Your audi­ence is on social media. They are right there in front of you. Chances are they could already be talk­ing about your brand or look­ing for your prod­ucts or ser­vices online. You need to be there to edu­cate them, help them with their needs, and guide them back to your brand.

When you’re in charge of a brand’s social media, you’re real­ly in charge of its voice. The con­sumer does­n’t know or care whether it’s the CMO run­ning the page or an intern you just added to your team. There­fore, before you give one or more peo­ple access to your social media pages, it’s cru­cial that you estab­lish guide­lines and a strate­gic plan for mar­ket­ing with social media.

Top 5 Components Of A Successful Social Media Plan

Brand Voice

Think about how you would like to be known. Does your brand have a pro­fes­sion­al, seri­ous tone? Or is it more fun and laid back?

You don’t want it to seem like more than one per­son is run­ning your com­pa­ny page. You want the brand’s voice to be con­sis­tent.

All efforts should go in the same direc­tion as your brand’s goals.

Guidelines

Your team, includ­ing those who don’t com­mu­ni­cate through the brand’s social media chan­nels, should under­stand prop­er eti­quette. This can also be relat­ed to their per­son­al use of social media.

What is con­sid­ered appro­pri­ate for your brand may not be appro­pri­ate for oth­er brands, so you need to define those lim­its in black and white for your team. Some­thing that one per­son thinks is fun­ny may offend some­one else.

Strategic Plan

Take a look at the rest of your mar­ket­ing efforts; chances are you can tie some of your exist­ing efforts into your social media mar­ket­ing plan. Then you need to ask your­self a few more ques­tions:

• Who are you tar­get­ing?
• What are your social media goals?
• What are your key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors (KPIs)?

Your Target Market

Social media can be a hyper-tar­get­ed tool where you reach your ide­al audi­ence, sort­ed by inter­ests and demo­graph­ics, at a rapid rate. Define who your ide­al con­sumers are. Once you’ve fig­ured that out, you can pick which social media plat­forms will be the most effec­tive to spend your time on.

Your brand doesn’t have to be every­where; just make sure to be in the right places. You can then cre­ate cus­tom adver­tis­ing cam­paigns to pro­mote your brand direct­ly to your tar­get audi­ence.

Social Media Goals

What do you want to get out of social media? What’s your end result?

It could be many-faceted: get­ting traf­fic, col­lect­ing email address­es, gen­er­at­ing sales, increas­ing brand aware­ness, dri­ving brand loy­al­ty, etc. You have to cus­tomize a strat­e­gy to fit your goals.

If you want to dri­ve traf­fic, you can set up ads that are focused on traf­fic, pro­mote your online posts to reach a large tar­get audi­ence, and track your traf­fic.

No mat­ter what your goals are, it’s impor­tant that you con­sis­tent­ly track your progress. You need to con­tin­u­al­ly tweak your ads and evolve your strat­e­gy.

3 Biggest Obstacles To Social Media Success

There are a three main obsta­cles when it comes to social media.

1. Tracking Sales Properly

Some plat­forms are hard­er to track than oth­ers.

For exam­ple, Insta­gram has become a very pop­u­lar and fast-grow­ing social media app. The app is mobile and does not include click­able links. The only click­able link is in the bio area. Luck­i­ly, mar­keters are clever and have found solu­tions to that. Some actu­al­ly change their bio link dai­ly, oth­ers include the link in the map check-in area of the post, and the list goes on.

Then there are plat­forms such as Pin­ter­est, with which you can direct­ly track traf­fic and sales, mak­ing it much eas­i­er to show con­ver­sions.

2. Not Enough Time Or Content

When you have a short­age of con­tent, try to spend some time cre­at­ing brand­ed images that do well on mobile.

You can also curate con­tent, but you should still make it a goal to blog peri­od­i­cal­ly, whether it’s week­ly or even month­ly. It’s always best to dri­ve traf­fic back to your own web­site rather than some­one else’s.

If you or your team don’t have enough time, hire a pro­fes­sion­al to help you man­age your pages. Not answer­ing a social media mes­sage is worse than not answer­ing your emails or a phone call because it’s pub­lic and oth­er peo­ple can see that you aren’t respond­ing to a loy­al fan.

The con­ver­sa­tion is going on with or with­out you, so it’s time to join in.

3. Social Media Changes

Social media is con­stant­ly chang­ing. Not only do things change on exist­ing plat­forms, but new social net­works appear often.

Don’t lis­ten to all the buzz. Sit back and look at whether a plat­form makes sense for you.

• Who is on it?
• How many peo­ple have joined?
• What sets it apart?

Wait to see if a social plat­form is one you want to be a part of. It’s fine to grab your user­name so you don’t lose it, but don’t waste time on some­thing that isn’t worth it. Pay atten­tion when a plat­form gets enough users who actu­al­ly remain active.

Social Media Marketing: Key Piece Of Advice For CMOs

My key piece of advice for CMOs is to look at the big pic­ture. When you focus on the big pic­ture, you will include it in your strat­e­gy and see if you’re suc­ceed­ing in your report­ing.

Be sure to con­sis­tent­ly run report­ing that is social media relat­ed, includ­ing likes, repins, retweets, com­ments, growth, etc. Whether you run report­ing week­ly, month­ly, or quar­ter­ly, start com­par­ing the pre­vi­ous num­bers to the cur­rent ones.

You can also look specif­i­cal­ly at your suc­cess­ful con­tests or con­tent and find ways to dupli­cate that suc­cess. If you see that some­thing isn’t work­ing, that is OK. Take it out of your strat­e­gy box and replace it with some­thing new.

The great thing about social media: it’s very cost effec­tive as a mar­ket­ing tech­nique. Don’t be afraid to test things out. It’s the best way to grow.

Does your strate­gic social media mar­ket­ing plan resem­ble this one? What oth­er obsta­cles does your brand face in social media? Share your insights in the com­ments.