How to Build a Successful Social Media Marketing Plan

How to Increase Brand Awareness After you identify the relevant metrics, it’s time to look at improving them. How to Drive Traffic and Leads In Social Media Examiner’s 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 78% of survey respondents said social media marketing helped them increase traffic. The more specific and relevant your content is to your target audience, the better your conversion rates from social referrals will be. Advertising and influencers can also help promote your content. Building a social media community is a good goal if you want to improve customer service efficiency, increase brand engagement, build trust, or provide more value to your audience. Although you can’t directly measure revenue contribution, these metrics help you see whether your efforts are paying off: Engagement (number of clicks, likes, comments, shares) Brand mentions Posts linking to your content Follower growth rate Survey responses to “How did you come across our brand?” (if the response is social media) In a nutshell, building a strong social media community is all about fostering engagement. The more relevant engagement within your community, the more valuable it becomes to users. Marc Jacobs’ Community Engagement Campaign When the Marc Jacobs brand wanted to launch a new line, the company created the #castmemarc campaign to advertise its rebellious new collection and encourage community engagement. #4: Listen to Your Audience to Discover Their Interests Social media presents brands with a massive opportunity to learn about their audience through social listening. Do you know what your next social media goal is?

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Do you wish you had a better plan for your social media marketing initiatives?

Looking for tips to help you succeed?

In this article, you’ll discover how to choose, pursue, and track your progress for four important social media marketing goals.

How to Build a Successful Social Media Marketing Plan by Pierre de Braux on Social Media Examiner.
How to Build a Successful Social Media Marketing Plan by Pierre de Braux on Social Media Examiner.

How to Identify the Right Goals for Your Business

What works for one business doesn’t necessarily work for others, even if you’re in similar industries. Before you define one or more goals, figure out where your business stands. First, audit your brand’s digital presence, including a social media audit. Then, analyze your marketing and sales funnels to determine where improvements could have a significant effect.

Should you build awareness, generate leads, nurture your community, or learn about your audience? Through the audit and analysis, you’ll discover which objective, if achieved, would benefit your company most at this point in time. When you can answer that, you’ve got yourself a goal.

Goal-setting matters because your ability to produce results from social media marketing is highly correlated with your ability to identify meaningful goals. This correlation makes sense: You can’t identify success or failure if you don’t know how much closer or farther away you are from reaching your goal.

The goal that you choose to pursue will determine what strategies you adopt and what performance metrics you should be tracking. After you have this overall goal, you can start identifying relevant metrics, devising strategies, and creating content.

Decide what goals you want to achieve with your social media efforts.
Decide what goals you want to achieve with your social media efforts.

General Goal-Setting Tips

Here are a few general tips for goal-setting in a social media marketing context:

  • Match your goals to your brand’s core values.
  • Know what makes each social media platform unique and use it to your advantage.
  • Make sure your campaigns are unique to differentiate your brand.
  • When setting goals, make sure your efforts are consistent over time.

These tips should apply across all of your social media goals, no matter the desired outcome.

#1: Increase Brand Awareness

Social media is a great way to spread the word. Facebook alone has 1.94 billion monthly active users. Whether you’re selling skincare products or IT outsourcing services, your business would most likely benefit from a strong social media campaign that puts your brand’s content in front of the right people.

You’ll want to set a brand awareness goal if you’re launching a new brand or product, if you’ve lost a significant amount of market share, or if you’re trying to reach a new target market. For example, CVS created an ad to increase awareness of its new partnership with Target.

When CVS launched a new partnership with Target, the pharmacy created a Facebook ad to increase brand awareness.
When CVS launched a new partnership with Target, the pharmacy created a Facebook ad to increase awareness.

Brand Awareness Metrics to Watch

Measuring brand awareness can get a little problematic because you need a focus group to measure brand recall. However, a few specific figures will give you a pretty good idea of how strong your brand presence is:

  • Average reach per post
  • Website traffic from social media
  • Number of followers
  • Number of brand mentions
  • Engagement levels (likes, shares, comments, replies, etc.)
  • Share of voice (brand coverage relative to your competitors)

For the most part, you’ll find these metrics via your corresponding social analytics tools (for instance, get Facebook metrics from Facebook Insights) or free tools like Google Analytics. More complex metrics like share of voice require specific tools like TrendKite or Brandwatch Analytics.

How to Increase Brand Awareness

After you identify the relevant metrics, it’s time to look at improving them. First, start posting content that excites your audience. Your brand is competing with a vast array of other brands for user attention so your content has to be uniquely valuable.

Aim to produce and share content that educates, informs, entertains, or inspires. Try to mix things up a little with a balance of the four types of content and keep overtly promotional posts to a minimum. Outdoor outfitter REI has a Force of Nature campaign that highlights women in the outdoors. The content relates to REI’s mission and aims to inspire, not directly sell.

REI has a social media campaign that highlights inspirational content about women in the outdoors.
REI has a social media campaign that highlights inspirational content about women in the outdoors.

You can develop content that increases brand awareness in several ways. When you inject some personality into your content, you remind everyone that you’re human, too. You might try influencer marketing, but make sure you approach it the right way. Host a contest or giveaway if your audience loves free stuff.

To increase a post’s reach, try curating popular posts to leverage their virality and add relevant hashtags to each post. If you’ve got a decent marketing budget, you could invest in social media advertising to good effect. It’s pretty amazing how accurately you can target audiences with social media ads.

You’ve got a few options here, but keep the relevant metrics in mind. Those are the numbers you’re trying to improve.

AirAsia’s Brand Awareness Campaign

Several years ago, AirAsia was launching a new flight route from Sydney and wanted to increase travelers’ awareness of it. The problem was that they didn’t have a massive marketing budget, or at least not enough to challenge bigger industry players.

To promote the new route, AirAsia ran a competition on Facebook called Friendsy. Users stood the chance to win a flight for themselves and 302 of their friends (basically a whole plane) by tagging them in a seating plan. Because the act of tagging someone automatically shares the post, it didn’t take long for this campaign to go viral.

AirAsia created a brand awareness campaign to promote a new route.
AirAsia created a brand awareness campaign to promote a new route.

As a result of the Friendsy campaign, AirAsia achieved an impressive response and increase in awareness metrics.

  • 30% increase in Facebook fans
  • 12,500 contest registrations
  • Over 2 million users reached (roughly 20% of Australians using Facebook)
  • Estimated PR value of $1.7 million

#2: Drive Traffic/Leads

Website traffic and sales leads are the metrics associated with sales and revenue. By nature, social media platforms, with their labyrinth of hyperlinks and clickable media, make the process of growing sales and revenue pretty easy. However, driving traffic and leads requires a good understanding of what motivates users to click.

You could set a goal to drive traffic and leads if your sales are stagnant, if your website’s content isn’t getting much attention, or if you want to support your inbound marketing funnel. In this Facebook ad, JAM invites potential subscribers to learn more about their online courses for kids and sign up for a free trial.

This JAM ad supports the marketing funnel by driving potential subscribers to the company's website, where they can learn more about subscriptions.
This JAM ad encourages users to sign up for a free trial of online courses.

Traffic and Lead Metrics to Track

When you’re aiming to increase traffic and leads, analytics should be your bread and butter. They’ll tell you exactly how well your social traffic and lead generation efforts are paying off. Here are the analytics you should be tracking:

  • Traffic (page views) from social referrals
  • Social referral session duration (bounce rate)
  • Form submission from social referrals (email subscriptions, gated content signups, Contact Us forms)
  • Social referral sales conversion rate

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