sample business plan for social media marketing company

Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template

Written by Dave Lavinsky

Social Media Marketing Business Plan

Over the past 20+ years, we have helped over 1,000 entrepreneurs and business owners create business plans to start and grow their social media marketing businesses. On this page, we will first give you some background information with regards to the importance of business planning. We will then go through a social media marketing business plan template step-by-step so you can create your plan today.

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What Is a Social Media Marketing Business Plan?

A business plan provides a snapshot of your social media marketing agency as it stands today, and lays out your growth plan for the next five years. It explains your business goals and your strategy for reaching them. It also includes market research to support your plans.

Why You Need a Social Media Marketing Business Plan

If you’re looking to start a social media marketing business or grow your existing company, you need a business plan. A social media marketing business plan will help you raise funding, if needed, and plan out the growth of your business in order to improve your chances of success. Your business plan is a living document that should be updated annually as your social media marketing agency grows and changes.

Funding Sources for Social Media Marketing Agencies

With regards to funding, the main sources of funding for a social media marketing business are personal savings, credit cards, bank loans and angel investors. With regards to bank loans, banks will want to review your business plan and gain confidence that you will be able to repay your loan and interest. To acquire this confidence, the loan officer will not only want to confirm that your financials are reasonable, but they will also want to see a professional plan. Such a plan will give them the confidence that you can successfully and professionally operate a business. Personal savings and bank loans are the most common funding paths for social media marketing agencies.

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How to write a business plan for a social media marketing agency.

If you want to start a business or expand your current one, you need a business plan. Below we detail what should be included in each section of your own social media marketing business plan:

Executive Summary

Your executive summary provides an introduction to your business plan, but it is normally the last section you write because it provides a summary of each key section of your plan.

The goal of your Executive Summary is to quickly engage the reader. Explain to them the type of social media marketing business you are operating and the status. For example, are you a startup, do you have a social media marketing business that you would like to grow, or are you operating social media marketing in multiple markets?

Next, provide an overview of each of the subsequent sections of your plan. For example, give a brief overview of the social media marketing industry. Discuss the type of social media marketing business you are operating. Detail your direct competitors. Give an overview of your target customers. Provide a snapshot of your marketing plan. Identify the key members of your team. And offer an overview of your financial plan.  

Company Analysis

In your company analysis, you will detail the type of social media marketing business you are operating.

For example, you might operate one of the following types of social media marketing businesses, or a full-service agency:

• Paid Ads : this type of marketing business focuses on creating social media ads and optimizing social media ad campaigns. A social media marketing agency may specialize in ads for one platform in particular or across all platforms.
• Content: this type of business focuses on creating content, either for specific platforms or across all platforms.
• Strategy: this type of marketing is where campaigns are created around specific goals that help businesses or individuals tailor where and how to best achieve results that will help them succeed.

In addition to explaining the type of social media marketing business you will operate, the Company Analysis section of your business plan needs to provide background on the business.

Include answers to questions such as:

• When and why did you start the business?
• What milestones have you achieved to date? Milestones could include the number of customers served, number of positive reviews, total campaigns, etc.
• Your legal structure. Are you incorporated as an S-Corp? An LLC? A sole proprietorship? Explain your legal structure here.

Industry Analysis

In your industry analysis, you need to provide an overview of the social media marketing industry.

While this may seem unnecessary, it serves multiple purposes.

First, researching the social media marketing industry educates you. It helps you understand the market in which you are operating.

Secondly, market research can improve your strategy, particularly if your research identifies market trends.

The third reason for market research is to prove to readers that you are an expert in your industry. By conducting the research and presenting it in your plan, you achieve just that.

The following questions should be answered in the industry analysis section of your social media marketing business plan:

• How big is the social media marketing industry (in dollars)?
• Is the market declining or increasing?
• Who are the key competitors in the market?
• Who are the key suppliers in the market?
• What trends are affecting the industry?
• What is the industry’s growth forecast over the next 5 – 10 years?
• What is the relevant market size? That is, how big is the potential market for your social media marketing business? You can extrapolate such a figure by assessing the size of the market in the entire country and then applying that figure to your local population.

Customer Analysis

The customer analysis section of your business plan must detail the customers you serve and/or expect to serve.

The following are examples of customer segments: corporations, small business owners, nonprofits and individuals. Customers may also be segmented by industry, such as healthcare, technology, beauty, restaurants, music, B2B, and more.

As you can imagine, the customer segment(s) you choose will have a great impact on the type of marketing business you operate. Clearly, individuals in the music industry would respond to different marketing promotions than corporations in the healthcare industry, for example.

Try to break out your target customers in terms of their demographic and psychographic profiles. With regards to demographics, include a discussion of the ages, genders, locations and income levels of the customers you seek to serve. Only select social media marketing agencies primarily serve customers living in their same city or town. However, if your niche is to provide social media services to local businesses, such demographic information is easy to find on government websites.

Psychographic profiles explain the wants and needs of your target customers. The more you can understand and define these needs, the better you will do in attracting and retaining your customers.  

With Growthink’s Ultimate Business Plan Template you can finish your plan in just 8 hours or less!

Competitive Analysis

Your competitive analysis should identify the indirect and direct competitors your business faces and then focus on the latter.

Direct competitors are other social media marketing agencies.

Indirect competitors are other options that customers have to purchase from that aren’t direct competitors. This includes digital freelance platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr. You need to mention such competition as well.

With regards to direct competition, you want to describe the other businesses with which you compete. Most likely, your direct competitors will have a similar niche audience.

For each such competitor, provide an overview of their businesses and document their strengths and weaknesses. Unless you once worked at your competitors’ businesses, it will be impossible to know everything about them. But you should be able to find out key things about them such as:

• What types of customers do they serve?
• What types of social media services do they provide?
• What is their pricing (premium, low, etc.)?
• What are they good at?
• What are their weaknesses?

With regards to the last two questions, think about your answers from the customers’ perspective. And don’t be afraid to ask your competitors’ customers what they like most and least about them.

The final part of your competitive analysis section is to document your areas of competitive advantage. For example:

• Will you provide better social media strategy, content and ad services?
• Will you provide services that your competitors don’t offer?
• Will you provide better customer service?
• Will you offer better pricing?

Think about ways you will outperform your competition and document them in this section of your plan.  

Marketing Plan

Traditionally, a marketing plan includes the four P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. For a social media marketing business, your marketing plan should include the following:

Product : In the product section, you should reiterate the type of social media marketing agency that you documented in your Company Analysis. Then, detail the specific products you will be offering. For example, in addition to social media marketing, will you provide web design services, copywriting or any other services?

Price : Document the prices you will offer and how they compare to your competitors. Essentially in the product and price sub-sections of your marketing plan, you are presenting the services you offer and their prices.

Place : Place refers to the location of your agency. Document your location and mention how the location will impact your success. For example, is your business located in a busy professional district (good if targeting local businesses), or is it fully remote (good if targeting clients that aren’t place-specific). Discuss how your location might be the ideal location for your customers.

Promotions : The final part of your marketing plan is the promotions section. Here you will document how you will drive customers to your location(s). The following are some promotional methods you might consider:

• Advertising in local papers and magazines
• Reaching out to local websites
• Social media marketing
• Local radio advertising

Operations Plan

While the earlier sections of your business plan explained your goals, your operations plan describes how you will meet them. Your operations plan should have two distinct sections as follows.

Everyday short-term processes include all of the tasks involved in running your business, including discovery calls, onboarding new clients, attending campaign meetings, managing employees and working on campaigns.

Long-term goals are the milestones you hope to achieve. These could include the dates when you expect to take on your 10th client, or when you hope to reach $X in revenue. It could also be when you expect to expand your social media marketing business into a new market.  

Management Team

To demonstrate your social media marketing business’ ability to succeed, a strong management team is essential. Highlight your key players’ backgrounds, emphasizing those skills and experiences that prove their ability to grow a company.

Ideally, you and/or your team members have direct experience in managing social media marketing businesses. If so, highlight this experience and expertise. But also highlight any experience that you think will help your business succeed.

If your team is lacking, consider assembling an advisory board. An advisory board would include 2 to 8 individuals who would act like mentors to your business. They would help answer questions and provide strategic guidance. If needed, look for advisory board members with experience in managing social media marketing agencies or successfully running small businesses.  

Financial Plan

Your financial plan should include your 5-year financial statement broken out both monthly or quarterly for the first year and then annually. Your financial statements include your income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements.

Income Statement : an income statement is more commonly called a Profit and Loss statement or P&L. It shows your revenues and then subtracts your costs to show whether you turned a profit or not.

In developing your income statement, you need to devise assumptions. For example, will you gain one new client per month or per quarter? And will sales grow by 2% or 10% per year? As you can imagine, your choice of assumptions will greatly impact the financial forecasts for your business. As much as possible, conduct research to try to root your assumptions in reality.

Balance Sheets : Balance sheets show your assets and liabilities. While balance sheets can include much information, try to simplify them to the key items you need to know about. For instance, if you spend $50,000 on building out your social media marketing business, this will not give you immediate profits. Rather it is an asset that will hopefully help you generate profits for years to come. Likewise, if a bank writes you a check for $50,000, you don’t need to pay it back immediately. Rather, that is a liability you will pay back over time.

Cash Flow Statement : Your cash flow statement will help determine how much money you need to start or grow your business, and make sure you never run out of money. What most entrepreneurs and business owners don’t realize is that you can turn a profit but run out of money and go bankrupt.

In developing your Income Statement and Balance Sheets be sure to include several of the key costs needed in starting or growing a social media marketing business:

• Location build-out including design fees, construction, etc. (if there will be a physical location)
• Cost of equipment and supplies (including hardware and software)
• Payroll or salaries paid to staff
• Business insurance
• Taxes and permits
• Legal expenses

Attach your full financial projections in the appendix of your plan along with any supporting documents that make your plan more compelling. For example, you might include your office location lease or outlines of campaigns you are currently working on.   Summary Putting together a business plan for your social media marketing business is a worthwhile endeavor. If you follow the template above, by the time you are done, you will truly be an expert. You will really understand the social media marketing industry, your competition, and your customers. You will have developed a marketing plan and will really understand what it takes to launch and grow a successful social media marketing business.  

Social Media Marketing Business Plan FAQs

What is the easiest way to complete my social media marketing business plan.

Growthink's Ultimate Business Plan Template allows you to quickly and easily complete your Social Media Marketing Business Plan.

Where Can I Download a Social Media Management Business Plan PDF?

You can download our Social Media Management business plan PDF  here. This is a business plan template you can use in PDF format.

What is the Goal of a Business Plan's Executive Summary?

The goal of your Executive Summary is to quickly engage the reader. Explain to them the type of social media marketing business you are operating and the status; for example, are you a startup, do you have a social media marketing business that you would like to grow, or are you operating a chain of social media marketing businesses?

  OR, Let Us Develop Your Plan For You Since 1999, Growthink has developed business plans for thousands of companies who have gone on to achieve tremendous success.

Click here to see how Growthink’s professional business plan consulting services can create your business plan for you.   Other Helpful Business Plan Articles & Templates

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy in 9 Easy Steps [Free Template]

Creating your social media marketing strategy doesn’t need to be painful. Create an effective plan for your business in 9 simple steps.

A social media marketing strategy is a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing.

The more specific your plan is, the more effective it will be. Keep it concise. Don’t make it so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable or impossible to measure.

In this post, we’ll walk you through a nine-step plan to create a winning social media strategy of your own. We’ve even got expert insights from Amanda Wood, Hootsuite’s Senior Manager of Social Marketing.

How to create a social media strategy:

Bonus: Get a free social media strategy template   to quickly and easily plan your own strategy. Also use it to track results and present the plan to your boss, teammates, and clients.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

A social media strategy is a document outlining your social media goals, the tactics you will use to achieve them and the metrics you will track to measure your progress.

Your social media marketing strategy should also list all of your existing and planned social media accounts along with goals specific to each platform you’re active on. These goals should align with your business’s larger digital marketing strategy.

Finally, a good social media plan should define the roles and responsibilities within your team and outline your reporting cadence.

Create. Schedule. Publish. Engage. Measure. Win.

Creating your own social media marketing strategy (video guide)

No time to read the whole article? Let Amanda, Hootsuite’s own Senior Manager of Social Media Marketing, guide you through our free social media marketing strategy template in less than 10 minutes:

How to create a social media marketing strategy in 9 steps

Step 1. choose goals that align to business objectives, set s.m.a.r.t. goals.

The first step to creating a winning social media strategy is to establish clear objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI) .

Each of your social media marketing goals should be SMART : s pecific, m easurable, a ttainable, r elevant and t ime-bound.

Psst: Need help getting started? We’ve got social strategy guides for small businesses , financial services , government , higher education , healthcare , real estate , law firms , and non-profits .

Oh, and if you need examples of smart social media goals , we’ve got you covered there too.

Once you’ve decided on your goals, track them in a social media strategy doc — grab our free template if you don’t have one already.

Track meaningful metrics

Vanity metrics like number of followers and likes are easy to track, but it’s hard to prove their real value. Instead, focus on things like engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.

For inspiration, take a look at these 19 essential social media metrics .

You may want to track different goals for different social media networks, or even different uses for each network.

For example, if you use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, you would measure click-throughs. If Instagram is for brand awareness, you might track the number of Instagram Story views. And if you advertise on Facebook, cost-per-click (CPC) is a common success metric.

Social media goals should align with your overall marketing objectives. This makes it easier to show the value of your work and secure buy-in from your boss.

Start developing a successful social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.

“ It’s easy to get overwhelmed by deciding what to post and which metrics to track, but you need to focus on what you want to get out of social media to begin with,” says Amanda Wood, Hootsuite’s Senior Manager of Social Marketing. “Don’t just start posting and tracking everything: match your goals to your business, and your metrics to your goals.”

Step 2. Learn everything you can about your audience

Get to know your fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs, and you will know how to target and engage them on social media.

When it comes to your ideal customer, you should know things like:

• Average income
• Typical job title or industry

Here’s a simple guide and template for creating audience/buyer personas .

Don’t forget to document this information in your strategy doc!

Social media analytics can also provide a ton of valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, and how they interact with your brand on social media. These insights allow you to refine your strategy and better target your audience.

Jugnoo, an Uber-like service for auto-rickshaws in India, used Facebook Analytics to learn that 90% of their users who referred other customers were between 18- and 34-years-old, and 65% of that group was using Android. They used that information to target their ads, resulting in a 40% lower cost per referral.

Check out our guide to using social media analytics and the tools you need to track them .

Step 3. Get to know your competition

Odds are your competitors are already using social media, and that means you can learn from what they’re doing.

Conduct a competitive analysis

A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.

It will also help you spot opportunities and weaknesses you can document in your social strategy doc.

Maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook, for example, but has put little effort into X (Twitter) or Instagram. You might want to focus on the social media platforms where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.

Use social media listening

Social listening is another way to keep an eye on your competitors.

Do searches of the competition’s company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they’re sharing and what other people are saying about them. If they’re using influencer marketing, how much engagement do those campaigns earn them?

Pro tip : Use Hootsuite Streams to monitor relevant keywords, hashtags and accounts in real-time.

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As you track, you may notice shifts in how your competitors and industry leaders are using social media. You may come across new, exciting trends. You might even spot specific social content or a campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs.

Use this kind of intel to optimize and inform your own social media marketing strategy.

Just don’t go overboard on the spy tactics, Amanda advises. “ Make sure you aren’t ALWAYS comparing yourself to the competition — it can be a distraction. I’d say checking in on a monthly basis is healthy. Otherwise, focus on your own strategy and results.”

Step 4. Do a social media audit

If you’re already using social media, take stock of your efforts so far. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What’s working, and what’s not?
• Who is engaging with you?
• What are your most valuable partnerships?
• Which networks does your target audience use?
• How does your social media presence compare to the competition?

Once you collect that information, you’ll be ready to start thinking about ways to improve.

We’ve created an easy-to-follow social media audit guide and template to walk you through each step of this process.

Your audit should give you a clear picture of what purpose each of your social accounts serves. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping.

To help you decide, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my audience here?
• If so, how are they using this platform?
• Can I use this account to help achieve my goals?

Asking these tough questions will keep your social media strategy focused.

Look for impostor accounts

During the audit, you may discover fake accounts using your business name or the names of your products.

These imposters can be harmful to your brand—never mind that they’re capturing followers that should be yours.

You may want to get your accounts verified too to ensure your fans know they are dealing with the real you.

Here’s how to get verified on:

• X (Twitter)

Step 5. Set up accounts and improve profiles

Decide which networks to use.

As you decide which social networks to use, you will also need to define your strategy for each.

Benefit Cosmetics’ social media manager, Angela Purcaro, told eMarketer : “For our makeup tutorials … we’re all about Snapchat and Instagram Stories. [X], on the other hand, is designated for customer service.”

Hootsuite’s own social team even designates different purposes for formats within networks. On Instagram, for example, they use the feed to post high-quality educational infographics and product announcements and Stories to cover live events or quick social media updates.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hootsuite 🦉 (@hootsuite)

Pro tip : Write out a mission statement for each network. A one-sentence declaration to keep you focused on a specific goal.

Example: “We will use X for customer support to keep email and call volumes down.”

Or: “We will use LinkedIn for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee advocacy.”

One more: “We will use Instagram to highlight new products and repost quality content from influencers.”

If you can’t create a solid mission statement for a particular social media channel, you may want to ask yourself if it’s worth it.

Note : While larger businesses can and do tackle every platform, small businesses may not be able to — and that’s ok! Prioritize social platforms that will have the most impact on your business and make sure your marketing team has the resources to handle content for those networks. If you need help focusing your efforts, check out our 18-minute social media plan .

Set up your profiles

Once you’ve decided which networks to focus on, it’s time to create your profiles. Or improve existing ones so they align with your strategy.

• Make sure you fill out all profile fields
• Include keywords people would use to search for your business
• Use consistent branding (logos, images, etc.) across networks so your profiles are easily recognizable

Pro tip : Use high-quality images that follow the recommended dimensions for each network. Check out our always-up-to-date social media image size cheat sheet for quick reference.

We’ve also got step-by-step guides for each network to walk you through the process:

• Create a Facebook business page
• Create an Instagram business account
• Create a TikTok account
• Create a X (Twitter) business account
• Create a Snapchat account
• Create a LinkedIn Company Page
• Create a Pinterest business account
• Create a YouTube channel

Don’t let this list overwhelm you. Remember, it’s better to use fewer channels well than to stretch yourself thin trying to maintain a presence on every network.

Optimize your profiles (and content) for search

Never heard of social SEO ? It’s time to learn.

44% of Gen Z consumers use social platforms to research their purchase decisions, which means it’s extra critical that your channels are optimized for social search.

That means making sure your profile names are clear and descriptive, you’re including relevant hashtags and keywords in your bio and on every post, and you’re using features like alt text and captions to include your target keywords as naturally as possible.

Step 6. Find inspiration

While it’s important that your brand be unique, you can still draw inspiration from other businesses that are great on social.

“ I consider it my job to stay active on social: to know what’s trending, which campaigns are winning, what’s new with the platforms, who’s going above and beyond,” says Amanda. “This might be the most fun step for you, or the hardest one, but it’s just as crucial as the rest of them.”

Social media success stories

You can usually find these on the business section of the social network’s website. ( Here’s Facebook’s , for example.)

Case studies can offer valuable insights that you can apply to your own social media plan.

Award-winning accounts and campaigns

You could also check out the winners of The Facebook Awards or The Shorty Awards for examples of brands that are at the top of their social media game.

For learning and a laugh, check out Fridge-Worthy, Hootsuite’s bi-weekly awards show highlighting brands doing smart and clever things on social media.

Your favorite brands on social media

Who do you enjoy following on social media? What do they do that compels people to engage and share their content?

National Geographic, for example, is one of the best on Instagram, combining stunning visuals with compelling captions.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by National Geographic (@natgeo)

Then there’s Shopify. The ecommerce brand uses Facebook to sell themselves by showcasing customer stories and case studies.

And Lush Cosmetics is a great example of superior customer service on X. They use their 280 characters to answer questions and solve problems in an extremely charming and on-brand way.

Source: lushcosmetics on X

Notice that each of these accounts has a consistent voice, tone, and style. That’s key to letting people know what to expect from your feed. That is, why should they follow you? What’s in it for them?

Consistency also helps keep your content on-brand even if you have multiple people on your social media team.

For more on this, read our guide on establishing a compelling brand voice on social media .

Ask your followers

Consumers can also offer social media inspiration.

What are your target customers talking about online? What can you learn about their wants and needs?

If you have existing social channels, you could also ask your followers what they want from you. Just make sure that you follow through and deliver what they ask for.

Step 7. Create a social media content calendar

Sharing great content is essential, of course, but it’s equally important to have a plan in place for when you’ll share content to get the maximum impact.

Your social media content calendar also needs to account for the time you spend interacting with the audience (although you need to allow for some spontaneous engagement as well).

Set your posting schedule

Your social media content calendar lists the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each channel. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images, link sharing, and re-shares of user-generated content to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns.

Your calendar also ensures your posts are spaced out appropriately and published at the best times to post .

Pro tip: You can plan your whole content calendar and get recommended best times to post on every network based on your past engagement rate, impressions, or link click data in Hootsuite.

Hootsuite’s Best Time to Publish feature

Determine the right content mix

Make sure your content strategy and calendar reflect the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile, so that everything you post is working to support your business goals.

(We know, it’s tempting to jump on every meme, but there should always be a strategy behind your social media marketing efforts!)

You might decide that:

• 50% of content will drive traffic back to your website
• 25% of content will be curated from other sources
• 20% of content will support lead-generation goals (newsletter sign-ups, ebook downloads, etc.)
• 5% of content will be about your company culture

Placing these different post types in your content calendar will ensure you maintain the right mix.

If you’re starting from scratch and you’re not sure what types of content to post, try the 80-20 rule :

• 80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience
• 20% can directly promote your brand.

You could also try the social media content marketing rule of thirds :

• One-third of your content promotes your business, converts readers, and generates profit.
• One-third of your content shares ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded businesses.
• One-third of your content is personal interactions with your audience

Whatever you decide on, be sure to document it in your strategy doc.

Don’t post too much or too little

If you’re starting a social media marketing strategy from scratch, you may not have figured out how often to post to each network for maximum engagement yet.

Post too frequently and you risk annoying your audience. But, if you post too little, you risk looking like you’re not worth following.

Start with these posting frequency recommendations:

• Instagram (feed): 3-7 times per week
• TikTok: 3-5 times per week
• Facebook: 1-2 times per day
• X (Twitter): 1-5 times per day
• LinkedIn: 1-5 times per day

Pro tip : Once you have your social media content calendar planned out, use a scheduling tool to prepare messages in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day.

We might be biased, but we think Hootsuite is the best social media management tool. You can schedule social media posts to every network and the intuitive calendar view gives you a full picture of all your social activity each week.

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Step 8. Create compelling content

Remember those mission statements you created for each channel in Step 5? Well, it’s time to go a bit deeper, a.k.a. provide some examples of the type of content you’ll post to fulfill your mission on each network.

If you’re not sure what to post, here’s a long list of social media content ideas to get you started. Or (to make it even easier) you can use an AI tool like OwlyWriter to generate on-brand content in a flash.

The idea here is to:

• Keep your content aligned with the purpose of each network;
• Show other stakeholders (if applicable) what kind of content they can expect to see on each network.

This last point especially will help you avoid any tension when your colleagues want to know why you haven’t posted their case study/whitepaper/blog post to TikTok yet. It’s not in the strategy, Linda!

Ideally, you will generate content types that are both suited to the network and the purpose you’ve set out for that network.

For example, you wouldn’t want to waste time posting brand awareness tweets if you’ve designated X/Twitter for primarily customer support. And you wouldn’t want to post super polished corporate video ads to TikTok, as users expect to see short, unpolished videos on that platform.

It might take some testing over time to figure out which type of content works best on which type of network, so prepare to update this section frequently.

We won’t lie: content creation isn’t as easy as everyone not on the social team seems to think. But if you’re struggling, Amanda suggests going back to basics.

The first question to ask is: is there cohesion between your content types? Is your content providing value? Do you have a good mix of entertaining, or educational content? What does it offer that makes a person stop and spend time? Creating a few different content pillars or categories that encompass different aspects of storytelling for your brand, and what you can offer your audience is a good start.

This brings us to Step 9.

Step 9. Track performance and make adjustments

Your social media marketing strategy is a hugely important document for your business, and you can’t assume you’ll get it exactly right on the first try.

As you start to implement your plan and track your results, you may find that some strategies don’t work as well as you’d anticipated, while others are working even better than expected.

That’s why it’s important to document your progress along the way.

Look at performance metrics

In addition to the analytics within each social network (see Step 2), you can use UTM parameters to track social visitors as they move through your website, so you can see exactly which social posts drive the most traffic to your website.

Benchmark your results

You’ve got your numbers, but how do they stack up to the competition in your industry? Industry benchmarks are a great way to evaluate your performance against other businesses in your category.

If you’ve got Hootsuite Analytics , you can use our built-in social media benchmarking tool to compare the performance of your social accounts against the average of brands in your industry with just a couple of clicks.

You can set up custom timeframes, switch between networks — Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and TikTok — and look up benchmarks for metrics like followers, audience growth rate, engagement rate, clicks, shares, and much more.

You’ll also find resources to improve your performance  right in the summary section:

Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again

Once this data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy regularly. You can also use this information to test different posts, social marketing campaigns, and strategies against one another. Constant testing allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can refine your social media marketing strategy in real time.

You’ll want to check the performance of all your channels at least once a week and get to know the basics of social media reporting so you can track your growth over time.

Pro tip: If you use Hootsuite, you can review the performance of all your posts on every network in one place. Once you get the hang of checking your analytics, you may even want to customize different reports to show specific metrics over a variety of different time periods.

Surveys can also be a great way to find out how well your social media strategy is working. Ask your followers, email list, and website visitors whether you’re meeting their needs and expectations, and what they’d like to see more of. Then make sure to deliver on what they tell you.

Finalizing your social media strategy

Spoiler alert: nothing is final.

Social media moves fast. New networks emerge, others go through demographic shifts.

Your business will go through periods of change as well.

All of this means that your social media marketing strategy should be a living document that you review and adjust as needed. Refer to it often to stay on track, but don’t be afraid to make changes so that it better reflects new goals, tools, or plans.

When you update your social strategy, make sure to watch our 5-step video on how to updating your social media strategy for 2024:

Social media strategy template

Ready to start documenting? Grab your free social media strategy template below!

What’s next? When you’re ready to put your plan into action, we’re here to help…

Save time managing your social media marketing strategy with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can easily:

• Plan, create, and schedule posts to every network
• Track relevant keywords, topics, and accounts
• Stay on top of engagement with a universal inbox
• Get easy-to-understand performance reports and improve your strategy as needed

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Christina Newberry is an award-winning writer and editor whose greatest passions include food, travel, urban gardening, and the Oxford comma—not necessarily in that order.

Amanda Wood is a senior social marketing professional who combines analytical and creative thinking to build brands.

As head of social at Hootsuite, Amanda oversees the global social strategy encompassing organic and paid social on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn, a social engagement and listening strategy, and an employee advocacy program.

As the leader of a high-performing social team, she has extensive experience collaborating with creatives to bring campaigns to life on social and drive business results.

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Free Social Media Marketing Plan Templates

Choose from the best social media plan templates to streamline your marketing efforts. Below you’ll find free templates for strategic planning, scheduling, and tracking in Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, Google Docs, and Google Sheets.

Templates on this page include a social media marketing strategy plan, a social media content calendar, and a social media audit. You’ll also find details for creating an effective social media strategy and mastering calendar planning.

Social Media Strategy Plan Template

Create a strategic social media marketing action plan. The template features a simple layout to help you organize each stage of planning and implementation; separate sections for research, competitive analysis, objectives, and actions; and space for revising social media goals based on performance. Edit the template to meet the specific marketing needs of your business or organization. Use the social media channel plan template to help execute your strategy. 

Download Social Media Strategy Plan Template - Excel

Social Media Marketing Plan Template

This social media campaign marketing plan template includes sections for defining goals, identifying a call to action, scheduling important dates, and planning marketing tools and content. The form is easy to read and edit, thanks to alternate row colors. Create a clear campaign plan that includes social media platforms, related online marketing tools, and metrics for tracking progress. 

Download Social Media Marketing Plan Template - Excel

Social Media Planning Calendar Template

Adjust the dates on this template to create a custom daily and weekly social media calendar. Perfect for small businesses and startups, the template has an hourly schedule and sections for multiple social media networks. Plan your posts and keep track of images used, linked content, and customer engagement. 

Download Social Media Planning Calendar Template - Excel

Social Media Editorial Plan Template

Designed as an annual social media plan template, this editorial calendar includes multiple spreadsheets. Use the first sheet for an overview of important events occuring during the year, with months and quarters highlighted. Each month also has its own sheet for detailed planning and tracking. For each month, schedule social media projects while tracking target audience, editorial goals, and measurements of success.

Download Social Media Editorial Plan Template - Excel

Social Media Content Plan Template

Create a monthly and yearly content plan for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media outlets. Use this template to build a comprehensive marketing plan for each month while also viewing a yearly outlook on one page. Keep track of the status of each post, whether it’s in progress or on hold or it needs updating.

Download Social Media Content Plan Template - Excel

Social Media Posting Plan Template with Dashboard

This social media plan template includes a sheet with sample data so you can see how the dashboard displays posts per week for each social platform. The schedule covers a four-week time period, so you can create a 30-day social media plan template for all content channels. Create a log of social media posts while tracking content type, topics covered, and posting stats.

Download Social Media Posting Plan with Dashboard Template - Excel

PowerPoint Social Media Marketing Plan Template

Enhance a marketing presentation with this social media PowerPoint template. Include key elements in your marketing plan for each section: target audience, objectives, strategy, and content. Use the bullet points to describe your customers, what makes your company unique, how your business and marketing goals align, and how you plan to meet those goals with social media tools.

Download Social Media Marketing Plan Template - PowerPoint

Social Media Multichannel Plan Template

Organized by month and channel, this template helps you track activities on all your social media outlets. Add or delete sections to create a yearly, six-, or three-month social media plan template. To create a detailed schedule, add rows under each social platform and list upcoming posts and publishing dates. Keep track of assigned owners, calls to action, and the sales funnel stage that matches your marketing goals.

Download Social Media Multichannel Plan Template - Excel

Download Social Media Multichannel Plan Template - Word

Social Media Schedule Template

This basic social media template provides a spreadsheet for scheduling posts. Use it as a calendar, log, and planning tool for social marketing. Columns include publishing date, post status, topics, content description, hashtags, and character count. You’ll also find a checklist with various social media outlets that offers a quick view of where you are posting and when.

Download Social Media Schedule Template - Excel

Social Media Audit Template

Conduct a social media audit to inform your marketing plans. Analyze your activity, customer engagement, audience reach, number of followers, and recent changes. Use this data to refine your social media strategy, as well as create and share more effective content. Customize the template to include all the marketing channels and KPIs you want to measure.

Download Social Media Audit Template - Excel

Maximize Your Social Media Strategy Plan with Smartsheet

The best marketing teams know the importance of effective campaign management, consistent creative operations, and powerful event logistics -- and Smartsheet helps you deliver on all three so you can be more effective and achieve more. 

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time. Try Smartsheet for free, today.

Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy Plan

For more templates, as well as information on creating a social media strategy and planning a social media content calendar, visit our post “ Free Social Media Templates for Excel .” We also offer a guide to social media calendars , including benefits, best practices, planning tips, and additional calendar tools. For a comprehensive marketing overview, see the “ Definitive Guide to Strategic Marketing Planning .”

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Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template & Guidebook

Social media has become an integral part of how businesses market themselves in the 21st century. From creating a strong online presence to generating leads and sales, social media can create amazing opportunities for businesses of all sizes—but only when it’s done right. That’s why it’s essential for businesses to have a comprehensive social media marketing plan in place. The #1 Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template & Guidebook provides a comprehensive, easy-to-follow template and guidebook combination to create a powerful social media marketing plan that helps businesses succeed.

Get worry-free services and support to launch your business starting at $0 plus state fees.

• How to Start a Profitable Social Media Marketing Business [11 Steps]
• 10+ Best & Profitable Social Media Marketing Business Ideas [2023]

How to Write a Social Media Marketing Business Plan in 7 Steps:

1. describe the purpose of your social media marketing business..

The first step to writing your business plan is to describe the purpose of your social media marketing business. This includes describing why you are starting this type of business, and what problems it will solve for customers. This is a quick way to get your mind thinking about the customers’ problems. It also helps you identify what makes your business different from others in its industry.

It also helps to include a vision statement so that readers can understand what type of company you want to build.

Here is an example of a purpose mission statement for a social media marketing business:

Our purpose at Social Media Marketing is to serve our clients and partners in the development, implementation and optimization of social media campaigns that are effective, cost-efficient and respectful of the customers we are targeting. We strive to open up new channels of communication, build brand awareness, engage customers, and grow our client's businesses.

2. Products & Services Offered by Your Social Media Marketing Business.

The next step is to outline your products and services for your social media marketing business. 

When you think about the products and services that you offer, it's helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my business?
• What are the products and/or services that I offer?
• Why am I offering these particular products and/or services?
• How do I differentiate myself from competitors with similar offerings?
• How will I market my products and services?

You may want to do a comparison of your business plan against those of other competitors in the area, or even with online reviews. This way, you can find out what people like about them and what they don’t like, so that you can either improve upon their offerings or avoid doing so altogether.

3. Build a Creative Marketing Stratgey.

If you don't have a marketing plan for your social media marketing business, it's time to write one. Your marketing plan should be part of your business plan and be a roadmap to your goals. 

A good marketing plan for your social media marketing business includes the following elements:

Target market

• Who is your target market?
• What do these customers have in common?
• How many of them are there?
• How can you best reach them with your message or product?

Customer base 

• Who are your current customers? 
• Where did they come from (i.e., referrals)?
• How can their experience with your social media marketing business help make them repeat customers, consumers, visitors, subscribers, or advocates for other people in their network or industry who might also benefit from using this service, product, or brand?

Product or service description

• How does it work, what features does it have, and what are its benefits?
• Can anyone use this product or service regardless of age or gender?
• Can anyone visually see themselves using this product or service?
• How will they feel when they do so? If so, how long will the feeling last after purchasing (or trying) the product/service for the first time?

Competitive analysis

• Which companies are competing with yours today (and why)? 
• Which ones may enter into competition with yours tomorrow if they find out about it now through word-of-mouth advertising; social media networks; friends' recommendations; etc.)
• What specific advantages does each competitor offer over yours currently?

Marketing channels

• Which marketing channel do you intend to leverage to attract new customers?
• What is your estimated marketing budget needed?
• What is the projected cost to acquire a new customer?
• How many of your customers do you instead will return?

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4. Write Your Operational Plan.

Next, you'll need to build your operational plan. This section describes the type of business you'll be running, and includes the steps involved in your operations. 

In it, you should list:

• The equipment and facilities needed
• Who will be involved in the business (employees, contractors)
• Financial requirements for each step
• Milestones & KPIs
• Location of your business
• Zoning & permits required for the business

What equipment, supplies, or permits are needed to run a social media marketing business?

• Internet connection
• Social media accounts or access to create accounts
• Knowledge of social media trends, platforms, and content creation
• Advertising budget, if applicable
• Graphic design tools (e.g. Adobe Photoshop)
• Content management system (e.g. WordPress)
• Analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics)
• Permit for soliciting services in certain states or countries

5. Management & Organization of Your Social Media Marketing Business.

The second part of your social media marketing business plan is to develop a management and organization section.

This section will cover all of the following:

• How many employees you need in order to run your social media marketing business. This should include the roles they will play (for example, one person may be responsible for managing administrative duties while another might be in charge of customer service).
• The structure of your management team. The higher-ups like yourself should be able to delegate tasks through lower-level managers who are directly responsible for their given department (inventory and sales, etc.).
• How you’re going to make sure that everyone on board is doing their job well. You’ll want check-ins with employees regularly so they have time to ask questions or voice concerns if needed; this also gives you time to offer support where necessary while staying informed on how things are going within individual departments too!

6. Social Media Marketing Business Startup Expenses & Captial Needed.

This section should be broken down by month and year. If you are still in the planning stage of your business, it may be helpful to estimate how much money will be needed each month until you reach profitability.

Typically, expenses for your business can be broken into a few basic categories:

Startup Costs

Startup costs are typically the first expenses you will incur when beginning an enterprise. These include legal fees, accounting expenses, and other costs associated with getting your business off the ground. The amount of money needed to start a social media marketing business varies based on many different variables, but below are a few different types of startup costs for a social media marketing business.

Running & Operating Costs

Running costs refer to ongoing expenses related directly with operating your business over time like electricity bills or salaries paid out each month. These types of expenses will vary greatly depending on multiple variables such as location, team size, utility costs, etc.

Marketing & Sales Expenses

You should include any costs associated with marketing and sales, such as advertising and promotions, website design or maintenance. Also, consider any additional expenses that may be incurred if you decide to launch a new product or service line. For example, if your social media marketing business has an existing website that needs an upgrade in order to sell more products or services, then this should be listed here.

7. Financial Plan & Projections

A financial plan is an important part of any business plan, as it outlines how the business will generate revenue and profit, and how it will use that profit to grow and sustain itself. To devise a financial plan for your social media marketing business, you will need to consider a number of factors, including your start-up costs, operating costs, projected revenue, and expenses. 

Here are some steps you can follow to devise a financial plan for your social media marketing business plan:

• Determine your start-up costs: This will include the cost of purchasing or leasing the space where you will operate your business, as well as the cost of buying or leasing any equipment or supplies that you need to start the business.
• Estimate your operating costs: Operating costs will include utilities, such as electricity, gas, and water, as well as labor costs for employees, if any, and the cost of purchasing any materials or supplies that you will need to run your business.
• Project your revenue: To project your revenue, you will need to consider the number of customers you expect to have and the average amount they will spend on each visit. You can use this information to estimate how much money you will make from selling your products or services.
• Estimate your expenses: In addition to your operating costs, you will need to consider other expenses, such as insurance, marketing, and maintenance. You will also need to set aside money for taxes and other fees.
• Create a budget: Once you have estimated your start-up costs, operating costs, revenue, and expenses, you can use this information to create a budget for your business. This will help you to see how much money you will need to start the business, and how much profit you can expect to make.
• Develop a plan for using your profit: Finally, you will need to decide how you will use your profit to grow and sustain your business. This might include investing in new equipment, expanding the business, or saving for a rainy day.

Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Marketing Business Plans:

Why do you need a business plan for a social media marketing business.

A business plan for a social media marketing business is essential in order to organize thoughts and ideas, set goals, create strategies, and define roles and tasks. It also serves as a starting point for forecasting the financial needs of the business, and allows you to map out the steps necessary to achieve success. By clearly outlining objectives, the business plan can provide a roadmap on how to best use resources to grow and sustain your business.

Who should you ask for help with your social media marketing business plan?

You should ask a professional business consultant or social media marketing expert for help with your social media marketing business plan. They will have the knowledge and expertise necessary to help you create a comprehensive and effective plan.

Can you write a social media marketing business plan yourself?

Yes, it is possible to write a social media marketing business plan yourself. A business plan is an essential part of any successful business, and a social media marketing business plan should include details on your target market, the services you will offer, the goals you want to achieve, how you will measure success and how you will finance your venture.

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I'm Nick, co-founder of newfoundr.com, dedicated to helping aspiring entrepreneurs succeed. As a small business owner with over five years of experience, I have garnered valuable knowledge and insights across a diverse range of industries. My passion for entrepreneurship drives me to share my expertise with aspiring entrepreneurs, empowering them to turn their business dreams into reality.

Through meticulous research and firsthand experience, I uncover the essential steps, software, tools, and costs associated with launching and maintaining a successful business. By demystifying the complexities of entrepreneurship, I provide the guidance and support needed for others to embark on their journey with confidence.

From assessing market viability and formulating business plans to selecting the right technology and navigating the financial landscape, I am dedicated to helping fellow entrepreneurs overcome challenges and unlock their full potential. As a steadfast advocate for small business success, my mission is to pave the way for a new generation of innovative and driven entrepreneurs who are ready to make their mark on the world.

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Creating a Winning Business Plan for Your Social Media Marketing Agency

Are you looking to start a digital marketing agency? A successful business plan is essential for any business to succeed. In this blog post, we will discuss how to write a business plan for a digital marketing agency. We will cover topics such as understanding your target audience, creating a marketing strategy, and setting financial goals. With this information, you can create a winning business plan for your social media marketing agency.

In this blog post, you will learn how to:

• Set objectives and goals to guide your business plan
• Identify and create a plan for your target market
• Develop a business model that works for your company
• Estimate your operating costs and create a budget
• Craft a marketing plan to reach your goals
• Create a financial plan to plan for success
• Assess potential risks and create a plan to address them
• Put all the pieces of your plan together
• Re-evaluate and update your plan as needed
• Leverage your plan to secure funding for your business

Establishing Objectives and Goals

When it comes to writing a business plan for digital marketing, the first step is to establish objectives and goals. This should include an understanding of where you want your business to be in the short and long-term. Consider what milestones you would like to reach and what type of growth you would like to see. This will help you create a roadmap for the future of your business.

Defining Your Target Market

The next step in writing a business plan for digital marketing is to define your target market. Identify who your customers are and what their needs are. Do some research to understand the demographics, behaviors, and motivations of your target market to make sure that you're creating content that will resonate with them.

Developing Your Business Model

Once you have identified your target market, you need to develop a business model that will enable you to reach them. Consider how you'll package and sell your services and products, how you'll market them, and what channels you'll use to reach your customers.

Estimating Your Operating Costs

Before you start your digital marketing business, you need to determine how much it will cost to operate. Estimate your expenses, such as salaries, rent, and marketing costs, and make sure you have enough capital to cover them.

Crafting Your Marketing Plan

Now that you know your operating costs, you can start crafting your marketing plan. This should include a strategy for how you'll reach your target market, what message you'll use, and which channels you'll use.

Creating Your Financial Plan

Once you've developed your marketing plan, you need to create a financial plan that includes a budget and projections for your income and expenses. This will help you determine how much funding you need and how much profit you can expect to make.

Assessing Potential Risks

No business plan is complete without an assessment of potential risks. Consider what could go wrong and how you would mitigate any potential losses.

Putting It All Together

Now that you have all the pieces, it's time to put it all together. This includes reviewing your objectives and goals, target market, business model, operating costs, marketing plan, financial plan, and potential risks. Make sure that everything is in alignment with your vision for the business.

Re-Evaluating and Updating Your Plan

Your business plan should be a living document that you revisit and update regularly. Monitor your progress and make adjustments as needed to keep your business on track.

Leveraging Your Plan to Secure Funding

Finally, you can use your business plan to secure funding from investors or lenders. Make sure it's thorough and well-written to demonstrate your commitment to success.

Writing a business plan for digital marketing can seem daunting, but with the right approach, it's an achievable task. Use this guide to help you create a comprehensive plan that will set your business up for success. Below we answer common questions entrepreneurs have about these topics.

1. Establishing Objectives and Goals

What are the desired outcomes you hope to achieve through this project.

This is a very broad question and an entrepreneur can easily get lost in their response. The key to answering this question is to understand exactly what the interviewer is looking for and how to best communicate your desired outcomes. The interviewer is looking for an understanding of your goals and how you plan to achieve them. You need to be prepared to answer this question and be able to communicate your plans clearly.

You also need to be prepared to explain why you chose these goals and how you plan to achieve them. Be prepared to discuss your plans in detail, including milestones and timelines. This will help the interviewer understand your goals and how you plan to achieve them. Be sure to also be prepared to discuss why you chose these goals and how they align with the company's overall mission. This will help the interviewer understand your goals and how they will benefit the company.

What metrics will you use to measure success?

While the question per se is about metrics, the real intent is to find out if you're a visionary entrepreneur or a numbers-driven manager. Founders who answer with a strong vision and a plan to achieve the vision are always preferred by investors and other stakeholders.

However, it's also important to understand what numbers to track. If your core product is an online service, for example, you need to track users and revenue to measure success. If you're an offline service, you may want to track the number of clients you acquire.

2. Defining Your Target Market

What geographic area or locations do you want to target with your product or service.

The answer to the question of which geographic area you want to target should be based on your target audience. You want to know who your ideal customer is and then figure out where they live and work. If you're selling something online and you're not picking a geographic area, you can sell to anyone in the world. But if you're trying to reach a local audience, you need to know where they live and where they like to shop. So it's important to know where your ideal customers are and where they like to hang out.

Who are the primary demographic groups you want to target with your product or service?

Entrepreneurs should avoid generalizations when answering this question, as they may limit their reach. While it may be tempting to answer this question by mentioning your target demographic groups as young professionals or mothers, it's better to be more specific when naming them.

For example, instead of mentioning young professionals as your target demographic, you can mention young professionals who are interested in traveling, or young professionals who are interested in fitness. This way, you can focus on their specific needs, instead of generalizing them.

3. Developing Your Business Model

What type of business model will you use to ensure long-term sustainability.

As a small business owner, one of the best ways you can ensure long-term sustainability is by embracing the art of delegation. You may be the one with the vision, but you can't do it all alone. Learning to effectively communicate and collaborate with your team will not only make the day-to-day more manageable, but it will also keep your business poised for growth and success.

How will you ensure that your business model meets the needs of your target audience?

Entrepreneurs should ensure that their business model meets the needs of their target audience by conducting market research and talking to their target audience. This will help them understand their target audience's needs and how their business model will meet those needs. Talking to their target audience will also help them develop a relationship with their customers and create a sense of loyalty and trust between them and the business.

4. Estimating Your Operating Costs

What will be your estimated monthly rent or mortgage payment.

It's important to note that the question is asking about your estimated monthly rent or mortgage payment, not someone else's. You need to think about your own ability to pay rent or a mortgage as it relates to your personal income. It's always a good idea to have a buffer of funds available to you so that you don't wind up short on rent or a mortgage, especially if you're starting a business with a lower income.

What are your estimated monthly utilities costs?

When you're looking for a job, you probably want to give the impression that your business is growing. A company with a lot of expenses, like utilities, can make that case. If your business is a small operation, though, you might want to tone down those numbers to avoid scaring off potential employers. It's not unusual for an entrepreneur to have a large utility bill, if they have an office with a lot of technology. Or, they're running projects that require a lot of resources. Still, try not to make it sound like it's going to be a regular occurrence.

5. Crafting Your Marketing Plan

What strategies will you use to reach your target market.

An entrepreneur needs to understand who their target market is, so they can reach and sell to them in a way that they will appreciate. For instance, while it's great to have a large consumer base, it's not going to help you as much if you don't know how to sell to your audience and get them to buy from you.

How will you measure the success of your marketing plan?

The most important thing to remember is to think holistically. How will you measure the success of your marketing plan as a whole? It's not just about the clickthrough rates for your social media posts or the number of people who sign up for your email list. You need to think about brand awareness, customer retention, and customer satisfaction, too.

6. Creating Your Financial Plan

What are your financial goals in the short-term and long-term.

Short-term, you'll want to express your business goals (i.e. sales goals, marketing goals, or any other objectives you have). Then, you'll want to express your personal goals, which are typically tied to your business goals. For instance, if you have a goal to have $100,000 in sales by the end of 2020, that could be tied to your goal to be able to quit your day job, or to buy a new car, or to pay off debt.

What resources do you need to reach your financial goals?

Entrepreneurs should think about their own financial goals and what resources they need to reach them. These goals can vary from entrepreneurs wanting to have a financially secure future for their family, to wanting to have the freedom to travel and live a life of luxury. Once the goals have been established, the next step is to determine the resources needed to reach those goals. These resources may include things like money, time, education, or even connections. By thinking about these things, entrepreneurs can better determine what resources they need to reach their financial goals.

7. Assessing Potential Risks

What potential risks should be taken into account when considering this project.

Innovation is a powerful force, but it is not without risk. The more innovative a product or service is, the more potential there is for it to fail. This is true for everything from electric cars to artificial intelligence. It is crucial to remember that innovation is not always successful and that failure is an inherent part of the process. While it is important to be optimistic about the future and to embrace progress, it is also critical to be realistic about the risks involved.

How can these risks be addressed or mitigated?

The key to answering the question, "how can these risks be addressed or mitigated" is to focus on limiting factors. Identify what will prevent you from achieving your business goals and address those limiting factors. For example, if you are launching a new product, you may be concerned about the demand for your product. You can mitigate this risk by creating a marketing plan and conducting market research to determine if there is a demand for your product. By addressing the limiting factor of insufficient demand, you can mitigate the risk of failure.

8. Putting It All Together

How can you apply the concepts and techniques you have learned to your own projects or tasks.

Being a business owner, I'm always looking for opportunities to grow my business and maximize my profits. One of the concepts and techniques I learned in my MBA program was how to evaluate the ROI of a project. I use this knowledge frequently as I weigh the potential benefits of new business ventures. I can apply this concept when answering the question, "How can you apply the concepts and techniques you have learned to your own projects or tasks?" by describing how I use the ROI formula to measure the potential success of a particular project.

What strategies can you use to ensure that you are able to effectively integrate the new knowledge into your work?

As a serial tech entrepreneur, I've learned how to adapt to new knowledge very quickly. Here's how I do it: I'm always working to increase my knowledge through reading articles and books related to my field. I use Evernote to keep all my information organized and easy to access. I also set goals for what I want to learn, and I make sure to stay on track to meet those goals.

9. Re-Evaluating and Updating Your Plan

What changes have occurred in the past year that require an update to your plan.

With hiring a new team member, updating your website with new products or services, or adding new products to your inventory, these are all actions that you can use to update your business plan. They show growth and progress for your company and can help you gain more customers or clients.

Are there any new objectives or goals that need to be added to the plan?

Entrepreneurs should approach this question by analyzing the current environment. Things are always changing, and an entrepreneur needs to realize that the path that got them to where they are now may not be the path that will get them to where they want to go in the future. Entrepreneurs should also be in touch with the environment around them. They should know who their competitors are, and they should be aware of what new technologies are emerging that could help or hinder their business.

10. Leveraging Your Plan to Secure Funding

How can you effectively use your business plan to secure funding.

Entrepreneurs should always be ready to show how the business plan will help secure funding. The best way to do this is to explain how your product or service solves a problem in the market.

By highlighting the problem, your company solves, you will be able to demonstrate how your business plan will help secure funding. All businesses start as an idea, and the entrepreneur's job is to show how their idea can be turned into reality, and how it will benefit the market.

Are there specific strategies you can use to increase the likelihood of obtaining funding?

Entrepreneurs should look for funding sources that are aligned with their values. For example, if you are passionate about sustainability, you should look for investors who share these values. This will help ensure that your business remains true to its mission.

Key Takeaways:

• Establish clear objectives and goals for your business.
• Identify and research your target market.
• Develop a business model and estimate operating costs.
• Create a marketing plan to reach your target market.
• Prepare a financial plan and assess potential risks.

These ten steps provide an effective and thorough approach to creating a business plan. By taking the time to research and develop a plan that specifies your objectives, target market, business model, operating costs, marketing plan, financial plan and potential risks, you can set your business up for success. Of course, business plans are not static and should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure that they remain relevant and effective. The effort you put in to creating and maintaining your business plan will be worth it when it helps you secure the funding you need to turn your dreams into reality.

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Create a Marketing Plan For Social Media in 8 Steps

Social media platforms allow companies of any size to build their brand while reaching a diverse audience that spans the globe.

By effectively using social media for your business, you can develop a stronger connection with your target audience and establish your brand image and personality. Best of all is the fact that creating and maintaining a social media presence is absolutely free!

So how do you leverage social media marketing for your brand? If you want to find success on social media, the first step you’ll need to take is to create a marketing plan for social media.

A social media marketing plan is a document that lays out the goals your company hopes to achieve through social media and how you intend to achieve them.

With a social media marketing strategy in place, you can take a more organized and focused approach when building your brand and marketing on social media.

Read on to learn more about the importance of establishing a social media marketing strategy and learn how to create one for your own company. Alternatively, you can skip to any section in the article using the links below.

What is a social media marketing plan?

A social media marketing plan is essentially a blueprint for what your organization aims to achieve through social media and how you plan to meet your goals. A marketing plan for social media may include details such as:

• Social media channels you plan on using
• Social media marketing goals
• Social media marketing tactics
• Key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Customer profiles
• Market research
• Social media content calendar

These are just some of the elements that may be included in a marketing plan for social media. As a general rule, the more detailed your social media marketing plan is, the better.

A highly detailed social media marketing plan will help streamline the decision-making process and ensure that everyone on your team is on the same page. Changes and other adjustments can always be made in the future as you begin to see results and get feedback from your target audience.

Why is establishing a strong marketing plan for social media important?

When entering into any new venture, it’s always better to have a plan. When it comes to social media, a marketing plan can help to highlight the priorities and goals of your organization while clearing up any confusion along the way.

There are several ways in which a marketing plan for social media can help your brand. With a strong social media marketing strategy in place, you can:

Set clear goals

One of the most useful parts of a social media marketing plan is that it enables you to identify and set clear, quantifiable goals. As you brainstorm goals for your social media marketing strategy, consider setting SMART goals .

For example, perhaps you want your Instagram page to reach 10,000 followers by the end of the year or you hope to increase traffic to your website by 10% by the next quarter. The goals you set will guide your decisions when it comes to marketing on social media.

A strong social media marketing strategy can save your team a lot of time. Since you’ve already taken the time to outline the content that you will post on social media channels, you won’t have to hesitate when it comes time to make that next post.

For instance, if you set up a content calendar as part of your social media marketing plan, you can use automation tools to schedule posts on different social media channels.

Maintain a consistent voice

It’s important to stay consistent on social media. All of the social media content you post should reflect the voice and values of your brand. With a social media marketing strategy in place, you can clearly define your brand’s personality, values, and mission, making it much easier to stay consistent across all channels.

Measure results

Every social media marketing strategy should lay out a set of goals as well as the KPIs that will be used to evaluate progress toward meeting those goals.

This makes it possible for organizations to measure results as they set out to grow their brand on social media. And by measuring results, you can identify what’s working and what isn’t and make changes to your strategy as needed.

Coordinate a multi-channel campaign

A social media marketing plan makes it easier to coordinate multi-channel marketing campaigns, whether you’re sharing posts across multiple social media platforms or utilizing other channels.

A defined social media marketing strategy allows you to better identify opportunities for multi-channel marketing campaigns and cross-channel promotion. This, in turn, can allow you to reach a wider target audience and reinforce your brand identity across multiple marketing channels.

Steps to create your social media marketing plan

While creating a social media marketing plan may take some energy and effort upfront, it can help you find success on social media while saving you time and trouble in the long run.

If this is your first time developing your social media marketing efforts, it may seem overwhelming—but the truth is that you can build a social media marketing strategy in just a few steps.

Below, we walk you through each step you must take in order to create a strong marketing plan for social media.

1. Goal setting

Setting goals is one of the most crucial parts of any social media marketing plan. The goals you set will often dictate the tactics you use on social media.

As you set goals for your social media marketing strategy, make sure to set SMART goals so that you can measure results.

2. Determine your target audience

It’s important to understand who you’re speaking to with your social media accounts. Build out customer profiles to determine who your ideal customer is.

Knowing metrics such as a customer’s age, income level, geographic location, and more can help you segment your audience and find a voice that works for your brand.

3. Audit of social media performance

If you already have social media accounts for your business, take some time to look at them more closely and conduct an audit. Take a look at what’s working on your social media pages and what isn’t.

Identify tactics and strategies that have been successful so that you can harness those moving forward. You might also take a look at your competitors’ social media pages and see how you stack up to their presence and performance.

4. Optimize accounts

One of the key things to pay attention to when optimizing your social media accounts is the profile page.

Completely fill out all profile fields in order to optimize your account and make it easier for visitors to determine what your page is about. Make sure that your profile picture, bio, and any other fields are up-to-date and align with your brand’s values.

5. Choose a posting strategy

A posting strategy essentially outlines what types of content you should post and when. The type of content you post will likely vary based on the social media networks you’re using. Some social media channels are ideal for videos, while others are suited to text or images.

You’ll also want to determine how often you should post. In general, you should post fairly regularly so that your account appears active and you give followers opportunities to engage with your content.

6. Create engaging content

This is one of the most important parts of any social media marketing strategy. By creating engaging content that aligns with the social media platform you’re using and addresses the needs and values of your users, you can more effectively build relationships and grow your following.

Whether you produce videos that demonstrate the capabilities of your products or conduct interviews with experts in your industry, create content that resonates with your target audience.

7. Use social media management tools

Social media management software makes it easy to manage and organize multiple social media channels.

With a social media management tool such as Mailchimp, you can save time by scheduling posts and evaluate performance by viewing key analytics and insights. You can also use Mailchimp’s content studio to store and manage all of your digital assets.

8. Analyze performance and optimize

Once your social media marketing plan has been created, it’s essential to analyze performance as you carry it out. By regularly looking at performance data and reports , you can identify what’s working and what isn’t.

Don’t hesitate to make changes and tweak your social media strategy as time goes on—after all, your social media marketing plan should act as an outline, not as a definitive set of laws!

Set your goals and stick to them

Social media may seem like an enigma to many brands, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Creating a social media marketing plan can help guide you as you establish a social media presence for your company and grow your brand on social media.

By coming up with goals, identifying relevant metrics to track, and creating engaging content, you can drive engagement on social media and expand the reach of your brand.

Of course, combining social media strategies with the right tools can make it easier to build a following and connect with your target audience. Mailchimp provides social media marketing tools that allow you to schedule posts, create content, run social media ads, and view analytics.

Try Mailchimp today to make the most of your social media marketing efforts and achieve your social media marketing goals.

Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template [Updated 2024]

Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template

If you want to start a Social Media Marketing business or expand your current Social Media Marketing business, you need a business plan.

The following Social Media business plan template gives you the key elements to include in a winning Social Media Marketing Agency business plan (also known as an SMMA business plan).

You can download our business plan template (including a full, customizable financial model) to your computer here.

Below are links to each of the key sections of a successful social media marketing business plan. Once you create your plan, download it to PDF to show banks and investors.

Social Media Marketing Business Plan Home I. Executive Summary II. Company Overview III. Industry Analysis IV. Customer Analysis V. Competitive Analysis VI. Marketing Plan VII. Operations Plan VIII. Management Team IX. Financial Plan

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How to Create a Great Social Media Strategy in 2024 (+New Data)

Create a comprehensive plan for leveraging social media platforms to achieve your marketing and growth goals with this free workbook.

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY WORKBOOK

Updated: 03/13/24

Published: 03/11/24

Creating social media strategies can be overwhelming, especially when you're just launching your brand or just building your online presence for the first time. So many channels, features, tools, and products available – but so little time to fit them all into your marketing strategy.

If you don’t have a full-time team of social media experts at your disposal, it’s even harder. But the fact is that your online success depends on having a sensible and straightforward strategy that fits your resources and goals.

I spoke with three top-tier social media experts, and dug into recent HubSpot research (including our 2024 State of Social Media Report), to show you how to develop a social media strategy that drives traffic and ROI to your brand.

What is a social media strategy?

Why you need a social media strategy, how to create a social media strategy.

HubSpot uses the information you provide to us to contact you about our relevant content, products, and services. HubSpot will share the information you provide to us with the following partners, who will use your information for similar purposes: Mention. You can unsubscribe from communications from HubSpot at any time. For more information, check out HubSpot's Privacy Policy . To unsubscribe from Mention's communications, see Mention's Privacy Policy .

The State of Social Media in 2024

Explore the top trends in social media for brands to know and optimize your social strategy.

• AI Content Creation
• Community Building
• Social Media Shopping
• Social Vs. Search Engine

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

A social media strategy is an outline of the content that your business will post, the responsibilities of your social media team, and the social media channels you will use to promote your business. A social media strategy includes social media goals that complement your business' overall digital marketing strategy.

Your social media strategy is your master plan for how you create, post, and engage with your social media content.

It encompasses your social content guidelines, posting cadence, social media marketing campaigns, target audience, and engagement strategy that promote your business and brand.

Many companies use social media to connect with customers, provide support, advertise new products and features, and promote special offers.

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According to our most recent The State of Social Media , social media marketers' top challenges include creating engaging content, generating leads, and reaching target audiences. While these are some of the trickiest challenges, they're also the items you'll want to think about most when making an effective plan.

Ultimately, well-thought-out social media strategies equip you to set goals and guardrails, track performance, and tweak your benchmarks over time.

“One of the biggest challenges I think social media marketers face is saturation and competition. There is so much content on social media that sometimes it makes it challenging to stand out from the crowd. Having a robust strategy that understands the target audience includes strong copy and unique content can help to cut through the noise,” says Ellie Nash , social community executive at Kurago .

Without a starting point, you can‘t measure what’s working and how to shift your activity to hit your goals.

A social media strategy also helps you set expectations for broader team involvement and get everyone aligned on what they should and shouldn't do on your social networks.

• Define your target audience.
• Incorporate ecommerce.
• Optimize your social channels for search.
• Focus on a few key channels.
• Make a plan for customer service.
• Develop a recipe card to guide you.
• Measure your results.
• Adjust your tactics.

1. Define your target audience.

If you haven’t already identified and documented your buyer personas , start by defining the key demographics of the audience you’re trying to reach — such as age, gender, occupation, income, hobbies, and interests.

To meet your audience where they are with marketing that won't annoy them, you first need to learn out what they want and why. 

Social Media Motivations

Are social media users visiting these apps to learn, explore, shop, or just have a good time?

In our most recent State of Consumer Trends Survey this summer, we asked over 500 general consumers to pick the three most common reasons they use social media. 

While 65% actually use it socially to keep up with friends, 53% just want to be entertained while 50% want to learn new things. Unfortunately, 28% say they prefer to go on social media to learn about new products or brands. 

The good news? Later in the survey, when we asked consumers how they prefer to research and learn about brands and products, a whopping 41% said they like to do this on social media channels (a slight increase from a similar survey we ran six months prior).

While Gen X and Boomers skew lower on this average, Gen Z and Millennial generations are using social for brand research more often – which is not surprising due to their hyper-connectedness to the web.

As you might be able to tell from our data above, your target audience plays a role in how successful the right strategy will be. And, better catering to them helps you create focused advertising that addresses your ideal consumer’s specific needs.

For instance, the below-sponsored post by Monday.com , a project management platform, highlights the platform’s flexibility and workflow customization feature.

The post targets business owners and project managers who may feel limited by other project management software.

Image Source

Consider your ideal consumer’s challenges and what problems they're solving daily. Focus on no more than four types of people representing most of your buyers. Don’t get hung up on the exceptions or outliers, or you’ll never get started.

Once you start creating content for your audience, focus on engaging your audience at every level.

Pay close attention to any questions or comments your audience posts, and be quick to address them, as that engagement could make or break a conversion or purchase.

Consumers like feeling like they’re part of a community when they’re on your social media pages. More than 1 in 5 social media users joined or participated in an online community in the last year.

Speaking of communities, creating social media groups is a smart move to attract, keep, and engage the audience, with 90% of marketers agreeing.

Here's why:

• Groups help people get involved.
• Followers can learn from each other.
• Your brand becomes a connector — something like a helpful friend.
• Communities feel more friendlier to chat compared to pages. 

In 2020, HubSpot made a small Facebook Group called Marketer to Marketer with 4.9k followers. It's not as big as our Facebook page, but conversions prove its worth it.

Pro tip: To reach the right audience, use social listening tools . These tools check social media for keywords, assess if the talk is positive or negative, and give you reports. This helps in creating a buyer persona for better targeting.

2. Incorporate ecommerce.

As more and more people use social media to discover new products, they’re also finding convenience in shopping for those products directly in the social app they found them in.

While one-fourth of social media marketers are already seeing more effectiveness in social shopping tools than they are with ecommerce site strategies, 80% of social media marketers believe consumers will eventually buy products directly within social apps more often than on brand websites or through third-party resellers. 

What's more, 25% of users between the ages of 18 and 44 had already bought a product on social media by summer of 2023. We wouldn't be shocked if this number increased in 2024.

Lastly, if we look at how this trend is fairing across the globe, several other countries have already made social media shopping a norm.

For example, check out this comparison of data from the UK, China, and the US:

• In the UK, social shopping saw a rise from 2021 to 2023 , with 4.1% of the population engaging in this trend. Anticipated data suggests a further increase in 2024 and a growth of approximately 2% in 2025.
• In 2022, around 84% of Chinese consumers have shopped on social media platforms. Despite some COVID-19 challenges, it reached 850 million users in 2021 , making the market worth more than 2.5 trillion.
• In 2023, the US made $68.91 million from social commerce , which is 5.9% of all online sales. This is a sharp increase from $39.51 million in 2021.

Translation? If you sell products, social media should be a key part of your ecommerce strategy in 2024. It doesn't matter where you are. Social selling is a big deal — so it’s time to take it seriously.

Most platforms offer built-in e-commerce features like shoppable posts, and 47% of social media marketers are already taking advantage of selling products directly within social media apps.

The most popular social selling tools for marketers are:

• Instagram Shops and Instagram Live Shopping — high ROI.
• Facebook Shops — average ROI.

(Psst: Need help building a Facebook page for your business? We have you covered.)

If you need inspiration for incorporating e-commerce into your social strategy, take a cue from Sephora .

Whenever the beauty brand shares an image of a product, it uses a product tag that links to its shoppable page above.

This makes it easy for its followers to instantly buy something they see on the page without ever having to leave the app.

One critical element of successfully selling on social media is establishing brand trust so users feel comfortable purchasing your products directly on the app.

While Sephora has built an established brand reputation over time, you can build trust in other ways, even if you’re building your social media strategy from scratch.

Focus on sharing customer reviews and testimonials, user-generated content (UGC), and product data to build social proof.

Pro tip: Go with image, video, and carousel ads for brand awareness to emphasize store visits, ad impressions, and engagement. For increased sales, select product, collection, or shopping ads to drive direct purchases and product page visits.

3. Optimize your social channels for search.

Social search is on the rise.

As more people turn to social with their queries instead of search engines, 89% of social media marketers agree that social search is important to their overall social media strategies in 2023.

Nearly 24% of consumers aged 18-54 use social media first to search for brands.

Pro tip: You don’t need to film an hour-long video. Even short videos, aka YouTube Shorts, can help you rank higher in SERP. You can use UGC videos and testimonials for that purpose.

4. Focus on a few key social channels.

Most small businesses or social teams don’t have the bandwidth to establish and sustain a quality social media presence on every single channel.

It's also overwhelming to learn the rules of engagement on multiple networks simultaneously.

Focus on the channels that will bring in the highest ROI. For most brands, this will be Instagram.

Instagram has proven to be the best source of ROI, engagement, and quality leads. Additionally, 23% of marketers believe Instagram offers brands the most potential to grow their audiences in 2023.

Adding an Instagram feed to your website is also a smart move to keep your site looking fresh and even to nudge people towards buying, as social media content can increase conversions by up to 29%.

With a tool like Flockler, even if you’re not a tech expert, you can make your site more lively and exciting with your latest Instagram posts. See their easy guide on  how to embed an Instagram feed on a website .

Or as Annie-Mai Hodge says, “You don’t need to be on every single social media platform, full stop — for most businesses, it’s a waste of time and resources to be on platforms where your audience isn’t active.”

When creating your strategy, Hodge says, “You would’ve looked at where your audience is, what your competitors are doing, and what you’re aiming to achieve with social media — all of this will help inform you as to what social media channels you should be focusing on.”

Pro tip: Check where your competitors are most active and what kind of content they post. You’ll see what works or doesn't and how engaged their audience is. Don’t copy them — just use that info to make smart decisions for your strategy.

5. Repurpose your content.

Why stress over creating different content for each platform? 

Keep it simple: repurpose and use the same awesome content in different places – within reason of course.

According to our research, most marketers repurpose content in some way, shape, or form, while 19% consider it one of their key strategies. Meanwhile 40% plan to invest more in content repurposing in 2024.

This makes sense. By repurposing content, you can leanly and easily:

• Get your message to more people on different platforms.
• Save time by using what you already have instead of starting from scratch.
• Stay visible on search engines by updating and reusing content.
• Cater to your audience's preferences with different formats.
• Make your content last longer by updating timeless pieces.
• Improve your strategy by checking how your content performs on different channels.

…to hilarious TikTok video:

@hubspot Always look for a desk with a view (of your manager's eyeline) #hybridwork #9to5 #officehumor #inoffice ♬ original sound - HubSpot

However, one word to the wise is to not lean on it for every single campaign. Although most marketers do it, only 7% told us it yields them substantial ROI compared to content that's more catered to platforms. 

So, if you're low on time or bandwidth, experimenting a new platform that's similar to one you already use, or can make light tweaks to optimize content for different channels – feel free. Just make sure you're giving your audience what they're looking for and not over-spamming them with content they've seen several times already.

Pro tip: Looking for a creative content idea that feels more personal than repurposed? Make catchy quote pictures from customer thoughts, share email insights on X or LinkedIn, and whip up quick videos from podcasts — people love that kind of stuff.

6. Make a plan for customer service.

When putting together your social media strategy, consider how you’ll use your channels for customer service.

Social media is so ingrained in our day-to-day lives that it’s no surprise that people turn to these platforms for everything from brand discovery to customer service.

According to our State of Social Media and Consumer Trends research, 1 in 5 social media users contact a brand through social DMs for customer service each quarter.

43% of marketers use customer service reps, 41% rely on platform managers, and 13% employ automated tools like chatbots.

Whether you create a separate account dedicated to customer service or have an auto-reply set up when people DM you on Instagram, have a plan for how you’ll handle customer support through social media.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about the importance of good customer service on social media. According Khoros research :

• 42% felt disappointed, 43% were unhappy, and 41% reported anger with poor customer care.
• 67% shared bad experiences, and 65% switched to a different brand.
• 43% are more likely to buy from a brand after a good customer service experience.
• 83% feel more loyal to brands that resolve their complaints.
• 73% of brands expect more inbound channels, and 53% anticipate more outbound channels in the next one to two years.
• Pro tip: Apart from clearly stating working hours, let customers know the expected response time and inform them about quicker alternative resources if available.

7. Develop a recipe card to guide you.

Social media isn’t an exact science. It doesn't work the same for every business or industry.

To see results for your business, create a recipe card. A recipe card is a posting and engagement schedule that keeps your team on track and helps you post content consistently.

HubSpot has a list of social media tools and templates that you can use to plan your content and create a posting schedule and content calendar.

One of the best ways to manage an SM content calendar is the method Bazile shared with me.

Here’s how she categorizes it:

• Evergreen engagement content.
• Evergreen promotional content.
• Specific campaign content.
• Recurring communications content.

“Breaking down content into these buckets allows social teams to maintain regular presences online while also separating content data into easily trackable pieces,” she says.

Develop a reasonable recipe card and well-organized calendar. Stick to it and get your team to follow. Set goals for your posting and engagement frequency, and hold yourself accountable for following your recipe.

Pro tip: Choose platforms that allow easy editing and content management within your team. This ensures smooth collaboration and calendar updates.

8. Talk WITH, not AT, your followers.

In our latest Consumer Trends research, 41% of consumers pointed to relatability as the most memorable aspect of posts from brands or companies on social or the web. 

Friendly brands win more followers (and hearts). So, skip the self-promotion overload. Instead, get into conversations and respond to comments authentically.

People love it when you chat with them, not just throw information their way. It makes them feel special, creating a genuine affection for your brand.

You don't have to sound super professional. Casual talk works even better on social media. Just take a cue from McDonald’s:

And here’s something interesting to remember — very few people, less than one percent , interact with the brands’ posts. 

Here are the platform breakdowns:

• Facebook: 0.09%.
• Instagram: 1.22%.

So, once you get a comment, find the right way to interact and show that you care.

Don't just ghost and ignore. These comments boost your post higher in algorithms and make it more visible. 

Pro tip: Never delete negative comments unless they’re super offensive or totally inappropriate. Instead, use them as an opportunity for constructive engagement and improvement.

9. Measure your results.

“Without goals, a product roadmap, or even a full brand strategy, social media managers will struggle to know what to prioritize in the social space, what metrics to measure to convey progress, and what sort of content or social presence is ideal for the brand,” Bazile says. 

There are countless things to track on your social media channels. Start by looking at how much traffic your social accounts drive to your website or blog.

Social media platforms offer tools to help businesses track analytics.

For example, you can use Facebook’s Page Insights , Instagram’s Account Insights , and LinkedIn’s Visitor Analytics to see what people are responding to and look for trends related to topics or keywords that generate the most interest.

Once you get an idea of your average traffic and post-performance, set goals for key metrics and keep a scorecard to measure your progress.

Be sure to choose metrics that are easy to gather because if it’s too time-consuming to track, you won’t be motivated to do it.

Examples of simple metrics include the total number of interactions, traffic to your website, and sales or revenue that can be attributed to social.

“One of the most valuable indicators, in my opinion, is impressions,” Nash says, “Impressions measure the number of times a piece of content is displayed on users' screens and help to evaluate the effectiveness of your content strategy in terms of exposure and brand awareness.”

Pro tip: Don’t only focus on platform numbers. Track the social sentiment as well. See if people express positive or negative feelings about you in online conversations. It takes a bit of manual work, but it's worth it. Check regularly for better insights.

10. Adjust your tactics as needed.

Social media won't start working overnight.

Establishing a following, stabilizing your brand, and seeing the results of your efforts take time. So, experiment to find the right combination of channels, content, and messaging that works for your audience.

We can pick up some cool tricks from Victoria's Secret in this regard.

They’ve shifted from using only professional photos and videos to incorporating more casual content. Now, VS’s Insta feed also includes UGC and interviews with random people on the street and in their stores.

Victoria's Secret proves that even as a high-end brand, you don't lose anything by including everyday people. 

Actually, you gain. 

More followers, more engagement, more exposure.

Keep track of changes in your post views, audience demographics, and post interactions, and make changes as needed.

Over time, you’ll be able to adjust your recipe card, content, and personas based on the information you’re gathering, which will help you fine-tune your strategy and generate more consistent results.

Trying new stuff might seem a bit daring, but sometimes, it's just necessary to “survive.”

For instance, try to use funny content whenever possible.

In our 2023 survey of over a thousand global social media marketers, 66% said funny content works best, followed by relatable (63%) and trendy (59%) content. While 45% talk only about their brand values, the key is to use humor for the most impact. 

Don't believe that humor can pay the bills? One-third, or 34% of Consumer Trends respondents also told us funny content is most memorable to them. 

I asked Hodge to tell me about a time when changing tactics improved social media results. She recalls that at the start of 2023, Girl Power Marketing stopped growing on social media and started losing engagement. 

“It wasn’t until I sat down and reassessed my strategy that I was missing something, and that was humanization,” Hodge recounts. “Why should people trust my thoughts, opinions, and guidance if they have no clue who was behind GPM or the mission behind it?”

Hodge shares that she started showing up more intentionally. She created content that showed more of herself, her personality, and GPM’s mission. 

“And a year later, GPM has grown to a community of 180k+ people - all because I switched up my tactics that no longer worked,” says Hodge.

Pro tip: Tailor your content to match seasonal trends and holidays. This helps keep your brand messaging timely and relatable. And most importantly — people love it.

Keeping Up With Social Media Strategies

While these tips will help you optimize your strategy for ROI in the present day, it's important to get your footing and keep up with the big shifts that are inevitable as new tools, channels, and trends arise.

To keep up with low stress, keep following research like our State of Social Media Report and check out our blog and resources for the coverage of social trends and tactics you actually need to keep on your radar.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Social media marketing: What it is and how to build your strategy

Reading time  22 minutes

Published on  September 20, 2023

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Looking to fine-tune your social media marketing strategy? Good! Now’s the perfect time to make it happen. In a landscape with more competition, content and networks than ever, a succinct strategy gives you the focus needed to say “no” to efforts that don’t serve your goals.

That’s why we put together a comprehensive guide to creating a social media marketing plan from scratch. Whether you’re totally new to social or want to double-check your priorities in 2024, this guide has you covered.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing means using social media platforms like Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook to promote your brand and sell your product or service.

If your business comes out with a new item and you plan to promote the launch on social media, that’s social media marketing. If you interact with your customers via comments, that’s social media marketing. And if you create engaging content that showcases your brand’s values and story, that’s social media marketing too.

This form of marketing requires you to use social media management skills and tools. Just as you prepare other aspects of your marketing strategy, you need to have a plan for your social media marketing.

Now that we’ve defined social media marketing, let’s walk through how to create a plan. Check out our video below to watch how you can use the tips in this article to build a strategy in seven steps.

Set goals that make sense for your business

Social media strategy planning starts with your goals. Whether you want to expand your team, build a larger following or a more active community, taking the time to define your social goals is the first step to reaching them.

Either way, your goals will define your social media marketing strategy and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.

Example social media goals for 2024 and beyond

What really matters is that you set realistic social media goals . We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.

Below are some example social media marketing goals that businesses of all shapes and sizes can pursue.

Goal example 1: Increase brand awareness

Brand awareness means getting your name out there. Some 68% of consumers say the primary reason they follow a brand on social media is to stay informed about new products or services, according to The Sprout Social Index™ .

Try to avoid solely publishing promotional messages and strike a good balance with authentic content that emphasizes your brand’s voice and story. The Sprout Social Index™ found that consumers don’t see enough authentic, non-promotional content from brands on social.

For example, in this TikTok video, Sani, a family-owned apparel company features a day in the life of the brand’s founders while visiting India for business:

Goal example 2: Generate leads and sales

Whether online, in-store or directly through your social profiles, followers don’t make purchases by accident. For example, are you alerting customers about new products and promos? Are you integrating your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running exclusive deals for followers? Social media gives you an avenue to generate revenue.

Goal example 3: Grow your brand’s audience

Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before. Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening for specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you expand your core audience (and reach adjacent audiences) much faster.

Goal example 4: Provide holistic customer care

The Index shows over half of consumers believe the most memorable thing a brand can do on social media is respond to customers.

Although 76% of consumers value quick responses, providing quality customer care isn’t just responding rapidly. Consumer expectations have evolved. Some 70% of consumers expect brands to provide a holistic experience with personalized responses that fit their unique customer service needs.

This means companies need to experiment with messaging and content when approaching customer care . For example, does your team have a protocol for handling @-mentions and comments? Do you have templated responses to FAQs? Does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags? Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you give them a reason to grab the megaphone.

Goal example 5: Drive traffic to your site to illustrate ROI of social efforts

The Sprout Social Index™ shows 46% of marketers plan to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of advertising spend to connect the value of social to business goals in 2024.

Simple enough. If you’re laser-focused on generating leads or traffic to your website, social media can make it happen. Whether through organic promotional posts or social ads, keeping an eye on conversions and URL clicks can help you better determine your ROI from social media .

Any combination of these goals is fair game and can help you better understand which networks to tackle, too. When in doubt, keep your social media marketing strategy simple rather than complicating it with too many objectives that might distract you. Pick one or two and rally your team around them.

Research your target audience and select your networks

Making assumptions is bad news for marketers. Both leaders and practitioners can disprove assumptions from the valuable insights social data provides. With the right tool, marketers can quickly research their audience . No formal market research or data science chops necessary.

What you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already available. You just have to know where to look.

Remember: different platforms attract different audiences

Here are some key numbers for your 2024 social media marketing strategy that speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish:

• According to The Sprout Social Index™, 53% of consumers say their social media usage has been higher over the last two years than the previous two.
• Instagram has 2 billion active users worldwide in 2023 and continues to be one of the most popular networks among teens between 13-17 years old.
• Women make up more than 60% of Pinterest’s global audience . Gen Z and Millennials use the platform the most.
• X has over half a billion monthly monetizable active users. And people spend an average of 31 minutes on the platform.
• LinkedIn is the hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more niche than what you see on Facebook or X.
• LinkedIn is the top platform for B2B lead generation, rated by marketers. Some 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions.
• Some 78% of TikTok users have purchased a product after watching TikTok creator content about the product.
• And some 73% of users feel a deeper connection to brands they interact with on TikTok vs other platforms.
• YouTube is one of the most popular search engines in the world with billions of monthly users across 80 languages and 100+ countries.

Social media demographics and stats like the ones above are great for understanding where your target audience lives, but it's also important to understand the nuances of each social network so you can decide where your business needs to be.

Bigger brands with large customer bases tend to have presences across multiple platforms. Giants like McDonald’s and Starbucks are more likely to have the resources to be everywhere at once, but what if you’re a mid-size or small business? And just because there are so many social platforms, doesn’t mean all of them are right for your brand. For the sake of narrowing down where you should spend your time, below is a quick overview of each of the major social platforms:

Simple and straightforward, X is a solid starting point for most businesses. Requiring minimal setup and providing a place to go back and forth with followers directly, there's a reason why X remains one of the go-to platforms for customer service . If you’re trying to master the social media marketing basics of hashtags, tagging, brand voice and social media etiquette, look no further.

Facebook is a must-have for brick-and-mortar businesses looking to target local customers. Allowing check-ins and reviews, it’s a prime place to grow a dedicated local following. Plus, they have an incredible chatbot functionality that can take your customer service and marketing campaigns to the next level.

Like many social algorithm changes, the platform’s algorithm change in late 2022 posed a challenge to some businesses looking to grow their Pages and stay in touch with fans consistently. The earliest algorithm prioritized Likes, but today’s is much more sophisticated and focuses on showing users the most relevant, meaningful content based on inventory, signals, relevancy scoring and other factors. That said, Facebook’s ad platform is the gold standard for social media ads because it can help businesses cut through the noise and lessen the impact of algorithm changes.

At its core, Instagram is a network centered around visual content. A major hub for brick-and-mortar businesses, e-commerce shops and influencers alike, the platform encourages brands to get creative. From eye-popping photos to clever captions, it’s all about finding unique ways to show off what you’re selling.

When Meta released Threads on July 5, 2023, the social network received over 100 million registrations less than a week after its launch, making it the most rapidly downloaded app ever. The launch of Threads sparked conversations about its role in the fediverse, or decentralized social media .

But, for now, Threads is a text-based social network that users can sign up for through their current Instagram account. Users can post on mobile, but Threads is also available on desktop. Threads are great for brands who already have Instagram accounts because the sign up process is pretty seamless.

LinkedIn is a network laser-focused on business trends and networking. LinkedIn is a goldmine, especially for anyone networking in the B2B space. Looking to get in touch with an influencer, marketing manager or CEO? Chances are you can find them here.

There are so many benefits of using LinkedIn marketing beyond networking, including content distribution and lead generation. We also have a guide for LinkedIn best practices so you can get full advantage of those benefits.

Pinterest marketing is insanely popular, especially among Gen Z and Millennials. Over 465 million people use this visual pinning platform every month to find inspiration and their next purchase. Pinterest is noted to be one of the best networks for social selling. Like Instagram, Pinterest thrives on imagery and inspirational content where products serve as the proverbial centerpiece.

Although some might not regard YouTube as a traditional social network, the platform’s active and engaged community speaks for itself. Considering that video represents the top-performing type of content across nearly every social network, YouTube is a great place to house your videos if you’re already producing them.

TikTok reached 1 billion users in September 2021 and remains one of the most popular apps in the world. Along with its viral trends and niche communities, the short-form video app is known for its hyper-personalized algorithm that keeps users scrolling for hours. TikTok marketing has changed the game for brands, allowing them to connect with customers in an entirely new way.

Picking networks for your social media marketing strategy

There are more than 15 social media platforms your brand can use , but don’t spread yourself too thin. Rather than try to dominate them all, you should consider which platforms make the most sense based on your industry and target audience.

Do your homework on your existing social media audience and focus on networks where your core audience is already active. You need to do further analysis before you can determine what your real-world social customers actually look like.

That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that provides an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel.

For example, Sprout’s analytics dashboard puts your audience demographics front and center. It highlights which social networks see the most activity, helping you ensure you spend your time on the right networks. You can also use analytics to determine if you should create a new social media account . With Sprout, you can view X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest data side-by-side in a customizable format that’s exportable by date range and profile.

There are plenty of other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. This includes your Google and email analytics, your CRM, your customer service platform or even your best-selling products.

All of the above will ultimately influence everything from your marketing messaging to how you’ll approach customer service or social commerce .

Establish your most important metrics and KPIs

No matter your goals or industry, your social media strategy should be data-driven. Rather than focus on vanity metrics, dig into data that aligns directly with your goals.

So, what metrics are we talking about? Below you’ll find a quick overview, but our full guide breaks down the social media metrics that matter (and why) in more detail.

• Reach . Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
• Clicks . This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
• Engagement . The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance . What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
• Organic and paid likes . Beyond a standard Like count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how much harder organic engagement is to gain, many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
• Sentiment . This is the measurement of how users react to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment do people associate with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people talk or feel about your brand.

• Video views. This varies by platform, but refers to the number of views you receive on a video. Some channels treat video views as impressions–like TikTok–and others get super detailed with views. For example, Instagram offers views metrics for Stories, Reels and Live. Facebook and LinkedIn count a view when a user watches a video for at least three seconds. From the popularity of TikTok to live streaming, video is taking the internet by storm, so familiarize yourself with social video engagement metrics if you plan to use it in your strategy.
• Follower growth. Follower growth measures the net new followers you earned within a set time frame. Follower count on its own doesn’t tell the whole story: knowing how many followers you gained can help you prove the value and return on investment for campaigns, content types and social media experiments.
• Follower growth rate. This percentage shows how quickly your audience is growing or declining over time.
• Reply time. This refers to how long it takes for your team to reply to a customer message or @-mention on social.
• Total response volume. The sum of responses your team sends to customers.
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT). A CSAT shows how satisfied customers are with your product, service or brand as a whole. You can use social messaging to measure CSAT by DMing customers and asking them how likely they are to refer your business. Or by working with your customer care team to formalize a survey for after interactions.
• Impressions. The number of times a piece of content was displayed to users. Impressions can indicate how well you’re promoting your account, content, campaigns, ads, etc.
• Brand mentions. This number tracks how many times a brand is mentioned in posts/comments, whether the brand is directly tagged or not.
• Share of voice (SOV). This indicates where your brand ranks in the market compared to competitors. SOV can help you understand how much of the industry conversation your brand dominates.
• Conversion rate. This metric measures how many people you convert to take a desired action on social, such as making a purchase, downloading gated content, or signing up for a free trial, webinar, newletter, etc.

An effective social media marketing strategy is rooted in numbers. That said, those numbers need to be put into context that aligns with your original goals. Conduct analytics reports regularly to convey the story behind the metrics and see if your efforts match up to your vision.

Create (and curate) engaging social content

No surprises here. Your social media marketing strategy hinges on your content. At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what to publish based on your goals, audience and brand identity. You probably feel confident in which networks to cover, too.

But what about your content strategy? Below are some tips, ideas and inspiration that can help.

Defining your content strategy

Coming up with a content strategy might seem like a lot of legwork, but it all really boils down to your goals.

• Looking to educate your audience in the B2B space? Publish blogs, news and opinions relevant to your industry.
• Trying to push e-commerce products? Post action shots of your products and photos of others showing off your swag.
• Focused on customer service? Tips, shout-outs and company updates are fair game.

Regardless of what you might post, coming up with a hashtag to couple with your content is a brilliant branding move.

Hashtags can be used to get your attention and encourage people to share their photos interacting with your brand.

Find your brand voice

One of the best ways to stand out on social media is to define your distinct brand voice. Chances are you’ve seen a post from a particular brand that just feels like, well, theirs.

The quippy, casual tone that makes Discord’s X presence beloved by casual users and moderators alike is a great example.

Of course, not every company will benefit from the same sort of tone. The key is to present yourself as a human rather than a robot. Adopt a consistent brand voice and style that’s appropriate for your business.

The importance of sticking to content themes

From graphics to Reels and beyond, many brands rely on the same content formats and creative touches time and again. These themes can help you become more consistent and zero in on a content strategy that makes sense.

For example, you might cycle between memes, product photos and user-generated content while sticking to a defined color scheme. If you’re struggling to keep up with all these sources of social content, consider social media management tools that help you organize your media library and schedule your posts in advance.

Content ideas for social media marketing in 2024

The Sprout Social Index™ reveals an interesting trend around the type of content consumers want to see on social. When asked what makes brands memorable on social, 38% of consumers said the most memorable brands prioritize original content over following trending topics. Some 37% said engaging directly with their audience rather than publishing a lot of content makes a brand more memorable, followed by 33% who remember brands that publish timely, on-trend posts.

The takeaway? There’s not one sure-fire way to approach content, but consumers generally want a good quality mix of original and timely, trending content.

That’s why businesses should focus on what their audience wants so they can know which content mix is best for their brand. Here are some social media trends to consider to help narrow down the specifics of what you should publish and inspire innovative content.

Stories and time-sensitive posts

Stories aren’t going anywhere. Tapping into your followers’ FOMO (fear of missing out), Stories-style content is both interactive and can’t-miss. Popping up first in your followers’ feeds by default, this content can help your brand’s account “skip the line” and stay fresh in your audience’s minds.

Stories are especially valuable for taking your followers behind-the-scenes and making your social feed feel more personal. For example, consider how you can use Stories to cover an event or take your followers on a journey without them having to leave the comfort of the ‘gram.

Short-form video

Thanks to the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels , social video is booming. Short-form productions continue to dominate the social space across all platforms due to their high engagement rate.

Sprout Social’s 2022 Index data shows that consumers find short-form videos 2.5x more engaging than long-form ones. Some 66% of consumers report paying the most attention to short-form content as well.

Thanks to advancements in DIY and remote video production , you don’t need massive budgets to be successful. All you need is a laptop or smartphone and a few tricks of the trade, like video length best practices and editing tools .

Posts that show off your brand’s uniqueness and human side

Both personal and personable content should be a cornerstone of your social media marketing strategy. Don’t be afraid to remind followers of the humans behind your posts. Remember that over a third of consumers are looking for authentic, original content from brands.

For example, Zoom has excellent original content on their Instagram and TikTok accounts, like this Reel that explores the different signs in the workplace:

Collaborate with creators

If you haven’t already, it’s time to tap into the creator economy . The Sprout Social Index™ shows that 25% of consumers remember brands that collaborate with content creators and influencers. Social partnerships are very effective when executed correctly: they can help drive traffic to your website, produce compelling content and inspire purchase decisions.

But consumers care about creators’ qualifications, so choose wisely. The two most important qualifications of content creators working with brands is their experience with the product/service and their authenticity.

Identify creators who align with your brand and consider how they can help you craft stand-out content for your audience.

Pro-tip: conduct a competitive analysis to help your content stand out

Before you start creating content, you should have a good idea of what your competitors are up to.

While some brands might want to look into third-party competitor analysis tools to dig deeper into their competitors’ numbers, you can learn a lot from a simple review of your competitors’ social presence.

The simplest way to find competitors is through a Google search. Look up your most valuable keywords, phrases and industry terms to see who shows up.

Then, see how their social channels compare to your own. The goal here isn’t to copycat or steal your competitors’ ideas. No two companies’ social media marketing strategies can be (or should be) the same. Instead, determine what’s working for them and what conclusions you can draw to adapt your own campaigns accordingly.

After identifying some of your industry rivals, you can use competitive analysis tools such as those found in Sprout to quickly compare competitor performance to your own.

See what they’re posting on Facebook. Contrast your X engagement with theirs. Find out how they’re tagging their content on Instagram. Optimize your own strategy. Rinse and repeat.

You can also go a step further using Sprout’s Advanced Listening . Using social listening, you can spotlight unfiltered consumer feedback regarding competitors, as well as their products and services. You get the added bonus of discovering honest conversations about your brand you may have otherwise missed.

Make your social presence as timely as possible

Timeliness is arguably more important than ever for marketers. Not only are you expected to put out fresh content regularly, but also to always be “on” for your followers. But you can’t always expect customers to operate on your clock. And timeliness is a tall order when you’re strapped for resources or are part of a small team.

Let’s look at some ways to maximize your schedule and your time spent on social media.

Assemble your content calendar

Use a content calendar to plan out your posts and stay organized. Knowing in advance what you’re going to post will save you a lot of time and keeps you from posting the same pieces of content too frequently.

With the help of Sprout’s scheduling and publishing , you can house your social posts, captions and creative in one place.

Post at the best times to engage

As evidenced by our best times to post on social , brands have a lot of ground to cover in terms of frequency and how much content to push. It’s important to pay attention to the optimal times for engagement so you can automate the most tedious aspects of your social presence without having to worry about posting in real time.

Sprout also offers a cool interactive tool that populates best times by industry and network. You can check it out here .

But, quick question: When is your brand available to engage and interact with customers?

You might see some recommended times to post late in the evening, for example. But if your team isn’t there to communicate, what’s the point of posting at the “preferred” time?

When you’re able to do so, ensure your social media or community managers are available and ready to answer any product questions or concerns when you post. Take time to review the best times to post on social media, but remember that it’s just as critical to engage after posting.

You should also consider taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and automation so you can serve and engage with customers when your team is offline, which leads us to our next point.

Respond to your customer questions and shout-outs ASAP

Your customers want speedy responses, but it’s likely impossible to respond to every message across multiple channels manually. Lean into AI to help execute faster. For example, you can use chatbots or automated replies to connect with customers when your team is offline.

The 2023 Index shows 81% of marketers say AI has already had a positive impact on their work. But marketers aren’t just using AI to increase efficiency–they’re using it to scale their entire customer care strategies.

Over half of marketers plan to use customer self-service resources like FAQs, forums and chatbots to grow their social customer care strategy. Nearly half of brands say they will use AI and automation to handle basic customer inquiries and tasks.

Your brand can’t forget these core elements of community building. It takes effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities aren’t left unattended. On social media, you gain respect as a brand by being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness—word travels fast about great service.

This is why you should designate teams to respond to specific customer cases. It can help your staff run like a well-oiled social media team, whether you’re a group of one or 100.

As social algorithms evolve, organic content has an increasingly tough time reaching the majority of your audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who do engage and lose out on sending more people down your marketing funnel.

Evaluate and improve your social media strategy

By now you should have a big-picture understanding of your social media strategy. However, it’s important to adapt your strategy throughout the year.

Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s eye view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective. This means looking at your top-performing content and adjusting your campaigns when your content stalls .

There’s no denying that a lot of social media is a matter of trial-and-error. Monitoring the metrics behind your campaigns in real time allows you to make small tweaks to your social media marketing strategy rather than sweeping, time-consuming changes.

Doing social media marketing right starts by being diligent about your data. You can be reactive in the short term to get the most out of your running campaigns, and then proactively use these takeaways to inform your next strategy overhaul.

To guarantee that you get in front of as many customers as possible, monitoring your growth is a major must-do. With Sprout, social reports can clue you in on everything from your top-performing content to how engaged your audience is. These reports are crucial for accountability and guaranteeing your numbers continue to tick upward.

Reporting on data is also important for the sake of sharing valuable insights from social with your coworkers and colleagues. Remember that 60% of organizations use social data daily—be one of the brands that embrace it.

Sharing this information in regular reports not only holds you accountable for your efforts but also highlights the impact and bottom-line results your social strategy produces.

Based on your data, you can better assess whether your KPIs truly ladder up to your overarching company goals or whether they need to change.

Bring other departments into the mix

Social media teams have a unique advantage when it comes to understanding customer sentiment. You’re the eyes and ears for your brand online. Those insights can do more than just inform marketing strategy. They can transform your business. Stand-out social media teams will approach cross-department collaboration with enthusiasm and intention.

Which departments can benefit from social data?

The short answer? All of them. Index data shows 76% of social marketers say their team’s insights inform other departments.

However, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Instead, start where you think you can make the most impact. Here are a few ideas to jumpstart your strategy.

Human Resources

Collaborating with human resources on social-first employer brand initiatives can do more than just fill open roles quickly. It can attract stronger, more qualified candidates as well. Many companies have embraced social recruiting strategies, such as publishing creative “we’re hiring” posts on LinkedIn to attract top talent.

Data from The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ notes marketers plan to track conversations and sales directly resulting from social efforts in 2024 to better connect the value of social to business goals. Sharing social insights with your sales organization can empower reps to work smarter in the context of increasingly digital customer journeys. Consider learning more about social selling to leverage the power of online networks even further.

Product and merchandising

You’ve probably received quite a few feature or product requests while managing your brand’s social inbox. With a social media management tool , you can distill those messages into actionable insights for your product or merchandising teams. These insights can complement existing roadmap research, creating a customer-focused plan that delights.

Customer care

Monitoring customer service metrics like average reply time, average wait time and response volume can help your social customer care team identify what is working well and spot opportunities for improvement. Marketers are using social media customer service software to elevate their support strategies and get the most out of their tech stack.

And with that, we wrap up your social media strategy guide for 2024 and beyond!

Is your social media marketing strategy future proof?

This guide highlights plenty of moving pieces to maintain a modern social presence. That said, putting together yours doesn’t have to be a drag.

If you set actionable goals and address each of the steps above, you’ll already be way ahead of the curve when it comes to your social media marketing strategy.

And if you need more inspiration for actionable ways to build out your strategies, make sure to download The Sprout Social Index™ to learn more.

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How to Create an Effective Social Media Plan in 2024

Content manager

Onlypult blog author and editor. 10 year experienced professional copywriter, is interested in social media and e-mail marketing.

What is a Social Media Plan?

Why do you need a social media plan, step 0. evaluate the current state of social media marketing, step 1. define metrics & set main goals for your social media plan, step 2. learn your audience, step 3. conduct a competitive analysis, step 4. collect ideas & find inspiration, step 5. fill out social network profiles properly, step 6. create a posting calendar, step 7. create content, step 8. test, evaluate & adjust your strategy, social media marketing plan template, onlypult social media post planner.

• What Are Social Media Goals?
• How Do I Create a Social Media Template?
• What Are the Benefits of Content Scheduling?

The number of accounts, posts, likes, and comments on social media is constantly growing. You can notice that some of them manage to cut through the noise, and some of them don’t.

However, social media success isn’t random, and there are many factors affecting your online presence. The one thing all influential brands have is a clear social media plan. This guide will show you why it’s important and walk you step-by-step along this process.

A social media plan is a thorough blueprint that defines your actions on social media. It answers crucial questions about your content, who’s consuming it, and how you want it to affect users. Generally, it is tied to a certain social media goal like increasing brand awareness, generating new leads, forming an online community, offering customer services, and so on.

Having a social media presence is no longer optional for businesses. The longer you wait to take it seriously, the more you lose. Here are a few of the ways social media marketing can improve your business:

• Making your website more visible to all Internet users;
• Building trust with customers and potential clients;
• Establishing more partnerships;
• Staying ahead of the competition and finding new, creative ways to shows off your product/service;
• Giving your brand a personal touch.

Your prospects are searching for companies online, and you have the power to affect whether they find information about your brand. More importantly, you can ensure that the first result from search engines is the webpage you can control. If they find your social media profile first, users will view content curated by you.

For example, you have Instagram and Facebook profiles that are performing extremely well. If users search your company name on Google, these pages will be the first ones they come across. If your social media plan takes all your goals into account, you can convert visitors into customers.

A simple post scheduler for all platforms, a user-friendly media editor, and posting at the time you need — Onlypult provides this all.

In terms of user trust, a strategy helps you answer questions that affect buying decisions. Let’s analyze three scenarios that could happen when people are looking at your social media networks:

• There are no social profiles, which makes you seem less trustworthy.
• Your accounts aren’t active and provide no relevant information. In this case, you also lose a few trust points and risk losing a client.
• They come across your profile, and it’s filled with informative, entertaining content. As they learn about your brand and values, they will see you as reliable service and connect with you on a deeper level.

The final thing we want to focus on is fostering partnerships through social media. Just like regular users are looking for your brand online, potential partners are doing the same thing. You can form useful referral partnerships and look for niche influencers that your target audience will connect with.

8 Steps to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan

If you don’t know where to start with your content plan, we’ve created a step-by-step system to cover all the bases. Remember that this plan is not set in stone, so you can be flexible in how you want to apply it. Use this model as a baseline and adjust it depending on your particular situation.

Before you jump into the planning process, evaluate what your social media currently looks like. What do you know about the social accounts you’re already using? Do you need to focus more on some of them? Do you need to tap into new networks?

Consider the following factors:

• Audience. Most likely, you have different audiences across different platforms. Compare them by key characteristics and see which audience demographics overlap.
• Time. See how much time you spend on individual accounts. If there is a correlation between how devoted you are to a social media platform and its performance, it will give you great insights.
• Resources. Create an overview of how much money you’re spending and what you are going to need for your goals. This includes copywriters, designers, videographers, etc.

Evaluate the state of your current social media accounts to determine what you’re not satisfied with. In order to make improvements, you should learn from your mistakes whenever you uncover them.

For example, you could analyze your average metrics across all of your platforms. Let’s say your primary audience is on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Make a comparison table of your followers, following accounts, mentions, shares, and likes. Keep this information as a starting point and refer back to it throughout the campaign.

There is a well-established tool used in goal setting called SMART. This approach states that for a goal to be a reality, your goals need to follow several conditions:

• Specific – Let’s take an example of growing your Twitter followers.
• Measurable – You can set the goal of doubling the number of your existing followers.
• Attainable – Don’t be sure of yourself; see whether it’s even possible to double your followers at this point.
• Relevant – You might not need to attain Twitter followers, and, instead, you should head over to Instagram.
• Time-based – Set a time frame like achieving the goal in 6 months.

Some areas of social media presence are more important than others. For example, you could work on brand awareness, public relations, community of advocates, sales and leads, etc. As a manager, you need to decide which goals you need to focus more on. Here is an example of how you can prioritize goals:

In terms of metrics that you should track, we can pinpoint the following five:

• Reach – Number of followers / fans / subscribers / connections and visibility percentage;
• Engagement – Public shares, likes, and comments;
• Acquisition – Activities to gain a fan, follower, subscriber, reader, etc.;
• Conversion – Percentage of consumers who take the action you want them to take;
• Activity – Photo and video sharing, blogging, reviews, and posting of other content.

Make sure to actually turn these metrics into actionable insights. There is no use in collecting plain numbers if they won’t guide your future improvements.

We intuitively know how to best communicate with different types of people in our personal life. Similarly, your social media plan should recognize the specific user type that you will target your content at.

Humanize core target groups of your customer base by crafting an audience persona. It helps you understand each general segment of your customer base without lumping them all together. This method is based on determining the specific needs and desires of your customer.

Dig into your statistics and learn as much as you can about people who are interacting with your brand online:

• Pain points (that your business can solve)
• Most used social network

Most often, you will end up with several personas because people may buy your products for different reasons. One group could be looking for distinctiveness or individuality. In other words, they need to be in possession of things which are not possessed by others.

Another group’s buying motivation could be comfort - or the desire for comfort. It’s one of the important emotional motives used in every industry: retail, travel, transport, beauty, and many others.

A competitive analysis is aimed at identifying your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Just like you can learn from heavy-hitters in your industry, and what they’re doing right, you can see what strategies aren’t performing as well.

Conduct the analysis in the following four steps:

• Determine your key competitors. This includes identifying relevant keywords, checking what brands are ranking for them in search engines, and looking at social search results. You might find that your top competitors are brands that aren’t even similar to yours.
• Learn what they’re up to. What social networks do they use, and what kind of data can you collect from them? Track the same metrics (if possible) as you do for your own social profiles.
• Do a SWOT analysis. This term is short for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. A SWOT analysis pays equal attention to the internal, positive, and negative aspects of your activities.
• Integrate media monitoring data. In addition to generating monthly or annual reviews, incorporate real-time data in your next analysis. This will help you stay aware of social conversations involving your competitors and industry at any time.

By the end of the competitor analysis, you should a good understanding of:

• When you should be posting your content;
• How frequently you should do it;
• Best posting times for your industry;
• Language and tone of voice you should use;
• Type of content performing well in your niche;
• Frustrations and complaints from users.

Surf the Internet and other accounts to see the most successful social media campaigns. This will help you learn more about what the general audience prefers. There are patterns that occur in many popular online marketing campaigns, and you will benefit from learning what they are.

You don’t have to necessarily look for posts in your specific niche. If you broaden your search, you might find something unexpected yet useful. After all, it’s not always the topic that made the campaign viral. Sometimes it’s the approach that social media marketers utilized, which you can always take lessons from.

For example, take a look at the Starbucks unicorn drink. The roll-out of this Frappuccino made many headlines and won the hearts of Starbucks’ younger audience. It was only available for one week and generated nearly 155,000 Instagram posts during that time period. Starbuck used the trend and went heavy on reposting user content.

For several years in a row, Spotify gave its users a data-rich gift at the end of the year. The platform generated customs playlists of users’ top songs throughout the year. They could also look up the total minutes of music streamed, top genres, and artists. The best thing for the company was that many users were happy to share their playlists and essentially offered a free promotion.

Another great example of using vivid online reactions is IHOP. The International House of Pancakes suddenly started advertising itself as the International House of Burgers. The outrage resulted in thousands of users sharing their reactions and gaining more than 15,000 retweets.

Unfortunately, you won’t get the chance to show off your content to users if they click off of your profile. Your social media profile is the equivalent of a landing page on your website. This is your chance to make the visitor interested in your page.

Let’s explore what behaviors are best for the most popular social media platforms. Here are our recommendations for crafting an effective Facebook profile:

• Upload an eye-catching profile picture to make a good first impression;
• Make your username and URL easy to remember;
• Include as many business details as possible;
• Tell your story in the About section;
• Add a call-to-action and a pinned post.

Optimizing your Instagram profile should include these steps:

• Convey your personality in the 150-character bio;
• Try hashtags and emojis;
• Use spacing and line breaks;
• Include one type of contact information, like a link to your website;
• Add your address and add a corresponding button Get Directions

Lastly, let’s see what you can do for Twitter:

• Use the entirety of 160-character limit;
• Include the right keywords;
• Use humor and catchy phrases;
• Tactfully insert a humble brag;
• Add your website and other social accounts.

Onlypult posts to all social media platforms, provides analytics data, builds teamwork and saves you time.

Before you can proceed to make content, you should plan it out. Each social profile might need unique content, or you should at least adjust it depending on the platform used. Assign meaning to your posts that reflect the business goals you’ve just set.

Place different posts in your posting calendar. If you always promote your products and services, users can get fed up fairly quickly. Apply an 80-20 ratio:

• 80% of your posts should be informational, educational or entertaining;
• 20% should be a direct promotion of your company.

The planning process is essential if you don’t want to waste company resources. It’s significantly easier to make adjustments before you actually make content. Once you make a rough plan, you could use scheduling tools to see how it would look on your grid/timeline. You can use scheduling tools or bulk scheduling to check the format of your posts.

Onlypult is a service that supports social media content calendars and helps you manage different types of content on each channel. You can plan and schedule your activities ahead of time to always stay in the lead. Plus, making a calendar on Onlypult helps you space out posts and share them at the optimal times.

The specifics of making content depend on what you’ve decided to post. By now, you should have ample information in order to make high-quality content that will strike a chord. Remember that, along with creating posts from scratch, you can share and repurpose user-generated content.

Based on the competitive analysis and current social media trends, define your tone of voice. It refers to the distinct voice that your brand uses to “speak” with your audience. This will ensure a unified reputation across all communication channels.

At this point, your content is ready to be posted. However, you should remember to be flexible about it. Online trends come and go, so you should be ready to act quickly sometimes. This approach is called situational marketing.

Over the years, we’ve seen trends like the Cinnamon Challenge, the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge, or “Storm Area 51”. Regardless of what you think of them, it’s beneficial to tap into that area. Catch the general sentiment and make your posts relevant to the current events.

Also, be ready to change the tone of voice for different platforms. Since social media networks have their own unspoken rules and different demographics, you need it to be reflected in your narrative. For example, Instagram can be more cheerful, whereas LinkedIn is more professional.

When you finally post the content, the work isn’t done. One of the best things about social media is that your account’s performance is measurable. This ties in with the topic of social media analytics and built-in data, as well as using specialized services to track data.

Set up tracking before your campaign begins and track key metrics described in step 1. Once this data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy. See what posts are making a bigger impact and make future posts follow the same pattern.

The reason for looking at your metrics is not because you should be doubtful about your decisions. In the social sphere, things change at lightning speed. People’s attention shifts quickly, new platforms emerge, and trends become irrelevant. Your social media strategy should be a dynamic script that should take into account the volatile nature of the Internet.

When you make adjustments, let everyone else on your team know. If you expect them to work towards a single goal, keep them updated.

The best way to organize a social media plan is to create a content calendar. You can use Google Sheets, Excel spreadsheets, or a specialized service. All activities can be divided into categories based on:

• time and date of posting;
• type of content and social channels;
• title or description of the content;
• links to supporting documents;
• people responsible for creating and posting.

Below are a few templates for social media plans. They include key points that help social media managers navigate all the activities. If there is any additional information that the manager would like to include, like reminders or promotions, they can add it to the table.

It’s up to the manager to decide what will make navigation easier. For example, the next template is color coordinated based on the social media channel the content is aimed at. As you can see, the table is not uniform. Some accounts imply posting more frequently, like the ones with larger user bases.

The last template is mostly time-focused. If the manager accurately calculated the best time for posting on different platforms, this plan works really well. It specifies who’s in charge on a given day, what the content is about, and anything else that the manager needs quick access to.

Onlypult is a platform for social media post planning with extensive functionality. For example, it includes the ability to manage multiple accounts, schedule posts, and change them in calendar mode, edit photos, and a lot more. Also, you get access to the analytics reports that present data in an easy-to-digest way.

While social networks are predominantly used on mobile devices, that’s not the case for managers. Working on your social media accounts is significantly easier with a web-based platform. You can see the full layout months ahead and make changes for scheduled posts whenever needed.

Scheduling Instagram and Twitter content isn’t easy because of its API, but Onlypult manages to overcome this limitation. To schedule posts on your social media planner, you need to:

• Go to the Onlypult website.
• Sign up for a 7-day free trial or choose a paid plan on the homepage.

• Create a social media account, which will take you to the dashboard.
• Click Add Post and drag the files you want to be scheduled.

• Add the description, hashtags, first comment, and all the general information you normally include in your posts.
• You have the option to choose both photos and videos, as well as photo albums.

• Specify the time and date when the post needs to go up.
• Click Schedule, and you will be directed to your dashboard again.

As you can see, the entire process won’t take you a lot of time but will provide all the extra perks of post planning. This will make sure that you always have great content ready to be posted. Afterward, you can analyze its performance and optimize your strategies for social media marketing.

Onlypult posts to all social media platforms, collects analytics data, allows creating micro landing pages and multiple links, and helps monitor what people say about your company.

Social media goals are broad outcomes that give you the general direction for online activities. They vary from brand to brand and can change over time. Some examples include growing revenue, driving more traffic, or increasing brand engagement.

Luckily, there are tons of resources that have practically everything already included. You will need to:

• Choose a social media template that is most suitable for you and download it;
• Fill in the text in a concise manner;
• Add graphics, pictures or links to make it more informative;
• Save it and share it with the rest of your team. If you want, you can allow the editing feature;
• Keep it at hand and refer back to it with any new activity.

Some of the reasons why brands use social media scheduling services are:

• You don’t have to be available or be physically behind your desk to make sure content is posted at a specific time.
• You can manage how your posts are spaced out and make changes.
• You can manage multiple different accounts from one interface.
• You will have more time to focus on creating better content and refining your strategies.

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How to Create a Killer Social Media Marketing Plan

Whether you’re just getting started on your entrepreneurial journey or looking to branch out into new marketing channels , you may be wondering how you can create a social media marketing plan that will help your ecommerce store grow.

It’s well known that social media is a marketing channel that many ecommerce brands have already used effectively to skyrocket their stores’ growth, so we’ve created this article to provide you with some tips and tricks to help you find that same level of success. Whether you plan to use Facebook , Snapchat , or Instagram for business , we’ve got you covered.

Let’s go!

Why Create a Social Media Marketing Plan?

Benjamin Franklin is credited with an old saying: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” This sentiment is especially true when you’re marketing your ecommerce business. We mentioned above that there are several ecommerce brands that have already established themselves, which means it won’t be easy to make your store stand out from the crowd.

If you want to maximize your chances for success, it’s critical that you create a social media marketing plan that’s super effective.

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Creating a social media marketing plan that’s well thought out will help you grow your ecommerce store’s reach, engage with your existing customers, and ultimately allow you to generate more sales. Once your store is generating a steady stream of revenue, you’ll be able to scale your marketing efforts even further, which will help you to further skyrocket your growth.

Creating Social Media Marketing Goals

These goals will not only help to shape your social media marketing strategy , but also allow you to gauge the success of your marketing efforts. If you haven’t established these goals, you won’t be able to measure your ROI or prove that social media marketing is a worthwhile tactic for growing your business.

When you’re establishing goals for your social media marketing plan, we advise against selecting vanity metrics, such as likes and retweets, as your main metric for success. While these are nice to see (and worthwhile to measure), they don’t directly affect your business’ growth. Instead, we recommend that you measure metrics that are likely to lead to sales, like number of leads generated or conversion rate.

If you decide to measure the number of leads generated through social media marketing, we advise adding a unique discount code to your social media posts. This will help you understand how you acquired your customers. If you see that a discount code from a specific post on social media is being used more than others, it’s a good indicator that the content of that post resonates well with your audience.

Each goal that you set for your social media marketing efforts should relate to all of these points. Here’s an example of a goal that follows the S.M.A.R.T. framework:

“I want to use social media marketing to promote the latest products that I’ve added to my store. The main channel that I’ll focus my efforts on will be Facebook, and I’ll grow my audience with compelling content, including posts, images, and videos. When promoting my products, I’ll post an appealing image of the product accompanied with a short description of the product’s main features. Within one month, I want to achieve at least one sale per post.”

While this example is catered specifically towards an ecommerce entrepreneur who has just started their store, it gives you a good idea of how you can apply the S.M.A.R.T. framework to your own social media marketing plan.

Launching and Optimizing Your Social Media Accounts

If you’ve already tried social media marketing for your business, make sure that these accounts are optimized to help you reach your goals. This isn’t a difficult task to accomplish, and it can pay off once your social media marketing efforts scale.

Start with your posts. Whether you’re using text or images, optimize them for each network that you’re posting on. If you’re posting on Instagram, try using hashtags , as they’ll help you grow your reach.

You can also cross-promote your social media accounts. If your Snapchat following has skyrocketed, mention to your audience that you’re also posting on Instagram and Facebook. This will give your audience more ways to engage with your content and offers you a wider social media reach overall. Double win!

It’s also a good idea to include a direct link to your ecommerce store in the bio sections of your social media accounts. This allows people who love your content (but aren’t aware of your brand) to take a look through your products and potentially make a purchase.

Gaining Inspiration for Your Social Media Marketing Plan

For example, here’s WeWork’s account:

You can also use your audience to gain inspiration for your social media content. Look at the way your audience engages with social media, and try to emulate this style. It’ll be familiar to them, and it’ll help you send a message that resonates. If you see that a specific type of post is popular, focus your attention on creating similar content – it’s the best way to reach your goals quickly.

Don’t be afraid to analyze what industry leaders are posting on social media when you’re looking for inspiration. While it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to reach their level of engagement at first, this is your end goal, so it’s good to understand what goes into a successful social media marketing strategy. We’ve already created an article about the best examples of Snapchat marketing, but there are so many brands that are excelling at social media marketing. All you need to do is look!

Bolster Your Social Media Marketing Plan With a Content Calendar

When creating your content calendar, it’s essential that you ask yourself these four main questions:

• How frequently will I post on social media?
• What types of content will I post on social media?
• How will my social media posts entertain and inform my audience?
• How will my posts help me achieve my goals?

We recommend writing these questions down and referring to them every time you post something on your business’ social media accounts.

If you’re looking for a platform to create your social media content calendar, there are several options available. Both Buffer and Hootsuite are free to sign up for and allow you to schedule social media posts in advance based on the platform of your choice. This means that you won’t have to worry about posting everything manually at specific times.

When you’re using a social media scheduling platform, we recommend that you schedule all of your posts at the start of the week. They’ll roll out at the times you set in advance while you focus on running the rest of your business.

If it’s your first time using social media for your business, make sure that you test out a variety of different content types. Fill up your content calendar, and make note of what content works best. This will help you to improve and optimize your future social media efforts.

Creating a Social Media Marketing Plan Using Templates

Now that you’re aware of the importance of creating a social media marketing plan, you can take the next step forward and use a social media plan template as a springboard to inform your approach.

There’s a lot of value to using a social media plan example to help plan your social media marketing. A template will help you visualize what your approach will look like, so when it comes time to launch your marketing efforts , you’ll have a robust vision in mind.

To help you out, we’ve put together our own template that proves creating a social media marketing plan doesn’t have to be complicated. It consists of various questions that will help you evaluate how your brand should communicate using social media. It was also designed with the S.M.A.R.T. framework as a foundation, so it’s highly actionable.

Copy and paste this template, and fill in your answers to these five questions:

Now develop your content and start posting it! Use your style guide and content calendar to keep the process streamlined. Also, be sure to interact with your audience. This will help you cultivate a loyal following and can even generate word-of-mouth marketing.

If you need to make any changes, you can use this social media marketing strategy sample we’ve designed as a tool to re-evaluate your social media presence.

Remember to Test, Evaluate, and Optimize Your Social Media Marketing

The world of social media is ever-changing, and if you truly want to succeed in growing your business, your content should be dynamic. In ecommerce, you’re fighting with thousands of other brands for your audience’s attention, and you can win them over by delivering a constant stream of compelling, unique content.

It’s essential that you’re tracking the performance of your social media marketing efforts and testing what works best for your audience. Whether you decide to use UTM codes and measure your performance on Google Analytics or opt for the built-in analytics that Buffer or Hootsuite offer, you can use the data from your campaigns to optimize for the future. If you want to stay on top of the game, it’s essential that you’re constantly testing, constantly learning, and constantly growing as an entrepreneur.

Now you know everything that you need to create a killer social media marketing plan to grow your business. Take the information in this post, and use it as inspiration for your own social media marketing efforts. We’re confident that you can create great content for your audience and start succeeding on social media.

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Want to Learn More?

• The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Influencer Marketing
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Top 7 Social Media Plan Templates with Samples and Examples

In a world where pixels dance, and hashtags whisper secrets, a band of social media devotees embarked on a mission for online fame and fortune. They set out to dominate the ever-changing social media scene. How? It was with the help of SlideTeam’s customizable Social Media Plan Templates, with samples and examples. 

As Confucius said, " If one wants to define the future, they must study the past ." With these words echoing through their heads, they braved the unknown landscape of the Internet. They had a wealth of resources at their fingertips, thanks to the social media plan templates with samples and examples, provided by Slide Tech, which helped them to see the light and become social media experts.

Each PPT Template opened a world of possibilities and clever planning. The Top 7 social media strategy templates helped them navigate this digital landscape and turn casual viewers into loyal followers.

Hey, my fellow hoppers, are you excited about how such templates meet your social media goals ? Read on to learn more and grab them!

Template 1: Monthly Social Media Plan PowerPoint Template Bundles

Famous presentation guru Nancy Duarte recommends monthly social media templates to improve your presentations. Using the appropriate pictures, graphics, and symbols, you can confidently communicate appealing messages with the help of this social media plan PPT deck. 

This template brings forward a month wise plan for social media. Secondly, you will find audit plans to measure the performance. Moreover, there is an intuitive dashboard to manage and boost posts as well as an event launch plan with Gantt charts available in this Set.  

DOWNLOAD NOW

Template 2: Paid Social Media Plan PPT Template Bundle

Just picture yourself entering a boardroom, with a potent instrument in your hands, that allows you to easily captivate your audience and take your presentations to the next level. Pitch-perfect professional templates just got better with the release of these template bundles.

This template offers social media plans for every level in the enterprise. There are plans in this template for advertising campaigns, unique ads, images, and increasing brand awareness. Further, the template brings the plans for startups, marketing agencies, and so on. There is a KPI dashboard where you can measure the results. If you are looking for a weekly plan this template got you covered. This template uses excellent design practices and controls for a smooth experience. Download it right away!

Template 3: Social Media Strategy Plan Business Engagement Awareness Statement Management

Gary Vaynerchuk, a marketing specialist, famously remarked, "Social media is not just an activity ; it is an investment of valuable time and resources." And this PPT Template fulfills this. This template can help you wow your audience with corporate involvement, awareness, or statement management. This Social Media Strategy Plan template comprises strategy plans for every social media channel so you can target them separately. 

You can set major goals, objects, and metrics of social media to achieve the outcomes. There is also a plan funnel where you can strategize your key objectives. Apart from this, the template lets you adjust purpose and measurements for improving your social media game. 

Template 4: Social Media Plan PowerPoint Shapes

The visual impact of your social media planning would be greatly enhanced if you had access to a strong tool like this. Here's something that'll revolutionize your thoughts about social media strategy forever: these social media PowerPoint shapes. Using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube as stepping stones, this dynamic template guides you through the process.

A diagram with shapes representing social media platforms helps demonstrate your strategy. Whether discussing content development, engagement methods, or influencer marketing, this template helps you organize and communicate your ideas. Download this template and use your ideas to produce memorable presentations.

Template 5: Performance KPI Dashboard to Measure Results of Paid Social Media Plan

Peter Drucker, a renowned expert in the field of marketing, said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. " This is where this template for evaluating the efficacy of a social media strategy comes in. Using this robust template, businesses can monitor the efficacy of their sponsored social media posts and get insight into campaign key metrics .

This dashboard can track important metrics like social media presence, active user base, page impressions, and page likes in one convenient location. You may wow your audience with this professionally written template for social media planning . This template is available for instant download. Take your sponsored social media advertising to new heights with the help of this template or advertising campaign plan templates .

Template 6: Social Media Plan PPT Design

Envision if you had a professionally created, aesthetically appealing PowerPoint presentation to showcase your social media marketing plan . That will be a fantastic way to capture clients. And in doing the same, these template samples will help. The PPT Design revolutionizes social media tactics. The eight steps of this dynamic design highlight major channels, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Chat, and Blog.

This template is your secret weapon when presenting your social media plan to customers, coworkers, or stakeholders. Just plug in your text and images, and see your presentation come to life before your eyes. 

Template 7: Social Media Planning Strategy Template

Starting a social media campaign with a plan is certain to succeed. Get your social media efforts in line with your company goals with the help of our social media plan strategy template that walks you through an eight-step approach. These are Learn, Project Objectives, Establish Governance, Define Activities, Develop Capabilities, Measure & Refine, Engage in Conversation, and Listen.

With this guide as a starting point, you can map out your whole social media strategy, from setting objectives and identifying your audience to choosing the best channels and developing engaging content. A lot of thought is put into each step so that you may make good choices and increase your social media influence.

Social media planning may benefit from this template from initiation to execution , whether you're an experienced marketer or just getting started. Improve your online reputation by taking charge of your social media strategy. To maximize the effectiveness of your social media operations, download this template.

Ready to Rule the Social Media Segment?

The 7 best social media plan templates with samples and examples from SlideTech will transform your digital marketing approach. They have several professionally created templates to meet your requirements. Also, you can leverage our digital marketing templates for better growth. Let your imagination flow, and watch your social media strategy expand your company.

FAQs on Social Media Plans

What is a social media plan.

A social media plan outlines a strategy to use social media to further a company's marketing or commercial goals. It's a guide for anyone who wants to reach their target audience on social media, whether they're a company or an individual. 

You should expect to find information about your intended audience, a content strategy, platform selection, publishing schedule, engagement methods, analytics, and measurement in a social media plan. It's a useful tool for directing your social media marketing efforts toward your goals, whether increasing brand exposure and website traffic or fostering interaction among your target audience.

What should a social media plan include?

A complete plan should incorporate important features to guarantee a successful social media strategy. Include well-defined aims and targets that mesh with the larger company's plans. It should also specify who the brand is aimed at and what makes it special. The social media channels, content strategy, and posting schedule should all be included in a social media plan. 

In addition, it needs audience interaction and connection-building strategies. Incorporating metrics and analytics allows you to monitor progress and make educated choices. Last but not least, a social media plan should include a crisis management strategy and procedures for dealing with any concerns. These components are essential for a social media strategy to direct marketing activities and provide results successfully.

What are the 6 steps to a social media plan?

Six main components make up a well-rounded and efficient social media plan:

Establish definite goals: Establish what you want to accomplish via your social media efforts. This might be anything from raising brand recognition and website traffic to lead generation.

Set Target Audience: Knowing your audience to address their needs and interests with relevant content and marketing is essential.

Carefully choose your channels: Check whether your intended audience and company goals are represented on social media sites. Target the channels where your target demographic spends the most time.

Create a plan for your content: Make a strategy for the information you want to publish, including interesting and useful blog entries, articles, images, and other media. 

Audience Interaction: Take advantage of audience interaction strategies by replying to their comments, emails, and mentions. Start conversations and take part in ones that interest you.

Constantly evaluate progress: Utilize analytics tools regularly to monitor your social media success. Monitor KPIs like exposure, interaction, and conversions to fine-tune your approach.

What are the four stages of a social media plan?

Generally speaking, a social media strategy has four parts:

Planning and Research: In this, you will learn as much as possible about your intended audience, your rivals, and the state of your industry. 

Content Creation: Developing a content strategy and producing high-quality content consistent with the brand and appeals to the target audience constitutes this stage. 

Implementation and Engagement: The next step is to put your strategy into action by publishing and promoting your content; interacting with your audience is crucial.

Analyze and optimize: The next step is to analyze and optimize your social media performance using various metrics and analytics tools. You may learn from this what is successful and what might want some tweaking.

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