Social media allows you to reach out to a wider range of audience.
Every day, a large number of new customers will provide real-time feedback, likes, and comments. You can gain useful information from a deluge of user-generated material, testimonials, and reviews about your products and services.
The practice of developing content for social media platforms in order to promote your products and/or services, build community social media with your target audience, and generate traffic to your business is known as social media marketing. It’s continually growing, with new features and platforms appearing every day.
Most popular social networks in the world: Source
Marketers on top social media platforms strive to make different types of social media content & advertise their products and services so that they can increase brand awareness resulting in increased conversions and better revenue. Consumers continue to participate in many ways after following a business on social media. 91% will go to the business’s website or app, 89% will buy from the brand, and 85% will tell a family or friend about it.
The game, however, is not that simple. Many brands struggle to create interesting content and reach their target audiences.
Also, make sure you are auditing your social media for quality. Use our social media audit tool to make things easy.
Understanding Social Media Outreach
What is social media outreach anyway?
“Ever worked with a media outlet or written a press release for journalists? Have you ever worked with an influencer? Ever considered lead gen from a social channel connecting to your PPC ads or an email outreach campaign? Considering social selling? Your potential client needs you to reach them where they are, online.
Well, crafting your social media strategy with just a social media platform without looking beyond social media outreach you could be missing out. Your social media marketing efforts can and should be tied to company revenue.” ~ Jenn Guidry | Former Director of Marketing | eclincher
With social media outreach playing such a crucial part at the top of the funnel, it’s undesirable to let it remain inadequate for your brand and business. To leverage social media, therefore, you must start off with creating a social media marketing outreach plan that works for you.
A social media outreach plan is a list of step by step activities you want to plan and perform on various social media platforms to accomplish your ultimate goal of enhancing your outreach. It directs your behaviors and tells you whether or not you’re succeeding. Your plan will be more effective if it is more explicit. Keep it short and sweet. Make sure it’s not so lofty and vast that it’s impossible to quantify.
A step-by-step guide on developing an effective social media outreach plan
In this post, we’ll lead you through a seven-step process for developing your own successful social media outreach plan in a step by step manner.
1. Establish your business specific goals
The first step in building a good social media outreach plan is to identify your business objectives and social media goals, as well as having a clear strategy to align the two with one another.
Your company’s goals should be
Specific – Measurable – Attainable – Relevant – Time-bound
This S.M.A.R.T objective framework will guide your actions and help you achieve real-world business outcomes. You should integrate your social media goals into your overall marketing strategy to demonstrate the value of your work and gain audiences’ trust and investment. That is why having a well defined social media outreach plan is crucial to your digital marketing strategy.
2. Identify your audience and buyer personas
It’s critical to understand who your target audience is and what they want to see on social media. As a result, you’ll be able to develop material that they’ll enjoy, comment on, and share. It’s also necessary if you want to convert your social media following into paying clients.
There’s a lot of competition, however, on social media platforms. Every day, more than 800 million tweets are shared on Twitter alone. Why should people interact with your postings instead of those of your competitors on social media?
To entice your audience to interact with you, you must generate content that stands out. When people like, share, and comment on your posts, it tells that they care about what you’re saying. The majority of social media algorithms will then ensure that your subsequent posts are seen by your target demographic or firmographic. They’ll even share your posts with others who share your interests.
The @ZapierApp Facebook post below, for example, addresses a current issue for the brand’s target audience: avoiding repetitive tasks. The copy and creative teams collaborate to provide a basic but critical solution: task automation to save time.
Automate your time-consuming tasks: Source
So, when creating a social media outreach plan, the first step is to determine what your target audience wants to see. Also determine whether they prefer video, image, or text-based content. You could also check to see whether they engage more with certain types of posts. Do your Facebook Stories, for example, perform better than ordinary posts when it comes to marketing? Is your audience more engaged on pages or in groups? You may learn more about their tastes and preferences, as well as if they like amusing, inspiring, or instructional content. Start mini-surveys using tools like polls on social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram if you already have a following.
3. Know your competitors
Social media is transforming the business world. Most of the businesses today utilize social media outereach for marketing objectives. It’s, thus, quite likely that your competitors are also utilizing it. You can conduct study and learn from what they have already accomplished.
Perform a competitor analysis using a specialized competitor analytics tool and learn who your competitors are and what they’re doing to attract new customers. Based on your own social media objectives, this will help you obtain a clear understanding of what the audience expects.
Conducting research on your competitors can assist you in spotting further prospects. You could, for example, focus on networking with a high concentration of your target demographic.
4. Identify the social media platforms you’ll leverage
As a social media marketer, when creating your social meida outreach plan, you must decide which channels you will use to market your content. Interestingly, when it comes to choosing which social platforms your business should use, there isn’t always a right or wrong answer. It’s more about your target audience’s demands and where they spend their time. Therefore, it’s critical to be where your target audience or potential customers are. Also, it’s quite common that today, they might be on one platform and tomorrow, on another. Therefore, being ahead of the curve is always preferable.
For example, if you’re targeting millennials, you might want to concentrate most of your social media outreach efforts on Instagram, because millennials account for the majority of the platform’s 1 billion monthly users.
5. Devise a social media content calendar
You’ll need a content calendar to make sure you’re posting on a regular basis. You must also decide the types of posts you will publish. On Instagram, for example, you may share ordinary posts, stories, reels, and guides. There are also numerous types of media, such as photos, GIFs, and videos. You may even post text and polls.
To keep your audience engaged, you must post these various forms of material on a regular basis. There’s too much competition, and social media algorithms tend to favor regular posters, so just hurrying and posting anything that comes to your mind won’t cut it. Stick to a regular schedule by clearly writing out which media and post types you will share on important dates on your content calendar. This can also make evaluating the effectiveness of your posting strategy easier.
The following is an example of how a team may utilize Google Calendar to keep track of both their editorial and social media schedules to ensure that posts are aligned with fresh blog content. To avoid scheduling conflicts and ensure that campaigns are synchronized, these calendars may easily be shared with numerous teams within the organization.
Pictorial representation of Google Calendar: Source
6. Create engaging content
“People flock to social media for these four main reasons: Sharing, Learning interacting, and marketing.
Sometimes people escape to social media to be entertained and engage with other people they might not normally get the chance to see in person. People also gravitate toward social to learn new concepts or share their own thoughts or videos.
Businesses primarily come to social media to market their products and services. Consumers don’t like to feel like they are being sold to though, and there lies the challenge.” ~Jenn Guidry
So why is this important for your social media outreach?
With billions of people using social media around the world, there’s a good chance that at least some of your followers, or those who are exploring your profile, have seen the content of your competitors. What if they are more impressed by their content as compared to yours? Sounds disheartening, isn’t it!
That’s why, for your social media outreach to be successful, you need interesting content that sticks out and gives people a reason to like and interact with your brand on social media. To create interesting social media content, first conduct market research, as what is engaging relies on the audience.
Consider what your competitors are sharing and how you can promote your products in a unique way to help you get innovative. Also, make use of the capabilities that the platform you’re using has to offer. For example, you may use Facebook Live to communicate the most up-to-date information about a product launch or to run a giveaway.
You may also enlist the support of your present customers and promoters to create content. You can accomplish this by re-posting their material or encouraging them to use a hashtag to share their own stories and photos about using your items.
7. Schedule your post in a timely manner
Using a social media management solution is one of the simplest ways to ensure your social media campaign is spread as planned to a targeted audience. You may use these tools to write descriptions, prepare images and videos, and schedule posts ahead of time.
They also share your material on a regular basis and keep track of all post interactions and engagement for you. Social media management software allows you to focus on other things while saving time.
Businesses are realizing the value a social media software can bring. Jump into any marketing group on Linkedin or Facebook and you will start to see the question: “What company do you use for social media management?”
“We would love if you considered eclincher, but there are a lot of choices out there and we understand it can be overwhelming. We actually wrote an in-depth article explaining the differences.
It actually matters how big your team is, if you are under a corporate umbrella or a part of a franchise, and it also matters how much you can spend.
If you’re an SMB your needs will be different from a corporate enterprise looking for advocacy and robust analytics. Agencies are looking for the most functionality they can get from video marketing, IG reels, and TikTok reach. We get it!
Choose wisely and use the free trials to see where your needs align with your values.” ~Jenn Guidry | Former Director of Marketing | eclincher
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a media outreach strategy?
A media outreach strategy is a plan of action designed to garner positive media attention for a particular product, service, person, or organization. A good media outreach strategy will identify the key targets that your organization should aim to reach out to and develop a custom pitch that outlines why they should cover your story. It’s also important to track your successes and failures so that you can improve your strategy over time.
What is the role of content in outreach and social media?
Good content is key to any effective social media and outreach strategy. When you create content that is compelling, useful, and worth sharing, you help to build an audience for your brand or organization.
What are some good outreach ideas?
There are several outreach ideas you could try on social media:
1. Connect with other relevant pages and share their content.
2. Host a contest or giveaway.
3. Answer questions and provide helpful advice on related topics.
4. Share engaging and entertaining content that followers will enjoy.
5. Make use of influencers to reach a wider audience.
A wrap up
Social media outreach is an effective digital marketing tool. Almost any business can benefit from it if it’s implemented correctly. However, with so many social media platforms to choose from, this is easier said than done.
Additionally, you must continuously publish various types of content on each platform. Creating a strategy that helps your entire marketing team understand what you’re doing is one method to prevent confusion.
Spend a few weeks, or at the very least a few days, conducting extensive research and developing a social media outreach plan that will assist you in achieving your business objectives.
To be on target, know your goals, audiences and competitors. Then identify the social media platforms that you’ll target. Next, create a content calendar, and keep on posting engaging content in a timely manner. With time and experience, you’ll gain expertise in leveraging social media to the growth of your business and revenue.
To keep your posting schedule in line with your social media outreach plan, consider a third-party scheduler which can connect all the major social media platforms in one software.
Enter eclincher.
You need more time in your week, and eclincher’s powerful and intuitive social media management software will help you connect the dots. With a free 14-day trial and personal demo offering, it’s a win-win for your franchise, agency, or business.
