How to create a social media marketing content plan

What you need to know:

Planning your social media content delivery keeps your marketing on-message, making it more likely that you’ll reach your business goals.

Want to connect more with your target audience? Wondering how to deliver relevant social media content consistently?

Planning your social media content delivery keeps your marketing on-message, making it more likely that you’ll reach your business goals.

Understand how your ideal customer moves from awareness to conversion

Whether you’ve been in business for 24 hours or 10 years, defining your target customer is a crucial part of your journey. You may be thinking it’s easy to define your target customer based on the usual demographics, age, gender, etc.

However, you need to go beyond simply identifying your target customer’s marital status, where they live, or what their hobbies are. In the era of the “experience,” you have to give your customers an experience they’ll fall in love with. For example, Uber and Airbnb have grown to be successful companies because they provide a great customer experience while fulfilling a need.

Put yourself in your target customers’ shoes. What is their first thought when researching a product? How do they progress from there? Most importantly, what’s the final question they ask before making a purchase?

Decide why you’ll use social media for business, and identify KPIs: Defining a goal for your social media efforts is crucial. Without a goal, you can’t assess the success or failure of your plan.

Increase brand awareness: The biggest reason marketers use social media is to build brand awareness. The average person will spend close to two hours a day on social media, which is why brand awareness is a key goal for businesses.

Boost engagement: Engagement is the second most important metric businesses use to measure social media success. Boosting engagement helps you build brand trust, recommendations, and perception online. Engagement is particularly important on Facebook and Instagram because they prioritize posts with higher engagement, showing them in the feed before posts with less engagement.

Choose the right social network to engage your audience: Targeting every social network without looking at each platform’s demographics won’t provide the results you’re looking for. Before deciding which platforms to invest your time in, you need to do some research to find out which social networks attract your target customer. Focus on two key areas: network demographics and reciprocity across platforms.

Research content topics: Once you’ve decided which social networks to focus on, it’s time to plan your content. The content you create needs to be specific, relevant, and unique, and not all about “you” as a business.

If your goal is to create content that’s either the next big thing or a viral sensation, that’s not realistic and the wrong approach to content creation. Instead, focus your efforts on creating content that will engage your target audience.

Plan Your Content Calendar: After you’ve done your research, you’re ready to create content for your blog. First, decide which target customer the content is designed for and then choose a topic. Get specific with topics in your industry.

Next, choose a blog article title. Look at three types of keywords: transactional, informational, and navigational. A transactional keyword attracts people who are looking for the best or cheapest. An informational keyword touches on the “what” and “how,” while establishing you as an expert. A navigational keyword helps people find what they’re looking for and usually includes a brand name.

Source: socialmediaexaminer.com