How does a social media marketing plan succeed?

Social media marketing has gone from being an option to being an absolute necessity. These platforms have fundamentally changed marketing, and marketers have shifted their attention from newspaper ads, radio and television ads, and huge street signs to digital marketing via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat… and many more. Almost 90% of marketers put their efforts into social media marketing to increase awareness of their business, and 75% say they have increased traffic to their websites.

Social media marketing in Egypt can be a great way to help you connect with your customers, market your products and interact better, but only if you do the process right away from the idea that you have to be on those networks just to be there. Here are the steps that will help you succeed in creating an effective social media marketing plan:

1.The importance of the plan in social media marketing?

According to the American Marketing Association: “Marketing planning is the process of setting goals for marketing activity and defining and scheduling the steps necessary to achieve these goals.” Planning is the compass for achieving goals, through which you determine the main reason for your use of communication networks, and with it you will know the roadmap that you will take to reach the desired success in Marketing through social media, planning is a very valuable process that can greatly contribute to enhancing your image on social networks. It also helps to define your trends, formulate priorities, and to build an effective plan you need to answer these questions:

• What is the purpose of my presence on social media?
• What is the target audience and what are their needs?
• What kind of content do I plan to publish and how will it contribute to improving the lives of customers?
• How do competitors meet customer needs on social networks?

2.Target the right customer

When you know the right customer that you should target on social networks, you will cut half the way to success in developing a strategic plan for social media marketing, make sure that the target audience is specifically defined, because this will help you direct the content to the ideal category, the marketing plan can Significantly fail if you go to the wrong audience.

Targeting the right customer on social networks is not enough. You need to understand your audience and their needs by talking to them directly by asking questions and getting answers, conducting surveys, or observing the interaction between competitors and the customer audience, and knowing how they listen to their reviews and how they respond.

The most obvious way to plan for your audience in social media marketing is to collect enough data to know: their age, geographic location, occupation, income, personal interests, problems they have that your brand can solve, and also what social networks they use, When are they most active on those networks, and what content do they prefer.

3. Prepare the content that customers like

With enough information about the audience, you can begin to prepare for the specific content that your customers' audience wants and can share widely with their friends and followers.

There are several vital steps that you must take before you start creating and curating engaging content to share on your social media channels, including diversifying the different content marketing trends that can be shared on social networks such as: images, posts, videos, infographics, articles , links to e-books..etc

Make sure to focus only on content formats that match your audience's sentiments and the nature of the platform you're using. The content you post on Snapchat is different from the content you provide on Facebook.