My Experience Planning a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Over the past few weeks, I have been cultivating a social media marketing plan for a local Real Estate Company, American Caribbean Real Estate. American Caribbean sought to create a comprehensive social media marketing plan to generate leads by increasing property inquiries and home sales through paid social media ads and content creation.
A social media marketing plan contains more information than just a posting schedule and some photos to post. The process entails conducting a significant amount of research on the company’s current social media marketing strategy, industry, mission, vision, story, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and more. A social media marketing plan summarizes every strategy and tactic you plan to utilize to achieve your goals for the social media campaign. This plan is intended to guide your actions and provide key performance indicators to let you know whether you’re succeeding or failing.
A social media marketing plan is intended to be very specific; the more precise, the more effective it will be. The key is to refrain from including broad information. Be so specific that someone reading the plan for the first time will know what the goal is, how you plan to achieve the goal, how long the goal will take to accomplish, and why the goal was chosen. When it comes to social media, every single post, reply, comment, and like should serve a purpose which should be thoroughly explained in your plan.
After researching the company, I understood their company’s story, mission, vision, strengths, weaknesses, room for improvements, and more. The summary of the performance I conducted informed me of their current social media strategy, which ultimately provided insights into what was currently working for their audience and what was not. The performance summary notified me that their most robust platform presence was on Facebook, with a follower count of over 14,000. Although the company has a high following of 14,438 people, the engagement level that the posts and content received is not high. Data showed that lifestyle content such as videos and photos about sunsets, fishing, boating, and more, received higher engagement rates than property listing content on their Facebook page. The lifestyle content received a significant amount of interaction (comments, likes, shares) compared to the posts featuring property listings or recent sales. Video content had also proved to be a strategy that works for American Caribbean’s current social media strategy.
Now that I understood what was working and not working for them, I could craft a general objective, specific objectives, strategies, and tactics for how I would implement and improve their social media strategy. Additionally, I knew precisely which platforms needed improvement and which ones the company should focus on to reach their desired target audience.
Having a clear understanding of their goal and knowing exactly how I was going to achieve that goal proved to be incredibly rewarding and beneficial to our strategy.
Other information collected to create this plan included a consumer analysis, which informed me who their target audience was and what behaviors, interests, and platforms that utilize; a content analysis, which informed me of the content they were currently posting and what was successful and what was failing, and more. Further, I developed a measurement system for the company to follow in order to track their success utilizing a social media dashboards, key metrics to focus on, analytics guidelines, and a customer journey map so they could understand who their target audience was, where to reach them, and with what content.
All in all, this was an incredible experience and allowed me to assist this company in achieving its goals of increasing property listing inquiries and home sales. If you are interested in creating a social media marketing strategy, contact me today!
