How a Social Media Plan Can Help You be More Productive with Your Marketing in 2022

If one of your intentions in your business is to become more productive with your marketing this year, creating a social media plan could be just the thing to get you there.

Like with any business or marketing plan, creating a specific and focused plan for your social media can help you know where to direct your time and resources enabling you to not only be more productive, but to get better results from your social media marketing too.

In this blog, I want to talk about how to create a social media plan and the best way to use it through your business year ahead to meet your goals and objectives in 2022.

A social media plan can help you set goals

Clear goals are essential if you’re going to find the right way of meeting them. A haphazard approach to social media marketing is only going to zap away your time and energy, but clearly defined goals can help you take the right steps and build momentum toward meeting your goals.

For example, you want 100 new Twitter followers. When do you want them by? The end of the month might be pushing things, how about six weeks? Ok, so what actions are you going to take to get those new followers? What kind of content will attract people? How often do you need to be posting to have enough new people see your posts to get those 100 new followers?

Hopefully, you can see how setting a goal can prompt the questions you need to be asking yourself to discover the steps you need to be taking and create an action plan to make sure they’re taken.

Ensure you’re using the right social media channels for your business

Let’s say you want 100 new followers on Facebook. You currently have 35 likes on your business page, and it’s been that way for six months. Why do you think that is? Is it because you’ve not been posting and interacting enough on Facebook, or is it because your ideal audience aren’t using Facebook at all?

Creating a social media plan can help you to really analyse what’s going on with your social media marketing, what’s working and what isn’t, and why that might be the case. Rather than wasting time and resources on a channel that isn’t going to get the results you’re looking for it’s better to direct them to a channel that will help you achieve your goals much faster.

Social media channels evolve over time, it’s quite common for people to change the channels they use or to use them differently than before. What might have worked well for you in the past may no longer be working the same way not because you’re doing something wrong, but simply because your audience has moved elsewhere.

Realign yourself with your target audience

Many of us did the target audience research and created a marketing avatar when we created our business and marketing plans, but when was the last time that you evaluated and amended it?

Are you the same person that you were five years ago, or even last year? The answer is probably not. Our experiences help us to learn and adapt as we get older and so what we do also changes to reflect that. We might not be aware of this process happening but it’s there consistently whirring away in the background. And it’s exactly the same for our clients.

For example, you might have put down three years ago that your ideal client enjoys reading psychology magazines on their daily commute into work. Is that the same now? Many of us are no longer commuting because we’re working from home, so does she still read those magazines or digest the information in another format?

Taking the time to check in with your marketing avatar to ensure that it’s still accurate is vital if you’re going to make sure your social media marketing efforts aren’t wasted. Even the smallest of changes can impact on how your ideal client engages with marketing, and the world in general.

A social media plan will ensure you have the right resources at your disposal

One of the biggest headaches and time drainers when creating social media posts is finding the right photos. It can literally take hours to find just the right image you’re looking for that’s royalty-free, free to use, and hasn’t been used by everyone else (spoiler alert, it has!).

Creating a social media plan can help you see the resources that you need at a glance before you start creating and scheduling your content. You can spend time finding a good image bank that meets your needs in advance, you can work out the best social media apps for scheduling your content before you start uploading, and you can keep an eye out for any special offers for paid tools that can save you even more time in the future.

Planning and preparation are very much the key with successful social media marketing.

You can tweak your social media plan often

Think of your social media plan as a living document that can be continually edited and updated to suit you. Met those goals? Great, time to add some new ones. Something not working as planned? Ok, time to check the analytics and have a rethink about that particular strategy.

Good planning is about learning from your mistakes and doing things differently next time, so keep that in mind with your social media plan. It’s not set in stone, if it’s not working change it as much as you need to until it does. If you’re really stumped, why not consider outsourcing to a marketing consultant like myself to help you get back on track?

I hope this blog has given you some ideas on how to create your social media plan and use it get the best results possible from your social media marketing in 2022. Keep an eye out on my own social media and blogs for some great tips and tricks this year, and as always, if you need any help please don’t hesitate to get in touch.