Create a Winning Social Media Marketing Plan

With 96.4% of Aussies between 16 and 64 using social media, no business can afford to pass up on the opportunities offered by social media marketing.

But you already know that, and that’s why you’re here.

When you break it down, there are two big social media marketing strategies to focus on, organic social and paid social. Here’s how we look at them:

Organic social

• What is it? It’s about building a community of engaged followers who interact with your content
• What are the goals? Usually the key objectives are brand awareness, increasing website traffic, website conversion and ROAS

Paid social

• What is it? Put simply, this is all about reaching your target audience using paid advertising strategies
• What are the goals? The goals for paid social will vary from business to business but are usually ROAS, sales, leads, website traffic and brand awareness

Looking to make big wins with your social media strategy but not sure where to start? You’ve come to the right place!

But before you can understand the steps you need to take to create a winning social media marketing plan, it’s important to understand the why.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

When social media marketing is done right, you can get some serious bang for your buck capturing sales-qualified leads and feeding the insights back into your above the line campaigns.

✅ Cost-effective lead generation

When it comes to generating leads, social media can deliver outstanding results. But don’t take our word for it, let the facts and figures speak for themselves:

51% of B2B marketers say that social media resulted in lead generation and sales growth. Closer to home, our social media marketing agency skyrocketed student applications by 42.86% year-on-year using these platforms.

Now it’s over to you to do the same.

✅ Sales and revenue

If you feel weary about the hype over social media marketing for lead generation, we get it. Unless you’re seeing results in your sales and the bottom line, social media marketing can feel like mucking around with tire-kickers.

But with a data-driven social media strategy, you can achieve those sales results you’ve been chasing.

To give you an idea of what’s possible, check out how we recently boosted sales for an RTO by increasing student enrolments by 32% using a combination of digital advertising, organic social media content and marketing automation.

✅ Insights and reporting

What a lot of businesses don’t realise about reporting is that it is more than just evidence that your social media marketing plan is working.

Reporting is actually your secret weapon to optimise your results year-on-year.

A winning social strategy is going to capture data about your users and their online behaviour and decisions, and how this changes over time. If you can collect data that shows intent markers, like timeframe to purchase or budget, then you can improve your social media marketing campaign and how you understand your customers.

How to create a social media marketing plan

Social media is evolving every year with new cultural shifts and features, so you need to have your finger on the pulse.

The question of how to start social media marketing really comes down to learning from the data you’ve collected previously and being flexible with your approach. People change, platforms change, expectations change. So don’t expect to set a plan in stone for years.

Here are some social media strategy ideas to get your plan started:

1. A cross-platform approach

The social media platforms you choose to market on really depend on the audience you are trying to connect with and the products and services you are trying to sell.

Be where your audience is.

Most businesses will need a cross platform approach to their social media strategy. But don’t fall into the trap of trying to have a presence on every social media platform. Do one or two really well and the ROI will follow.

Find out where your audiences spend most of their time and integrate their preferred platforms seamlessly into their buyers’ journey. This could mean creating more animated content for Stories or user-generated content on TikTok, or both!

Our social media marketing agency is a certified Facebook partner agency, which means if Facebook is a platform you’re considering, we have the expertise to help you get the most return on your marketing investment.

2. Mobile-first

98% of Australian users access social media via a mobile device.

While that fact is becoming ever more widely known, many businesses still don’t practice mobile-first marketing. This needs to be your approach for every part of the campaign – from the look and feel of your images, to the number of fields in your forms and amount of text.

Ensure your social media marketing strategy is optimised for the mobile experience.

3. Content fit for purpose

You might choose to focus your Facebook social media marketing on the latest product updates, while YouTube is the home of product tours and reviews.

In order to create the best user experience, it’s important that your content is tailored to the specific platform it is being run on.

This will also help to provide value on each platform, where someone isn’t able to access the same thing on another social handle. This is a common mistake we see time and time again with businesses who share the same content across all channels.

While there’s nothing wrong with re-purposing content across different platforms, it’s important to make sure the content feels native and offers real value.