Having a successful social media marketing campaign is vital for any business that wants to stay competitive in today’s world. Campaigns help you with brand awareness, followers, leads, and conversions. However, each campaign should be well-structured to deliver results, and here’s where a social media marketing plan shines.
A social media marketing plan can help you define each step in your campaign, clarify its goals, and ensure that each campaign detail is focused on delivering real business goals and not just vanity metrics such as likes and shares.
In this guide, we share what are the differences between a social media campaign and a social media plan, and how to create a plan that perfectly aligns with your strategies and helps you convert more social media users to paying customers.
Social Media Campaign vs Social Media Plan
At first glance, a social media campaign and a social media plan appear similar, as both involve activities on social media platforms, generating content, and setting goals. However, the scope and purpose of both are different. Understanding what sets them apart can help you build a more convincing online presence for your business.
What is a Social Media Marketing Campaign
A social media marketing campaign is a focused activity designed to achieve marketing goals within one or more social media platforms within a set period of time. It involves outlining potential customer groups (segmentation) and generating messages, visuals, and videos that are likely to convince this audience that your products and services are worth checking out and purchasing. In most cases, every campaign has clear start and end dates, and aims at a specific goal – most likely generating a certain number of purchases, but a campaign can also aim at improving brand awareness or website visits, or downloading free materials.
Example social media campaigns include:
- Running a two-week giveaway after registering for the email newsletter to increase brand awareness.
- Launching a paid ad campaign to generate leads for an upcoming webinar.
- Promoting a seasonal sale with countdowns and promotions to boost sales.
What is a Social Media Marketing Plan
The social media marketing plan is your roadmap towards your campaign’s goals. You can think of it as a framework that defines your steps towards executing campaign aims. In most cases, the marketing plan provides you with directions to follow, such as specific types of content you should publish, specific segments you should target, and specific time frames that you need to operate in. In short, having a marketing plan makes following your strategies easier and with greater attention to detail.
The best way to visualise the difference between the two is to think of your social media campaign as a map and the social media marketing plan as the journey towards the treasure on the map.
Why You Need a Social Media Marketing Plan
In most cases, a plan helps you follow your social media marketing strategy more tightly and more efficiently. Always keep in mind that a well-structured social media marketing plan can greatly enhance your business endeavours and help you with:
- Campaign clarity: A plan can help you tie your campaigns to your business goals and help you stick to your core goals.
- Campaign efficiency: A well-structured marketing plan can help you track budget spending and monitor performance and results of campaign investments.
- Sustainability: Plans can help you get the best out of a given campaign and use it in the next one.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan that Converts
Each successful marketing plan is comprised of a few essential components. Below, we list the most important elements your plan should have to help you with any marketing activity.
Define Your Business Goals
The success of each campaign lies in its goals. Often, managers chase vanity metrics such as likes and shares, or simply aim to sell more. However, a successful plan should focus on setting goals that align with your organization’s broader business objectives that impact revenue, growth, and customer satisfaction.
A handy approach might be to incorporate the so-called SMART goal frame, which means to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals when working on your campaigns and marketing plans. This approach can help you avoid abstract aims such as “let’s increase engagement” or “let’s sell more” and replace them with specific targets that, once achieved, help you expand your business.
For example, a SMART goal can be to increase leads by 20% in the span of 6 months. This aim is far more specific and real than something like “aim for more website clicks,” as it allows you to shape the rest of your plan and campaign components in such a way that they help with the achievement of this particular goal.
Another specific goal can be:
- Boost online sales by 15% for 12 months via Instagram ads.
- Grow the list of email newsletter subscribers by 20%.
- Outline two new customer segments for our new product.
Develop Audience Personas
A useful marketing plan should include a description of your target audience. This means that you should analyze your target customers beyond simple age/gender/location segmentation. To develop a successful campaign and a plan that helps you achieve your goals, you should build detailed audience personas: a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers, based on deep and comprehensive research. The more detailed this research is, the more effective your targeting will be.
When you know your audience, you don’t just publish content for the sake of activity in social media; you create content that directly speaks to their needs, which can drastically enhance engagement and conversion. This means that, along with age/gender/location segmentation, you should also include:
- Psychographic characteristics: interests, hobbies, lifestyle
- Needs and motivations: Do they really need your product, and how come they use it to satisfy needs and desires?
- Pain points: what are their struggles and how can your organization solve them?
- Preferred social media platforms: Which channels do they use the most and for what purpose?
- Content preferences: what types of content does your target audience prefer to consume – video tutorials, memes, long-form articles, short texts?
Once you develop audience personas, you should have a pretty detailed idea of who your customers are and how you can communicate with them in a way that is most lucrative for your campaign and business.
Here are some examples of audience segments:
- Young consumers, who are likely to use TikTok and Instagram, engage with short and entertaining videos, challenges, and user-generated content. They are likely to respond to influencer marketing and campaigns that prompt them to participate.
- Video game enthusiasts. who use Reddit and Facebook groups to discuss challenges, progressions, lore, and everything else regarding their favorite games. They would respond to an authentic tone that shares real gaming values.
- Professionals and experts use LinkedIn, and they value in-depth industry analyses, educational publications, and everything else that brings knowledge and value for their professional activities. Such a segment cherishes credibility and expertise on the matter way more than entertainment.
Build Content Pillars
A successful social media plan includes a well-structured and intentional content strategy. This means that, instead of publishing random posts daily, you should define clear content pillars: themes and topical categories that can guide you with your content ideas. These pillars can help you keep your social media presence consistent, relevant, and engaging. This all means that each of your social media publications should serve a defined purpose – whether to inform, engage, or make a sale.
Examples of strong content pillars can include:
- Educational guides and how-to content. Within this scope, you share advice, publish tutorials, industry tips, and explanatory videos. This can increase the trust in your brand and drive traffic to your website, because visitors might want to search for even deeper resources.
- Behind-the-scenes insights. Publish videos and images that show your team, corporate culture, daily work processes, or simply, some funny moments that are worth sharing. By doing so, you can humanize your brand and make it more relatable.
- Campaign-specific Posts. Such publications are created and published in support of your ongoing campaigns. Examples might include publications that announce limited-time offers, product launches, and countdowns.
To build a strong content pillar, you can start by auditing your current content – identify what performs well and what makes social media users engage with your publication. After you do so, you define several pillars, depending on the best-performing publications, and then map your business and marketing goals to these pillars. For example, your educational pillar might be focused on informing AND generating leads, and your user-generated content might be aimed at creating an online community around your business.
Read also: Content Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: Which is Better for Your Project?
Track and Optimize Conversion Pathways
Each social media marketing plan should be focused on guiding people from awareness to action, with the final goal being a purchase. This is where conversion pathways come in. These are the connections between social media posts and tangible business results such as lead generation, sales, and subscriptions.
There are several approaches you can undertake to optimize your conversion pathways. Here are some suggestions:
- Create clear Call-to-Action (CTA) prompts. Every post should contain a clear CTA prompt that informs the audience what comes next. Examples include “Download our free guide”, “Shop now”, “Register for the seminar now”, and similar. Remember that clear CTAs help users move along the sales funnel more easily towards the final goal of making a purchase.
- Optimize your landing pages. When you prompt your social media followers to go to your website, you should make sure that the landing pages are well-structured and contain everything that was promised in your publication. Something more, such pages should load quickly, match perfectly the promise in the publication, and be clear about your marketing message.
- Focus on social proof and user-generated content. Showcase testimonials, positive reviews, and user-generated content, as these can greatly reduce hesitation and enhance trust in your brand.
Keep in mind that each of your publications should be matched to a pre-defined conversion pathway. This means that your educational content should also lead to resource downloads and/or email subscriptions, whereas your campaign-specific posts should lead to time-sensitive landing pages that prompt urgency and action.
Constantly Measure and Track Performance
No social media marketing plan is complete without a measurement optimization process. Without clear metrics, it is practically impossible to track how your publications and campaigns perform and whether they generate real business results such as purchases and subscriptions. This is why you should always track and analyze the performance of each element of your social media marketing campaign. Doing so helps you distinguish guesswork from data-driven decisions, and shоws you which are the most effective approaches towards converting users to clients.
You can track performance with various social media tools that make the process easier and more effective.
Conclusion
A well-structured social media marketing plan is essential for your online presence, as it helps you track and measure each step of your ongoing social media campaigns. Such a plan makes it easier for you and your team to measure performance and come up with productive ideas about future campaigns, product development, and customer segments. Make sure to include one for your brand, and you have the chance to get the most out of your ongoing marketing endeavors.