How To Create An Effective Social Media Marketing Plan For Your Startup

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would agree that social media is a powerful marketing tool. So much so that many startups depend solely on their social media marketing plan to create brand awareness about and/or sell their products.

Social media has the power to kickstart a startup and catapult it to success. This is largely attributed to the fact that social media caters to a wide global audience. Startup marketing success for startups is only possible if there’s a strong social media marketing plan in place.

It may be a bit overwhelming to come up with an effective social media marketing plan, given that there are so many platforms, content styles, and varied strategies.

From chasing user-generated content to using AI-powered chatbots, social media marketing is a space that moves forward at breakneck speed. Precisely why we have put together a quick guide to help you come up with a social media marketing plan that’s not only effective but also simple to create.

8 Step Guide To Building A Killer Social Media Marketing Plan

1. Be clear about your goals and objectives

It is easy to get influenced by what you see around you, especially on social media. You may be tempted to emulate other brands’ but it is essential to focus on building a social media marketing plan that takes into account your startup’s goals and objectives and not someone else’s.

This makes it important for you to first chalk out your goals and objectives that need to be achieved through your social media initiative.

For instance, if you are running an apparel brand with a sizable Instagram following, the focus could be on enhancing sales as opposed to, say, only creating awareness. Instagram’s visual format allows brands to display their product in a beautiful way to the right target audience.

On the other hand, if you are running a B2C tech product startup, you could use Youtube videos to spread awareness about your products. You will probably have to start with the kind of content that users are looking for and make your product relevant through the content.

So the first step is to understand where your company stands in its lifecycle, the kind of products or services that it offers, and then write down your objectives.

2. Different missions for different platforms

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is to miss the context-to-content approach. While it is possible to share similar content across all of your social media channels, sharing the same content is not the best approach.

Social media marketing plans need to consider the uniqueness of every platform and develop a separate mission statement for each one of them.

Let’s say your company builds AI-powered toy robots that can answer questions and have conversations among other things.

Maybe the mission statement for each of your social channels will look like this.

Youtube — to inform existing and potential users about your products through interesting use-case videos, explainers, and humanize the brand.

Instagram — to engage existing and potential users with short videos that make them happy and pictures that make your product aspirational

Twitter — to engage with and build a community of tech enthusiasts through participating in AI and the future of IoT conversations.

3. Work well in advance

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Originally published at https://get.tech on January 30, 2020.