Most small business owners have taken the social media marketing as part of their marketing activities because of its multiple benefits. However, some of them are not getting results. Therefore, it is important find where you went wrong. May be you missed out in defining the marketing objectives. In this article, we will discuss how to make a successful social media plan for your small business.
- Create a road map to your social media campaign: Many of you get overwhelmed with social media benefits. In addition, start campaigning without any prior planning, but once you came to know that you are not getting the results, all those resources, efforts and time you spent on its implementation go in vain. So, it is always better to question yourself:
- Why do you want to do social media marketing?
- What are objectives of your social media strategy?
- How much do you want to allocate out of your marketing budget?
- Who are your targeted audiences? Where are they? How to reach them?
- Do you have enough resources and so on?
Then define accordingly and make sure that your social media objectives should match your business objectives.
- Sort out different social media options: There are different social media options available for you such as Facebook, PinInterest, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and so on. However, you need to sort out the one, which is suitable for your business. This is because in each these sites, you will have different types of customers with different personalities. In addition, from where you have to figure out where you are targeted customers are present in these social media sites.
- Plan what to publish: Plan what type of content need to be published (latest updates on your products/services, awards or rewards, discounts, contests, surveys, polls and so on), how often to publish, what type of content your targeted audience are interested in, and make sure to figure out what your competitors are doing – what they are posting, how often they are posting, how they are responding to their customers and so on.
- When to reach your customers: Spend some time a day to respond to your targeted audience queries. In addition, plan how to respond to the negative critics/comments. So, always try to acknowledge, never deny. In addition, try to find out the root cause to their negative comments or critics. This helps you know is the negative feedback is just by misunderstanding or anything to be changed internally.
- Monitor analytics: Implement a strategy in your day schedule to figure out how your social media campaign is performing, from here you will come to know who are purchasing, by what means they approached you, if these customers are regular visitors, and so on. In addition, based on that you can implement the same strategy on other customers to convert them into leads. Therefore, plan effectively how to track, measure and analyzes things to get better results.