4 Steps Recipe to Bake Your Own Social Media Marketing Plan

Are you looking to make personal connections with your fans on social media sites? Do you want to find even better ways to serve their needs and desires? The best technique to getting more personal engagement with your audience is to know which fans to focus on, and when to do it. Below you can learn all about how you craft your own social media marketing plan that can help you achieve these kind of intimate customer connections, ultimately yielding concrete improvements in your bottom line.

Step 1: Why You Need a Plan?

Many small businesses make the mistake of approaching social media by creating one brand message, customizing that message for different social media platforms, and calling that sufficient. While that strategy can be effective, it does rely on the assumption that the needs of the target audience will be the same from channel to channel.
 
In truth, your target audience will have different needs depending on how far down the buying cycle they may be. By accommodating position the customer is in the buying cycle, you place the customer first, giving a more customer-centric focus to your marketing. It is almost certain to produce better results.

Step 2: Use the Buying Cycle

The buying cycle begins before your potential buyers are aware that they're potential buyers, and extends beyond their first purchase. Understanding each step down the cycle each fan takes is important because the goals of your content and the behaviors you want to inspire will change depending on where your audience is in cycle.
 
For example, for those who aren't yet knowingly in the market to buy, content needs to show them what kind of problems they face, how your products or services are capable of solving those problems. By contrast, those who are further down the buyer cycle are looking more for product information and service comparisons in order to make well-informed purchase decisions. If you end up serving content aimed at customers in one part of the cycle to customers who are in a totally different part, this mismatch will cause the effectiveness of your presentation to greatly suffer. That's why it's vital to customize your interaction with consumers in the depending on where they stand within the buying cycle.

Step 3: Strong Employee Matching

The right employees to talk to your customers may vary from department to department. Within the marketing department, you may find talent that understands how to do a hard-sell, or how to explain the value of your products. However, you may have to look outside the marketing department to find those who are capable of effective one-on-one engagement. This is why it's important to spread social media responsibilities to several people rather than leaving it up to one or two.
 
After you've identified some candidates to take on specific engagement tasks, set some goals for them, and consider creating new social media accounts to give them more direct access to their target customers. This will allow you to generate engagement through the entire purchase cycle, and ultimately generate new customers, repeat purchases, and long-term business relationships.

Step 4: Cater your Messages to Individual Personas

One quick and easy way to categorize your customers in the buying cycle is with three different types of personas: the pre-purchase, purchase-ready, and post-purchase customer.

Pre-Purchase:
In the first category, you're looking to discover consumers who want to buy, but haven't yet made a purchase. In short, you're trying to attract prospective leads. This means selecting keywords that are relevant specifically to these individuals, which may include mentions of your competitors, your industry, or even specific services. Here you want to create campaigns designed to increase your fan base, and closely monitor the conversation surrounding the people who engage with you.

Purchase-Ready: 
The purchase-ready customer is characterized by consumers who are looking for relevant product and service data. Marketers usually know how to speak to these people by identifying all the criteria that are relevance both to selling the unique advantages of your business, and meeting all the relevant needs of your customer. Here you may find it useful to help your sales team directly interact with this persona on social media sites, or even review pages.

Post-Purchase: 
Finally, managing the post-purchase customer is generally all about retention, by helping overcome the issues, providing necessary existence, or otherwise ensuring that they remain brand advocates. This type of role is typically taken on by customer service representatives, with their goal being to reduce or mitigate negative remarks while highlighting the uplifting ones.

Summary

Get started on your own customer-focused social media marketing plan, and be sure to build it around apparent customer desires. Carefully listen to what your fans are saying in order to figure out where they are in the buying cycle, and then determine who from your business is most adequately suited to engage with those people. You may not see results overnight, but if you stick to your plan, you're certain to make steady progress towards your next sale.

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