Social Media Marketing - 4 step plan for small businesses

Hey Sports Fans! Haroon Rashid. Finisher Creative. And this is all about how you can write a social media marketing plan. Right. So, the number one thing to do is always start with your website. The website is the central element in your online marketing plan. It needs to be right. If your website is not right, everything else will fail. There will be a... a little link to a video that I've done about the basic anatomy of an online marketing plan, that you can check out. But the social media is actually here and your website is there. And the two are linked together but they work together in harmony. The actual plan is that you need to be driving traffic from social media to your website. That's it really! Because your website is supposed to be a lead-generating machine. There's probably going to be another link somewhere on the screen that'll take you to another video that I've done about that. Content marketing is brilliant isn't it? So, once you've got your website sorted out, then you have to go back to your marketing plan. What is your plan? If you don't have a plan, how are you going to know what to do? Anyway. So, you need to determine, "What am I trying to achieve with social media?" "What is my business trying to do?" Because, are we trying to generate a lot of leads? Are we trying to retain customers? Are we trying to raise brand name awareness? Are we trying to educate our audience or our customers about a new product or service that we're going to be launching soon? So as you can see, all those different strategies are going to require you to use social media in different ways. So once you've got the plan sorted, you'll then determine your goals. Everybody hates that word, 'goals'. But they're so, so, so important. Because how can you hit a target that you can't see? Sure, right? So, once you've got the goals sorted out, you'll then determine, "OK, well which platforms are going to be the best for what we're trying to do?" Which social media platforms should we use? Because Facebook is great for things like competitions. If you're going to try and drive traffic to your website, Twitter is a great way to do that. If it's a very visual thing - maybe if you're a cake maker or maybe if you've got like a design business or something, you could use Instagram or Pinterest or something like that. But either way you don't have to go on every single social media site. I'm not! I'm only on the ones that you know, are actually applicable to my business and where my customers hang out. And I reach those customers how they like to be reached on the places that they like to hang out. So that is the rough step that you need to take to create a good social media marketing plan.