If you were to pick one of your favourite brands on social media and really dissect what they did with their content, what would you uncover? It’s likely you would quickly discover a lot of thought was put into their social media content right from the get go.

So, how exactly might they have gotten to that level of success? It probably wasn’t just plain luck. It was likely because they started by coming up with an effective social media marketing plan.

How to Create an Effective Social Media Marketing Plan

Coming up with a social media marketing strategy isn’t always the simplest process, but it’s made a lot easier with these seven tried and true practices. Read on!

Start with Audit and Assessment

The first step in developing an effective digital marketing plan is auditing what your current social media presence looks like. Consider what channels you’re currently active on and assess whether or not they are going to be the most effective channels for your audience.

You should also audit existing profiles to ensure they are properly optimized with photos, website links and a biography, as well as taking a look at what your competitors are doing.

Develop Your Target Audience

In order to be able to speak to your audience effectively on social media, you first need to understand who they are. What’s their age, location, income, and job, and what problems do they have that your brand could solve?

Knowing exactly who your audience is helps you to connect with them on social media and create content that will resonate with them most.

Create a Social Specific Mission Statement

Your next step will be to give some thought towards what your mission statement will be in terms of social media. An effective social media marketing plan will start with a statement to make your intentions clear.

You can then embark on creating and sharing content that resonates with this mission statement.

Warm up to Important Metrics

Metrics are going to be your best friend when it comes to measuring the success of your social media plan. They’re ultimately what tells you about its effectiveness.

Your goal should be to define what metrics will be instrumental in telling you whether you are successful or not. This could mean looking at conversion rate, reach, total comments or even time spent on your website.

Be the King or Queen of Content

Once you have established a solid foundation for your social media marketing plan, it’s time to start creating engaging and high quality content! The steps you take before this will help you to be able to determine what type of content is going to be most engaging.

It could be blog post, images, videos, infographics, white papers, eBooks or even fun facts! There are endless types of social media content to choose from.

Create your content based on your discovery process and be sure to organize it into a content calendar. This will not only help you to stay organized, but to define topics and intention behind each and every post.

Choose Your Social Media Management Tool

A social media management tool is going to be key in increasing your productivity when it comes to social media. You can schedule your posts ahead of time and even gain access to all of your social media analytics all in one place.

Analyze, Evaluate and Adjust for Success

As time goes on it will be important to analyze the success of your social media efforts to see what’s working and what isn’t. Your chosen metrics will help to define your success and to make adjustments for best performance.

Next Steps in Creating an Effective Social Media Marketing Plan

Following each of these steps is going to be instrumental in helping you to develop a social media marketing strategy that works.

While it’s important to have a solid plan in place, it’s also essential to stay flexible in making changes to that plan as the ebbs and flows in the world of social media and your industry take their course.

The best social media marketing plan is one that is resilient to change and always open to growth.