THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA PLANNING PROCESS & STEPS
Find below the best social media planning process and steps. The top social media planning tips and strategies for successful creative social media planning.
Brought to you by Mau, a Senior Social Media Marketing Specialist and Training Facilitator at eDigital.
SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN PLANNING PROCESS & STEPS
STEP 1: Establish one key campaign goal and secondary objectives
It is good to have exact and trackable key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can see how the campaign is going. Make a list of your top 2/3 campaign deliverables.
A common mistake is to let other team members pile up other KPIs that are not associated with your key campaign goal. You gotta defend your key campaign goal as this will help align it to messaging.
An example: your key campaign goal is to drive booking conversions for a seasonal offer but someone in your team might also want to add on a UGC component and someone else wants to optimise for video views.
It is important to stay focused!
STEP 2: Research
- Get inspired by some of your favourite brands in non-competing sectors.
- Challenge your team to bring something fresh and useful.
- Review past creative: discuss with your team the good and the bad about past social media campaigns.
- Find what is trending in pop culture that is affecting the views, feelings and desires of your audiences and what things/topics your most profitable customers are gravitating towards.
STEP 3: Brainstorm content ideas
You want to consider:
- Your current content calendar
- Your current email marketing calendar
- Your current Adwords and Social Media advertising calendar
- Your influencers’ activity calendar: review the unique angles they feel your brand.
- National, city and community events your brand is participating in.
- List the most popular content people are already sharing the most about your brand on social media or from your blog.
- Feedback from your teams who are based in cities where you serve customers as they might have some interesting insights on how specific things can be interpreted at a local level.
Influencers can be extremely helpful to help you with:
- Identifying gaps in the business
- Bringing a unique perspective on how they feel about your brand.
- Brainstorming creative ideas to ensure the success of your social media content and paid campaigns.
There might be some other competitors who have done, are doing or can easily copy your campaign creative.
It is important to ask yourself:
“How can we make this social media campaign a better story and not easy to be copied?“
Campaign innovation comes from:
- The idea
- The delivery of the idea (message)
- The type of access (medium)
- The expected customer action
Popular this month: The best social media strategy plan – template
STEP 4: Aligned messaging
Campaign messaging should be clear and concise to support your key campaign goal. Use social media listening tools to inform and curate your messaging style. This will help you build empathy, know the history of the topic conversation, prioritise well and go deep into the campaign conversation.
Expert tip: Always remember, social media users already have over-saturated feeds, so for businesses with multiple brands, it is important to isolate the messages and package them up. You do not want to confuse your customers with tons of different messages that in the end, they do not take any action.
Test different types of messaging. For example:
- Message set 1: straightforward promotion or brand feature.
- Message set 2: Fun, playful, edgy, sassy.
- Measure results and see which one works out better for your key campaign objective.
Think about the medium. For example:
- Instagram feed: Polished images, magazine centric, curated
- Instagram Stories/Live: loosen up a little bit, more casual, more authentic.
You might find that the more casual Instagram stories performed better than the overly curated images on your brand feed.
STEP 5: Activation
- Make sure your team has the best social media marketing tools to activate the content and campaigns on social media.
- Ensure your team are clear on what they have to do and how often.
STEP 6: Evaluation & feedback
- Create monthly and quarterly social media reports.
- Evaluate your results against your key primary objective and secondary goals.
- Get feedback from your team and customers.
SOCIAL MEDIA PLANNING CHECKLIST
- Never create a campaign in isolation. Involve key stakeholders.
- Your campaign should support either a business goal, need or challenge
- List internal resources from other divisions to make your campaign a success
- Campaign timeline- Break it down into phases and what should happen in each phase.
SOCIAL MEDIA CREATIVE CAMPAIGN ELEMENTS
- Simple
- Creative
- Engaging
- Sharable
- Personal action: how the viewer can make action and feel proud of it.
- Make it evergreen: create seasonal campaign content pieces that can also be recycled for use after the campaign has ended. When using photographers and videographers you should ask them to grant you perpetual copyrights for the photos produced. You can learn how to ask for copyrights on this article > How to write the best creative photography brief.
Marketers are also reading: The best social media strategy plan template.
Conclusion
Having a structured process for social media planning is important for achieving consistency, strategic alignment and efficiency.
A well-thought social media planning process can help you with effective resource allocation, risk management and measurable results
Social media planning also aids in collaboration and communication ad brand consistency.
By following a predefined process for social media planning, marketers can optimise their social media efforts and maximise their impact on audience engagement, brand awareness, and business growth.
eDigital can help you conceptualise, plan, develop, run and optimise successful digital marketing campaigns that generate leads and sales for your brand.
Our digital marketing services include:
- Strategic planning for social media and other digital marketing channels.
- Online advertising management and optimisation (Search, Display, social media ads and re-marketing).
- Marketing training: social media training and digital marketing training.
- SEO strategy and execution. Including content development (articles, stories, eye-catching and SEO-optimised visuals).
- Celebrity and influencer marketing campaign strategy.
- Brand development. Logo creation, brand personality development and design of marketing materials.
- Consumer contests/competitions/giveaways.
- Email marketing. Dip sequence design and deployment.
- Conversion rate optimisation. It is also called “path to purchase” optimisation.
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THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN PLANNING PROCESS & STEPS
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