In his article, I break down the steps I use to build a Powerful Social Media Marketing Plan for entrepreneurs.
Creating a Social Media Marketing plan is important because it gives you focus. You gain clarity on two very important things
- Why you are using Social Media
- How you are using Social Media to achieve your business goals
If your Social Media Plan doesn’t answer these two questions, then it’s time for a new one.
That said, there are basically 9 steps to building an effective Social Media Plan:
- Identify your target audience for social media
- Analyze your target audience
- Firm up your branding
- Choose your social media platform
- Set your social media marketing goals
- Do peer research
- Select social media content topics
- Plan your content amplifiers
- Create your social media schedule
Let’s dive right in.
Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience for Social Media
I always start every marketing endeavour with a focus on the Target Audience. Your Social Media target audience is an easily identifiable group of people who will best respond to your Social Media content.
You should not confuse your target audience with your target market.
A target market is all the people who could enjoy your offering. Your target audience is typically smaller than your target market. They can either be a subset of your market or a group that has influence or access to your target audience.
For example, let’s say you’re a Virtual Assistant offering administrative and social media services. Your target market could be entrepreneurs who are growing their business.
On Social Media, your target audience could then be a subset of these entrepreneurs. (For example, entrepreneurs who do craft or entrepreneurs located near you.) You have effectively niched down to this target audience because they may be easier to access or you may have more in common with them.
Here’s another example. Let’s say you sell school supplies. Your target market are school-aged children. They will enjoy your offering but your target audience on social media is their parents. Why? Because, it’s the parents who have the money to buy the school products.
Do you understand how this works? When choosing your target audience on Social Media, identify a group of people who are either:
- A subset of your target market or
- Has access to or influence over your target market.
Now, what I’m about to say may sound strange:
When you’re new to business, identifying your target audience can be a daunting task. Don’t let it hold you back.
If all you can do is identify a target market, then run with it until clarity comes to you on your target audience. Eventually, you may find that you attract a certain audience. You may even end up building competency working with a particular group.
The key is to start and keep moving forward.
Step 2: Analyze Your Target Audience
Your target audience has specific needs and preferences. It’s your job to find out and document what they are.
The best way to find out is to ask. You can talk to persons who have done business with you in the past. If a one-on-one conversation isn’t convenient, then send them a survey.
If you’re new to business and haven't identified your target audience yet, approach persons who are within your target market or who have:
- once had a need for a service like yours in the past and/or
- used a service like what you are offering
The questions you ask should really revolve around six main areas:
- Goals and Aspirations: Goals, motivations, and actions taken towards achieving these goals
- Challenges: challenges people encounter in trying to achieve goals and barriers that prevent them from solving these challenges
- Hesitations: Objections and hesitations persons have had in purchasing services like yours
- Deciding Factors: Factors that have swayed purchase decisions
- Information Sources: Sources persons turn to for information or help in solving problems
- Demographics: Any relevant characteristics that help describe the person. E.g. Sex, Age, Job title, Years in Business, Business Type
The information you collect will help you better understand your target audience and build a buyer persona.
Step 3: Firm Up Your Branding
Your brand are the messages, personality and visual cues that distinguish you from others who offer similar services.
In firming up your brand you must first identify 1-3 key messages that you want to deliver to your audience. These messages must be relevant to your audience. That’s why analyzing your audience (step 2) is so important.
Secondly, your message should be composed in plain language that your audience can easily understand.
Consider creating messages around the following:
- Your key offers
- Who you target
- What makes you different
- Why people should trust you
Your brand personality are the human characteristics you want your target audience to associate with you.
To ensure brand authenticity and consistency, choose a brand personality that aligns with your own character and mannerisms. Are you laid back? Confident? Introspective? Funny? You need to bring this personality out in your language and imagery on Social Media.
Finally, you must lay out the visual parts of your brand. These are your logos, fonts and colour choices.
Remember, most social media platforms centre around the visuals. You must be careful to present a consistent image.
Step 4: Choose Your Social Media Platform
The fourth step in building your Social Media Plan is to choose your platforms.
When you’re a small business with limited resources, it’s best not to spread yourself too thin. In such cases, there’s a rule of thumb. Choose the platform where you can readily find your audience.
If you’re not sure which platform your audience congregates on, then I encourage you to experiment. If you don’t test, you won’t know.
Many persons draw generalizations on the types of people who gravitate to certain social media platforms. Such hard pronouncements may start holding less and less weight as tastes and preferences change over time.
For example, Instagram used to be the platform where mostly creatives hung out. People went there to get inspired. Now, you can find all types of entrepreneurs on Instagram who are not just restricted to creatives.
Step 5: Set Your Social Media Marketing Goals
In the fifth step, you set your goals for what you want to achieve on your social media platforms of choice.
Your social media goals should connect to your overarching Business goals and Marketing goals. Re-read that again!
Before you attempt to set Social Media goals, you need to have business goals and marketing goals.
To simplify, your Business goals can fall into 1 of 3 categories:
- Profitability Goals – These relate to your income and expenses
- Challenge Goals – These relate to the challenges you want to address in your business
- Innovation Goals- These address the areas in your business you want to improve to better serve your potential and current clients
See examples in the table below:
| Business Profitability Goals | Business Challenges Goals | Business Innovation Goals |
| Achieve total sales revenue of 50,000 dollars within 6 months | Diversify client base by the end of the year (where the problem is over-dependence on one or a few type of clients for one product/service category) | Add 2 additional payment options for customers within 3 months |
Your Marketing goals should then support one or more of the business goals you set. Using the Business profitability goal from the previous example, you can set a Marketing goal:
Business Profitability Goals: Achieve total sales revenue of 50,000 dollars within 6 months
Marketing Goal: Increase website conversions for offer x
Then you can set social media goals support your marketing goals. Following our example, you can have a social media goal that looks like this:
Business Profitability Goals: Achieve total sales revenue of 50,000 dollars within 6 months
Marketing Goal: Increase website conversions for offer x
Social Media Goal: Drive 1,000 monthly visits back to the landing page for offer x from Instagram
After you’ve set your goals, identify the daily habits (systems) you must adopt to meets your goal. Then, identify the performance standards that let you know if you’re on track to reaching your goals.
For example, you may place a daily call to action on your Instagram stories to drive website traffic. Then may set performance goals relating to Instagram profile visits and link clicks.
Step 6: Do Your Peer Research
The sixth step in building your Social Media Marketing Plan is to conduct Peer research.
Others may call it competitor search but I’ve evolved from that way of thinking.
There may be others who provide the same services as you do but businesses rarely have a monopoly over every audience. (The key is to find what makes you different and leverage that with an audience who cares about this difference.)
That said, you will have peers or other complementary service providers with content that can spark great ideas for you.
First, run a search on your browser and Social Media Platforms using keywords relevant to your industry. You want to take note of the businesses that pop up.
Go to their Social Media Pages and website blogs and take a look at the content they’ve posted in the last 3-12 months.
Pay attention to posts that have had relatively higher engagement (shares, comments, reactions).
Look at the post topics and any other contextual clues. For example, time of year, promotional links, collaborations, event references, and incentives offered are all context clues that influence engagement rates.
If you can, scan their followers to find patterns in the types of persons who are following them. What recurring job positions do you see? What types of businesses? Which locations? Which common interests?
From your notes, decide what is most relevant to you and use these as inspiration for possible content ideas and activities.
Step 7: Select Your Social Media Content Topics
Now it’s time for the really fun part—or tough part—depending on how you look at it! Content Ideation is the seventh step in building your Social Media Marketing Plan. Here, it’s all about coming up with your content topics.
In planning, aim for at least 3 months of content topics to start.
There are tons of ways to source new content ideas. But you should start with topic ideas arising from your audience and peer research.
In the very least, they will give you a broad list of themes that you should dig deeper into. Here are 10 other ways to come up with new content ideas:
- Listen to Q and A sessions with experts in your industry
- Read reviews of Amazon books in your niche for clues on problems solved for readers
- Look at the job description of persons within your target audience
- Reflect on experiences with previous clients. True life experiences can also act as interesting metaphors for key ideas
- Pay attention to the personal stories of your clients or influencers in your industry
- Ask your subscribers to identify their most nagging problem in your email welcome series
- Join communities with your peer group and target audience and ask and respond to questions
- Use exit pop-ups on your website to ask your visitors a question
- Ask questions on your social media posts
- Pay attention to the questions people ask you when you explain what you do to persons outside your industry
To make content ideation easier and ensure a varied content mix, organise content into different categories. Again, your choices are wide here. Here are 3 ideas on how you can group content:
- Group by Value delivered (Educational, Inspirational, Informative, or Engaging content)
- Group by Stage in the consumer buyer journey (Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Post-Purchase content)
- Group by the YouTube model (Hero, Hub, and Hygiene content)
In selecting each topic idea, consider the following:
- The goal of your content piece
- The key message you want people to learn or receive
- The action you want people to take after consuming your content
- The format that best fits the message
Step 8: Plan Your Content Amplifiers
Content amplification is the eighth step. It has to do with the methods you use to get your social media posts in front of your new and existing audiences.
Depending on the social media platform you choose the tactics will differ. But, all platforms boil down to two main methods:
- Organic- Methods that cost you no money. For example, posting consistently, finding content collaboration and using engagement tactics (commenting, sharing other persons’ posts).
- Paid- Methods that come at a financial cost such as advertising and paid partnerships. Using ads will speed up your reach and can potentially help you reach your marketing and business goals much more quickly.
Step 9: Create Your Social Media Marketing Schedule
The ninth and final step in building your social media marketing plan is scheduling. You have to schedule time for researching, creating and publishing your content.
You should also schedule time for engagement, content amplification activities, and performance reviews. Finally, you need to schedule periodic reviews of your performance.
Smart scheduling helps you produce higher quality content, reduce stress, and free up your time.
- Research- Even though you have a list of content topics, you still need time to research supporting facts, evidence, and details.
- Creation: Set aside time to batch the actual creation of your content. Consider recording all your videos at once. Batch all your image/video editing and caption writing as well.
- Publishing: Use a calendar to plan the days and times you’ll post.
- Engaging and Content Amplification: It’s never a good idea to post and dash. Schedule time for responding to comments and questions that arise from your posts. After all, it’s called Social Media for a reason! Finally, decide when you will activate your content amplification activities (e.g. initiating engagement and running ads).
- Periodic review: Check your analytics and insights to track progress towards your goals. Remember, you can’t improve what you don’t measure
Conclusion
Here’s a recap of the 9 steps to building a Powerful Social Media Marketing Plan:
- Identify your target audience for social media
- Analyze your target audience
- Firm up your branding
- Choose your social media platform
- Set your social media marketing goals
- Do peer research
- Select your social media content topics
- Plan your content amplifiers
- Create your social media schedule
Documenting your Social Media Marketing plan increases your chances of success.
Why? Because it’s your plan that tells you what success looks like and gives you a pathway to achieving it.
Now tell me, do you think your Social Media Marketing Plan is comprehensive enough?
I’m a content marketing specialist and owner of C.D BLACKMAN SOCIAL REBELLION MARKETING, where I make it easy for professional service-based business owners to create content marketing strategies that attract leads and clients more predictably.