Ways To Strategize A Social Media Marketing Plan

Written by Anabel Blesch ~3 Min Read

Social Media Marketing Plan

Social media marketing is a key aspect to any business or brand in today’s industry, so finding an effective approach to develop a strategic plan is key! There are a few approaches to strategizing your social media marketing plan but we’ve broken down the key steps we think are the most important below.

1. Research

This stage should include all research about your own brand, competitors, and researching the available social media platforms. Before doing any strategic planning, you need to have a very clear grasp on your brand and where you line up within the industry. Things you should prioritize in your research of competitors is their following, engagement, content type, and channels used. 

This stage of strategy development is one of the most key steps in order to know how to proceed moving forward. Lay out all your research within one document and organize it by different research types. Some examples include: Competitor Analysis, Self Audit, and Social Channel Analysis.

2. Begin determining ‘objectives’ and ‘target audiences’

Once you have your research laid out, it’ll be much easier to determine the key aspects of any strategy: objectives and target audiences. 

Your objectives should outline clearly what you expect your strategy to achieve. They should also be realistic, which is another place where your research will come into play. Analyzing things like time and budget will also play a role in your objectives. Some objectives of strategy could include: increased brand awareness, increase in following, or simply create a consistent posting plan. 

Outlining your target audience and secondary audience is an unskippable step within any digital marketing strategy, let alone social media. Understanding your audience will help you determine your content approaches, as well as which channels to focus your efforts on.

3. Clearly outline social persona and messaging

Now that you have your objectives and target audience in place, you can begin working on the content aspect of your strategy. Outline your tone of voice, key messages, and persona that you want to be included throughout all of your content. These can be laid out in an easy, point-form format within your strategy. 

To determine these, sift through brand materials such as branding guidelines, your website, and any relevant pieces of media. Pull the key messages and “story” of your brand, along with particular phrases and headlines that are often used for your business. The point of doing this is to ensure your brand voice and personality on social media aligns with your other marketing strategies. Additionally, the brand persona and key messaging you’ve outlined in your strategy shouldn’t shift from channel to channel. While your content may be more relaxed on TikTok versus Facebook, you still want to make sure your persona and voice is consistent across them both. 

4. Don’t forget your key performance indicators

Your key performance indicators, or KPIs, are a crucial aspect of strategy development. Once you have all the above determined, how will you know you’ve actually achieved it? These should be outlined clearly and re-evaluated once you start implementing your strategy. Are they actually helping you analyze your results or do they not effectively line up with your objectives? 

Your objectives and KPIs should be aligned to best track your strategy results. For example, if your objective is to increase brand awareness, you’ll want to track reach & impressions. If you’re looking to increase website traffic, you should track profile visits & story link clicks. If you’ve chosen appropriate KPIs, your results will help you determine if your tactics are achieving your social media goals. 

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To learn more about Jelly’s approaches to Social Media success, visit our page here.