How to Create a Killer Social Media Marketing Plan

Whether you’re just starting out in business or looking to diversify into new marketing avenues, you might be wondering how to develop a social media marketing strategy that will support the expansion of your e-commerce business.

We wrote this article to give you some pointers and tricks, and thus help you achieve the same level of success. Because it’s well known that social media is a marketing channel that many e-commerce brands have already used successfully to rocket their stores’ growth. We have you covered whether you intend to use Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram for business.

Let’s go!

Why Create a Social Media Marketing Plan?

We mentioned above that there are several e-commerce brands that have already established themselves, so it won’t be easy to make your store stand out from the competition.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with the proverb, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” This sentiment is particularly true when you’re marketing your e-commerce business.

It’s essential that you have to develop an extremely successful social media marketing strategy if you want to increase your chances of success.

After your e-commerce store starts bringing in a steady stream of income, you’ll be able to scale your marketing efforts even further, which will help you to further accelerate your growth.

Creating Social Media Marketing Goals

If you haven’t established these goals, you won’t be able to measure your ROI or demonstrate that social media marketing is an effective strategy for expanding your business. These goals will not only help to shape your social media marketing strategies, but also allow you to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts.

While likes and retweets are nice to see (and worthwhile to measure), they don’t directly impact your business’ growth, so we advise against using them as your main metric for success when you’re setting goals for your social media marketing plan. Instead, we advise you to track sales-related metrics like lead generation or conversion rate.

We suggest adding a special discount code to your social media posts if you choose to track the quantity of leads generated by social media marketing, as this will help you comprehend how you attracted your customers.

A good indication that the content of a particular social media post resonates well with your audience is if a discount code from that post is used more frequently than others.

This is an example of a goal that adheres to the S.M.A.R.T. framework: Each goal you set for your social media marketing efforts should be related to all of these points.

Within a month, I want to generate at least one sale from each post I make promoting my products, which will include an attractive image of the product and a succinct summary of its key attributes. “I want to use social media marketing to advertise the newest products that I’ve added to my store. I’ll grow my audience with engaging content, such as posts, images, and videos, on Facebook, where I’ll concentrate most of my efforts.

The S.M.A.R.T. framework can be applied to your own social media marketing plan, even though this example is targeted specifically at an e-commerce business owner who has just launched their store.

Launching and Optimizing Your Social Media Accounts

It’s not hard to do, and it can pay off once your social media marketing efforts scale, so if you’ve already tried social media marketing for your business, make sure that these accounts are optimized to help you reach your goals.

If you’re posting on Instagram, try using hashtags as they can help you expand your reach. To start, optimize your posts, whether they are text or images, for each network on which you are posting.

In order to give your audience more ways to interact with your content and to give you a wider social media reach overall, you can also cross-promote your social media accounts. For example, if your Snapchat following has surged, let your audience know that you’re also posting on Instagram and Facebook. Both wins!

In the bio sections of your social media accounts, it’s a good idea to include a direct link to your e-commerce store, which enables people who enjoy your content (but aren’t familiar with your brand) to browse your merchandise and perhaps make a purchase.

Gaining Inspiration from Your Competitors’ Marketing Plan and Audiences

There must be a great number of Shopify Stores who have succeeded in operating their social media marketing, and you can visit their social media accounts as an audience for inspiration.

By using SimplyTrends, an all-features software focuses on Shopify and dropshipping, you can find out your competitors easily. Input store’s URL or some keywords, and it looks for the most suitable result across 2m stores. With the help of Similar Stores, you can know which media channels they run, click the sign and you can visit them directly.

Besides, you can also use your audience as inspiration for your social media content by observing how they interact with social media and attempting to adopt this approach; it will be more relatable to them and will help you convey a message that resonates. Focusing on producing content that is similar to a popular post type is the fastest way to achieve your objectives.

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.

Don’t be afraid to examine what industry leaders are posting on social media when you’re looking for inspiration. There are countless businesses that are excelling at social media marketing, and we’ve already written an article about the best examples of Snapchat marketing, so take a look!

Bolster Your Social Media Marketing Plan With a Content Calendar

You must ask yourself these four key questions before creating your content calendar:

1. How frequently will I post on social media?
2. What types of content will I post on social media?
3. How will my social media posts entertain and inform my audience?
4. How will my posts help me achieve my goals?

We advise outlining these inquiries so you can refer to them each time you publish something on your company’s social media pages.

There are several platforms you can use to build your social media content calendar, including Hootsuite and Buffer, both of which let you schedule social media posts in advance based on the platform of your choice. You won’t have to worry about manually posting everything at specific times as a result.

When using a social media scheduling tool, we advise scheduling every post at the beginning of the week so that it will go live at the times you specify while you concentrate on managing the rest of your business.

When using social media for your business for the first time, experiment with a variety of content types, fill up your content calendar, and note what content performs best. Your future social media efforts will be enhanced and optimized with this.

Creating a Social Media Marketing Plan Using Templates

You can move on and use a social media plan template as a launching point for your strategy now that you are aware of the significance of developing a social media marketing plan.

A template will help you picture how your strategy will look, so when the time comes to launch your marketing initiatives, you’ll have a strong vision in mind.

In order to assist you, we’ve created our own template, which demonstrates that developing a social media marketing plan doesn’t have to be difficult. It consists of various questions that will help you assess how your brand should communicate using social media. It is also very actionable because the S.M.A.R.T. framework served as the basis for its design.

Please copy and paste your responses to the following five questions into this template:

This is why it’s so important to set specific, measurable goals — you’ll quickly know what’s working and what isn’t.

1. I intend to post ________ times per day/week/month.
2. What type of content will I post on each day? On Monday, I will post… On Tuesday, I will post… On Wednesday, I will post… On Thursday, I will post… On Friday, I will post… On Saturday, I will post… On Sunday, I will post…

5 Based on your research in step one, consider what kind of content you’ll post and what your brand voice will be. You may want to create a brand style guide that outlines all of this.

1. I will measure the results of my content every (day/week/month)
2. I will come back to review this social media plan in _____ months. You should also set aside some time to come back and review this plan in a few months once you start creating content.
3. Establish specific goals that are both short-term (1–3 months) and long-term (6–12 months) so that you have a clear plan for the future.

Start by concentrating on just one social media channel, and before you do anything else, make sure that the channel is important to your demographic. Then, analyze your audience’s behavior on the channel:

1. Where are my customers?
2. What kinds of people and companies do they follow?
3. What kind of content do they interact with?

This is an important step because it will help you determine exactly how effective this social media site will be for you.

This kind of consistency is essential, so it’s definitely something to carefully consider when creating a social media marketing plan. For example, how often will I post? Set a steady, predictable schedule for your content. The four main topics I will cover in my posts are: 1. 2. 3. 4. My brand’s voice is: My brand’s voice is NOT: 4 Your style guide should be in line with your content calendar. It’s also ideal to have a backlog of preplanned content ready to go.

Use your style guide and content calendar to streamline the process as you create and post your content. Interacting with your audience will help you build a loyal following and may even result in word-of-mouth marketing.

This social media marketing strategy sample we created can be used as a tool to re-examine your social media presence if any adjustments need to be made.

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

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

It’s crucial that you continually test new ideas, pick up new knowledge, and develop as an entrepreneur if you want to stay on top of the game. It’s critical that you monitor the success of your social media marketing campaigns and test what resonates with your audience.

Whether you choose to use UTM codes and track your performance on Google Analytics or choose the built-in analytics that Buffer or Hootsuite offer, you can use the data from your campaigns to optimize for the future.

You can start succeeding on social media by producing fantastic content for your audience. Take the advice in this post as motivation for your own social media marketing initiatives now that you have all the knowledge necessary to develop an effective social media marketing strategy to expand your business.

If you enjoy this article, you can turn to SimplyShop blog website to find more dropshipping tips and ecommerce marketing strategies.

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