10 Questions to Create an Effective Social Marketing Plan

A Social Marketing campaign goes beyond creating a Facebook group or tweeting about your offers. These are actions that must respond to a requirement and achieve a measurable marketing objective that provides a high return on investment .

This is why preparing a social marketing campaign is not a trivial task to be left to an intern simply because he is the only one who already has a Twitter account in the company: In order to define and subsequently successfully execute a social marketing campaign, the motivation, vision and objectives of the campaign must be clear, as well as the resources available to invest, the time and restrictions of the process, etc. All of this will finally allow us to establish a plan that includes strategies that fit our needs.

But how do you develop a plan? This can be defined naturally by website development service answering questions like those in this useful checklist for defining your Social Marketing strategy and in this article on Internal Social Marketing: Developing a Plan, from which I take the most relevant ones and extend them with others:

Why a Social Marketing campaign?
Choose to run a social marketing campaign if your audience is there and if social media makes it easier to achieve the goals you want to achieve.
Are we ready to let go of some control over our brand?
Social media is an open space where we will receive feedback, not only positive, but of any kind that cannot be controlled, which will make us identify elements to improve within our organization and which will be important to respond to effectively. It is therefore important to correctly manage expectations within the organization and communicate all these aspects to decision makers and those responsible for Marketing and Communication.
How will the campaign be integrated into our marketing and communication strategy?
Our organization probably already has a defined strategy and is carrying out other online or traditional marketing actions, and it is essential that social marketing is integrated to benefit from them and get the most out of all the actions carried out in any of them.
Who will approve each of the actions to be executed at the different stages?
Once we identify the strategy and develop a detailed plan to follow: Who will be the decision makers during the project?
What is the Campaign trying to achieve?
Identify what you want to achieve in a measurable way: Double your traffic, increase brand recognition by doubling its mentions, increase inbound links to your site by 100%, improve user engagement by doubling browsing time on the site, increase conversions by 100%, etc.
How will we measure success?
What tools will we use to measure the achievement of objectives? How often will reports be delivered with the results obtained up to that point? To whom will the report be presented?
How long will the campaign run?
The execution time will depend on the objectives you are seeking: Do you want to achieve a specific result over time, in the long term or permanently? You can establish stages that facilitate not only the execution and measurement of the campaign, but also its ongoing management within a comprehensive process.
What will happen once the defined results are achieved?
If the campaign is temporary, it is important to establish from the beginning what will happen once the established objectives are achieved: It can be integrated with a subsequent campaign or establish a continuous maintenance process.
What type of Social Marketing actions will help us achieve our goals and where will they be carried out?
Identify which actions will help you achieve your defined goals effectively: Developing a blog on your website, creating attractive content on your blog that you promote on social networks, interacting with your community, providing customer service and resolving any queries via Twitter, etc.
How many resources will we need to execute the campaign in each of its phases?
Who will give us the information to create the desired presence on social networks? Who will provide us with the content for the blog? Who will update the Facebook page? We will need tools, human resources, information material, etc., which will be important to define and request from the appropriate parties with sufficient time.