The 10 Step Social Media Marketing Content Plan {Updated}


Infographic showing tips for a successful content marketing plan, including steps like knowing your audience, influencer marketing, publishing, and promotion.

Your Guide to Creating a Social Media Marketing Content Plan in 10 Steps

A well-executed content marketing plan is a huge growth opportunity for every business, regardless of its size. A content marketing plan is a huge growth opportunity for every business regardless of its size.

However, the key to a successful strategy not only relies upon how you will run your campaign but also the type and quality of the content that you will share with your audience.

This type of campaign must provide a benefit and be useful for the potential customers, in the manner that they can see your brand as an important reference in your field.

If you have tools to create perfect visuals but haven’t developed a smart content plan for Social Media, the campaign will have the minimum impact on reaching the right audience and promoting your product or service.

The content you share on social media is the fundamental base of every marketing strategy because it will help you on these matters:

  • Reaching your business objectives.
  • Getting to your current or potential audience.
  • Increasing the visibility of your brand on the internet.

For these purposes, your content must follow the appropriate planning to reach our goals.

This is what we know as a “Content Marketing Plan”; the roadmap to follow in order to be clear at any moment about what type of content to publish in every digital channel, when, and which resources you need.

That’s why we will share with you the 10 vital steps that you should consider to create an efficient content plan for your social media marketing campaign that will help you connect more with your target and deliver relevant social media content consistently!

  1. Analyze your surroundings:

It’s very important to be conscious of your starting point, the current performances developed in Social Media, the available resources, etc.

To obtain this information, you can use a SWOT analysis where you will have to identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of your enterprise.

At this point, is also very recommendable to make an analysis of your competitor’s current situation. For this purpose, pay attention to the following aspects:

  • What are the other enterprises doing in this matter?
  • What type of content are they sharing on Social Media?
  • With which type of content are they trying to get the audience?
  • How frequently do they publish content?
  • What tone do they use?
  1. Find the added value of your Social Media campaign:

Once you have analyzed the performance of your competitors in Social Media, you need to think if it’s something you could do better, faster, prettier or more comfortable than them. Consider answering these questions:

  • Can I produce or share content more relevant than theirs?
  • Could my content be more compelling than theirs could?
  • Could I post more frequently or more consistently than them?
  • Do I have space to post relevant content from trusted sources on my social media platforms?

As you can note, this step is not only about finding what you could do better than your competitors but most importantly, what could you do differently.

It’s amazing how a simple change of angle can make a huge difference.

  1. Identify how your audience goes from knowing your brand to generating interaction and business:

We always read how important is to define our target market in terms of the usual demographic information like age, gender, marital status, location, hobbies, etc.

However, the idea is not only attracting people who say “Oh yes, I know the brand” but the ones who say “I have used/bought that product or service and I liked it”.

It doesn’t matter how high the scope of your marketing campaign could be If it doesn’t really connect with your target audience and this connection develops in conversions.

Currently, we are in a context where there exist so many similar products on the market that brands need to differentiate from each other in more innovative ways.

One of them is by offering your customers an experience they could fall in love with, at the same time that you fulfill their needs with your products or services.

In this manner, you need to outline the purchase process for the different types of target consumers for whom your campaign is directed. You can put yourself in their shoes and try to answer these questions:

  • What could be their first thought when researching a product?
  • How do they progress from every purchase step?
  • What could be the final question they ask before making the purchase?

Some people are more inquisitive and passionate when it comes to their purchase decisions.

They tend to ask their friends for opinions and complement the information searching through Google or Social Media platforms like Pinterest or Instagram.

On the other side, we can find a more analytical and methodical buyer profile, who is more interested in data and facts, using B2B platforms like Linkedin.

The key to this exercise is that your brand can find ways to build trust and answer these questions to provide valuable content in the form of blog posts, images, infographics, etc.

It’s all about taking enough time to figure out what your potential customer thinks.

This will facilitate the work to understand which type of content will connect with them and gain their trust.

  1. Define the goals for your social media efforts to identify your KPIs:

         Once you are conscious of your starting point, you need to define your objectives, what do we want to get with our content plan for social media? These are some examples of possible goals:

  • Improving your brand’s image.
  • Generating traffic on your website.
  • Build a community.
  • Increasing sales, conversions, or downloads.
  • Increase the engagement level of your target audience

There are many different objectives with each campaign, but it’s very important to define them, so you can focus your content strategy to fulfill them.

In this case, they need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Time-bound).

Consider these three potential goals as examples:

Improving your Brand Awareness:

This is one of the main reasons why marketers use social media.

Every day, people spend at least two hours on social media, that’s why this is a key goal for many businesses.

If you are using Twitter to create brand awareness, your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) could be:

  • Number of Followers.
  • Level of Impressions.
  • The number of mentions and shares.
  • Your Top Tweet to identify the type of content that engages better with your audience.
  • Top Mentions.
  • Profile Visits.
  • New Followers.

Boost Engagement:

This could be the second most popular metric that marketers use to measure their success on Social Media because, at the time that you boost your engagement, you are helping to build brand trust, recommendations, and perception online.

This metric is very important, especially for social networks like Facebook and Instagram because they prioritize the post with higher engagement, showing them in the feed before other content.

For this purpose, your KPIs should be:

  • The number of community members you reach on a daily basis.
  • Retweets
  • Likes
  • Questions
  • Any other type of communication.
  1. Define the channels to spread your content:

This will depend on where is our target audience located.

Note that if you share the same content on different social media platforms, you need to adapt it to each channel and the public that uses it.

Stay also conscious about the reciprocity of your target to use more than one social network.

To potentiate the visibility of the content, many channels offer payment options to promote publications and make sure that they get quicker to more people. Consider these important facts about the most popular social networks:

Facebook: it’s used by 79% of online adults but the higher percentage goes in people between 18-29 years and it has more profiles of women (83%) than men (75%).

In this platform, the live video content has grown by 700%.

Twitter: 80% of people who use Twitter do it through their mobile devices, which means that if your marketing campaign is developed through this platform, you need to make your content with a responsive design for multiple devices.

Instagram: 38% of online adult women use this platform in front of the 26% of men who do it.

More than half of the total users of Instagram check their apps daily and 35% of them even several times per day.

Pinterest: 45% of online women use this platform compared to 17% of online men.

Linkedin: The statistics are more balanced with this network because 31% of online adult men use it in front of 27% of online adult women.

The most popular content shared by users is the long-form one.

Youtube: This is a network whose audience is dominated by men with 62% in front of 38% of women.        

  1. Create the Content:

At this point of the process, you are in a good position to define and create the content you will share in social media.

You will find a great variety of content and it’s up to you to choose the most appropriate in each case to reach your objectives.

As some examples, we can mention:

  • News
  • Events
  • Guides
  • Videos
  • List
  • Tips and Advice
  • Interviews
  • Polls
  • Quotes
  • Phrases
  • Infographics
  • Illustrations
  • Promotions

You will need to pick the tone that you will use for each type of content, always considering to whom it’s directed.

You can create content in two ways; one of them is through Content Curation, which means searching and selecting existing content from other brands or creating your own and unpublished content.

The content you choose to share needs to be specific, relevant, and unique which lets you engage with your audience.

You don’t need to be the master of wisdom to guess what type of content your audience wants; you can simply run a Twitter poll or create a questionnaire to obtain feedback.

  1. Make sure to include a video in your content:

We have to make a special reference to this because currently, people are consuming more video than any other type of content on the internet. You have different alternatives such as:

  • Live Video: Brands are using real-time live video marketing to connect with their potential customers.
  • On-Camera Video: It gives your audience an insight into your world, so you must consider creating a YouTube account.
  • Screencast: it’s about recording the screen of your computer, which is great for creating webinars and sharing Power Point presentations.
  • Photo Montage: If you are not comfortable yet with the idea of recording yourself, consider creating photo montages, and adding an overlay of text and music.
  • Animation: this involves a higher technical knowledge but it’s very recommendable for explainer and sketch-type videos.
  • Hybrid Video: it turns out from the combination of on-screen video and screen sharing. In this manner, you can talk directly to the camera and then show important information on your screen.
  1. Organize a Content Calendar:

Believe us when we tell you that this will make your life easier when it comes to managing your content plan.

You can create a table or download one of the thousands of templates on the internet with information like:

  • Month
  • Publish Date
  • Title/Description
  • Due Date
  • Type of Content (Video, Image, Infographics, etc.)
  • Target Audience
  • Distribution Channels
  • Keywords.
  1. Don’t forget about the engagement:

The best action to complement relevant content is creating a bidirectional interaction with your audience.

In this manner, your presence in social media will be a subtle but very powerful customer service tool that will make your customers feel safe with your brand.

  1. Measure your strategy and make the necessary adjustments:

You need to monitor constantly your progress so you can boost what you are doing great and improve those aspects that aren’t working as you expected.

Don’t leave this step for the end of the campaign; do it during the entire process.

For these purposes, you need to analyze the KPIs and metrics you identified before.

Consider three important metrics:

Conversions: it will determine if you are driving sales from social media.

Reach: It measures the number of people you have reached with your content. It’s more related to the amount of followers, visitors, connections, likes, and subscribers.

Engagement: it tells you how many people are interacting with your brand on social media. It’s related to shares, comments, mentions, and clicks.

Make sure you adapt all these steps to your business needs and goals, developing a coherent and productive Content Plan for your Social Media Marketing campaign that makes you stand out from the crowd and generate a powerful impact on your audience!

Looking to get started? Contact an expert today!

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