However, business management does not run using the same KPIs as social marketers. This is important to note when asking for extra resources as businesses look for monetary increases as a result of their investment. This means when presenting a plan, always provide sufficient evidence as to how increasing a social KPI would increase ROI’s. Simply put, give the business a reason to back your social marketing plan in terms of profit. Has your business seen profit after submitting a post?
Conclusion
Social media marketing holds significant value to businesses as now most consumers are on social media with 4.48 billion active social media users (Backlinko). Knowing how to properly set up a social media plan requires an understanding of where you are, where you want to be and how you wish to achieve it.
First was understanding your situation, like what socials work best for you right now and why you want socials. The second is knowing who you are marketing for and how to target the audience. The third is knowing what kind of content to put out relevant both to who you market for and where you are marketing. Lastly is selecting the appropriate KPIs to determine what is a measure of success for your business and what kind of goals you wish to set in correspondence. These 5 steps allow you to create a direction for your business or allow you to consider what socials you need to beat the competition.
