A social media marketing strategy or a plan is a brief document that explains your goals and objectives through social media marketing. These goals are set for a particular period and they define what you aim to achieve during that period.
Oftentimes, businesses fail to realize the difference between an organic social media marketing plan and a social media ads plan. While both plans work on different ends of the spectrum they serve the same purpose – lead generation.
In this blog post, we’ll clarify the concept of how to use social media for marketing and share our social media marketing plan sample. However, the social media plan we share is for organic marketing, the paid social media marketing plan works differently for every business and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
Understanding the costs associated with social media advertising is crucial when planning your marketing budget. If you’re curious about the financial aspect, our detailed guide on how much ads on social media cost in 2024 provides an in-depth look at the expected expenses and factors influencing ad pricing.
How to Use Social Media for Marketing – 4 Ways
Social media is an excellent product of advanced digital marketing that allows brands and individuals to seamlessly connect with each other. This advantage of social platforms is being utilized in marketing to showcase products or services to consumers across borders.
However, most businesses don’t know how to use social media for marketing. Here are a few ways you can utilize social media marketing for your business.
1. Engage With Other Brand
Engaging with other brands on social media through your brand page gives you a higher reach. In addition, brand engagements show customers that your page is managed by a human. What’s more, is that your customers feel more connected to your brand posts.
However, most social media brands tend to bombard their page with sales messages and promotion offers. This might work for a short interval but it doesn’t build any brand value. Here’s an example of how to use social media for marketing,
The Ad Professor’s website authority is 01. Yet they score more clients than sites with 80+ authority. How? Through quirky social media engagements. Brands need to understand that social media requires human-to-human interaction and you can’t achieve that unless your social media agency has complete autonomy and freedom.
But the only way you can build a brand image is when you know what your customers are talking about. We marketers call that social listening and you can read all about it in our How Can Social Listening Increase Customer Advocacy blogpost.
2. Use Humor
By this point, you know that social media marketing plans consist of regular posting, But what type of content should you post, and how often? Simply put, humor is the best way to gain traction for your brand. However, general humor doesn’t get as much attention because your followers don’t understand your personality to picture general humor over your brand.
Take Wendy’s social media marketing strategy as an example, how often have you seen them share general memes? Wendy’s sounds more human on social media than actual humans. And their tweets have a massive reach. This is primarily because Wendy’s has created a “brand personality
Brand personalities attract consumers that match your brand’s vibe (your target audience). In addition, brand personalities help your followers connect and engage with your brand because they know you’ll reply.
3. Use Video Marketing
Social media algorithms are changing and all Meta platforms (excluding WhatsApp) give more value to video-based content. In fact, Meta platforms have given designated space to video content called “reels.” Reels have the potential to bring massive organic traffic to your social media page and website if you use them wisely.
For instance, the above two points that we shared? Why not use them in reels? Or, you can schedule your reel content distribution to 3 per week. This will give your social media team enough time to plan and create engaging content that has a touch of humor and a splash of your brand values.
4. Collect UGC
UGC stands for User Generated Content, it’s the epitome of social media marketing business plans because it’s a form of digital word-of-mouth marketing. And if you know how effective word-of-mouth marketing is, you won’t think twice about this idea.
While creating user-generated content isn’t possible because it defeats the purpose, you can always collect them from your followers. Simply start a competition asking for your customers to share their reviews of your product or service without sharing their reviews. Something along the lines of the trend that went viral saying “Tell me your rich without telling me your rich”
The winner would either get a 6 months free subscription to your product or service. This way, your brand will generate massive numbers of UGC that are both humorous and meaningful to your social media marketing efforts.
You can also post UGC content on YouTube and start building your brand’s reputation on video-based search engines. However, you’ll need to understand YouTube which you can learn via our 6 YouTube SEO Tips That Boost Your Organic Views blog.
Now that you know how to use social media marketing for your business, it’s time to start learning how to make a social media marketing plan. But before that, you can download our social media marketing sample, and have it open on the side to enhance your learning.
4 Steps to Make a Social Media Marketing Plan in 2024
Now that you’ve downloaded our social media marketing sample, you have an idea of how to organize your posts. Plus, you’ve also learned how to use social media for marketing. What’s left is to understand the core elements that give you a guideline on executing your social media marketing strategy.
1. Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience and their behavior is key to better social media marketing. It allows you to tailor your content to your follower’s preferences. One way to go about this is by analyzing your competitors’ engagements. It gives you a good idea of whom to target in your social media marketing plan.
Another way to understand your target audience and their behavior is through paid tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, BuzzSumo, and Followerwonk. These tools help you understand where you’re target audience is and what activities they perform on their social profiles.
You can find more paid tools in our 10 Innovative Social Media Analytics Tools for 2024 guide. Once you get a hang of whom you’re targeting in your social media marketing plan, it’s time to align them with your business goals.
Not everyone you consider your target audience will show interest in what you’re selling. The goal is to connect with immediate buyers and let others rest on your social media page to make an informed purchase.
2. Choose Goals That Align With Your Business Values
Your business goals and values will be defined in the company documents. But if your company has several brands or “websites” you’d need to create your brand’s values and goals. Note that brand values and goals aren’t always centered on lead generation or scoring clients. However, social media marketing plans do include a section about lead flow.
So choosing your brand goals solely depends on your objectives. If you’re centered on a long-term marketing approach, establishing brand awareness should be your core objective. For that, you’ll need to follow the details in our “How to use social media for marketing” section above.
If you’re interested in generating revenue through organic social media marketing, focusing on commercials, promotional content, and customer reviews will give you an edge.
3. Spy Your Competitors
Analyzing your competitor’s social media page is a key ingredient in adding post copy and design ideas to the social media marketing sample that we shared. There are several ways to analyze your competitor’s page. One of which is manually scraping through competitor’s engagement.
You can also use the Meta Ads library to find your competitor’s social media ad creatives and take inspiration. Simply search for a category of service you’re targeting and see the ads your competitors are running. You can also search for specific competitors and find ad creative inspiration.
If you’re having difficulty finding your competitors you can always use the Meta Ads library to search for your category of business and find relevant pages that are running ads on your search term. Click on the ads or copy the page name and search it on Facebook. This will give you more room to do manual scraping and find your target audience.
3. Track Social Media Metrics
After you’ve successfully followed all the steps above, you can start tracking social media metrics. There isn’t a specific format to track and store social media analytics, therefore, we haven’t shared a Google sheet for it.
Social media analytics can be found in the Meta Business Suit section. There you can see the demographic segmentation of your followers and an engagement breakdown. Use that data to design your next organic or paid social media post.
It’s important to track metrics either weekly or monthly for better post design and creatives. In addition, you can get a hang of your posting schedule and time. For instance, socialpilot has done research on each social media platform and identified the best posting times.
Since social media users follow several pages, the chances of your page’s post appearing on your follower’s feed are low. The best way to increase your chances is to schedule your post at a time when your competitors aren’t active and your followers are freely using social media.
If you’re targeting business owners, you may need to focus more on Linkedin. That’s because C-level executives are active mostly on Linkedin.
Each audience segment has unique preferences and if you are running low on inspiration, you can refer to our 7 Types of Social Media Posts Ideas blog.
Hire Advertyzed for Better Social Media Marketing Lead Gen and Awareness
Crafting a social media marketing plan is essential for any business aiming to thrive in 2024. By understanding the nuances between organic and paid strategies, engaging with other brands, leveraging humor, utilizing video marketing, and collecting user-generated content, you can significantly enhance your brand’s presence and connect with your target audience effectively.
If you want to skip the headache and start making sales, hire Advertyzed for social media marketing service. Our packages are affordable and we can always make a custom plan for your business needs.
Remember, the key to a successful social media marketing plan lies in knowing your audience, setting aligned goals, analyzing competitors, and consistently tracking your metrics. By following these steps and adapting them to your unique business needs, you’ll be well-equipped to create a compelling and results-driven social media marketing strategy. For more insights, refer to our social media marketing plan sample and discover how to use social media for marketing to its fullest potential.