Take stock of your existing social media marketing efforts with this set of questions to guide development of your social media marketing plan. Then review the template to articulate your social media marketing plan. A key aspect is analytics as they provide you with valuable insight into your marketing investment.
How Is Social Media Marketing Contributing To Your Business Goals?
Read more: How To Plan Your Social Media Marketing- How are your existing social media marketing efforts contributing to business goals?
- What’s the contribution of social media versus your other marketing channels?
- What’s the most interesting content for your social audience?
“33% of social networking site users follow companies or brand on social networks.”
Where Should You Be On Social?
- Where are your prospects on social media?
- What’s the potential market size on social media?
- Who’s already aware of your offering / presence on social media?
Exploring Existing Marketing Content To Use On Social Media
- Consider the B2B marketing content themes that may be of interest to your followers & prospects?
- Thinking about customer questions, what kind of information needs might you fulfill on social media?
- What types of content are competing organizations using?
- What social media marketing content drive engagement?
Developing Social Media Benchmark / Competitive Assessment
- How many followers / fans do you and competing organizations have?
- How are your competitors using social media marketing?
- What kind of engagement do competitors experience?
Moving Forward With Social Media Marketing
- What should you do next to engage with potential customers on social network?
- What kind of marketing results can you target?
“75% of IT decision makers are using social media as part of their buying process.”
– IBM Worldwide Study
Social Media Marketing – Plan Template Sections
Use this list to organize and populate your social media marketing plan.
Business Context & Objectives
Ideally everything in this section should available before you start. If missing, you may need to take a step back and addressing each item before proceeding to your social media plan.
- Organizational vision and objectives
- Business numbers: revenue and profitability targets, spending budgets, resource allocation
- Selected market segment: market size, segmentation, target customer persona
- Your offering (product, services, pricing and more).
- Marketing communication objectives and metrics: awareness, lead nurturing, lead generation.
Social Media Objectives
- Guided by organizational objectives, articulate how social media can contribute to those objectives. Include:
- awareness
- lead generation
- listening. (Competitors, advocates, partners, and more.)
Social Media Publishing Plan
- Identify (existing and new) content, such as from your website, to answer customer questions.
- Plan to reshare ideas relevant for our customer persona.
- Include both earned (organic) and paid advertising.
Social Media Measurement
As with all marketing metrics the goal is to learn what works and improve through iteration. Articulate what you will measure
- On each social network using their (or third party) analytics tools
- Measure traffic from social media to your website
- Sample Goal Measurement:
- Triple social media followers
- Engagement rates of up to 11%.
- Grow inbound website traffic
- Social media website traffic goal conversion rates of 5%.
- Paid social media advertising with click through rates (CTR) 300% better than benchmark rate
There’s more sample B2B Technology social media marketing results in => this case study