THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE IN 2024

The best Social Media Marketing Strategy plan in 2024. You can use our premium Social Media plan template on Google Sheets, Word document or PDF file for 2024.

By Mau, Global Head of Social Media Marketing Strategy at eDigital.

THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE IN 2024

Marketing professionals and business owners are using this premium social media marketing plan template for their small or medium businesses. 

Before you learn how to create a successful social media plan that offers fantastic value for your business, you need to understand what social media planning is.

WHAT DOES SOCIAL MEDIA PLANNING MEAN?

Whether you are using the 4 p’s of the marketing mix model or another marketing strategy framework, the activity of Social Media planning is part of your marketing strategy and should include a series of decisions and actions to be executed on social media channels to either increase sales, profits or brand equity.

Yes, that’s right.

You know you have written a successful social media plan when it is helping you achieve your marketing and business goals.

And – from my long 20 years of experience in business and marketing – there are only three main marketing goals:

  • Grow sales
  • Increase profits
  • Boost brand equity

Below you find a graph that explains how to can achieve your marketing goals.

Business strategies framework eDigital

Business strategies framework eDigital

?? Cool!

Now you won’t let anything else or anyone decide any other objective for your social media plan.

You can go now to your boss and say:

“Mau says that our social media plan should either help us increase sales, profit or brand equity” 

Your boss may say: Who the f*k is Mau?

I was partly joking, you do not need to say that to your boss.

But yes, your only three key main objectives for your social media plan are:

1) increase sales

2) grow profits

2) Boost brand equity

Thousands of other social media “gurus” may tell you other things.

Throw those ideas into the rubbish bin!

You are in the business of making money (increasing sales and/or profits) and boosting brand equity ( which will increase your company valuation). Anything else is rubbish!

WHAT SHOULD BE INCLUDED IN A SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN

A winning social media marketing plan should define the main aim of your brand presence on social media channels and set the parameters for:

  • Why is your brand investing in social media marketing? (the reason)
  • What should your social media activities aim to deliver? (one key objective, max two)
  • How will the social media marketing plan be executed? (actions)
  • Where will your social media executions take place? Which specific social media channels/platforms you will focus on?

Tip: The customer’s age bracket may be a critical demographic consideration when prioritising the social media platforms you will invest most of your time, money and resources (see the below graph). You can also use the Conversation Prism or the social media history timeline that showcases the vast social media landscape.

social media channels by age chart image

social media channels by age chart image

  • When should your social media executions be delivered? Timings and frequency. Seasonality adjustments, etc (Scheduling)
  • What tools and resources will you need and use? Which specific social media training should be offered to your team?
  • Who will be responsible for measuring, auditing, managing, executing, optimising, reporting and presenting the results? (Team involved)
  • How much is the cost of your social media strategy and the expected return on investment? (Budget)

You will need a well-written Social Media Marketing Plan template to create successful social media campaigns that will help you reach the business goals you are already aware of: increase profit or boost brand equity.

Get this best Social Media Marketing Plan template today and grow your business by developing successful Social Media marketing campaigns.

Now, you are about to uncover how to create a winning Social Media Marketing Plan. I will also introduce you to our premium Social Media Marketing Plan template that will streamline the whole process for you and your social media team.

Key questions a professionally-crafted Social Media Marketing plan should answer

  • How your social media plan will help your customers’ purchase journey?
customer journey stages funnel diagram chart framework

customer journey stages funnel diagram chart framework

  • Should your social media activities generate leads or sales or would social media help build just awareness and preference?
  • Do the sales team share the same definition of a lead as the social media marketing team?
  • What social media marketing activities should you invest in now to lay the groundwork for next year?
  • What levels of brand sentiment do we want our social media executions to provide support on?
brand sentiment customer negative positive levels

brand sentiment customer negative positive levels

WHAT IS A SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE?

A successful Social Media Marketing Plan Template is a clear and detailed roadmap of all your social media content and marketing goals, tasks, and deadlines.

An effective Social Media Marketing Plan template should outline repeatable steps, tasks, and documentation required to launch, monitor, track and report your social media marketing campaigns.

ABOUT THIS PREMIUM SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY TEMPLATE

This is an exclusive & premium template you won’t find anywhere else. It is ready on Google Sheets for real-time collaboration or you can also have it as a Microsoft Excel, Word document or pdf.

  • Instant access. Do not wait for anything. Once you pay, you will be redirected to a confirmation page with the link to the template.
  • Secure. Once you access this premium template, you can save securely your copy in seconds on your PC or laptop or keep it on your Google Sheets account. No one else will have access to it unless you permit them.
  • 100% guaranteed delivery. You can always contact us if there is an issue.
  • Fast support. Same-day response to any questions.
  • Access your template anywhere/anytime. Just need an internet connection.
  • Real-time interactive collaboration. You can grant permission to edit your document to other team members and see changes and/or updates in real-time.
  • A universe of add-ons/plugins is available. Bring and manipulate data from your marketing department into your brief document using powerful plugins and add-ons available only on Google Sheets.
  • Turn data into powerful charts. Use the Google Sheets editor to create and customise charts, if needed.
  • Voice typing. Lazy to type? Use Google Sheets voice recognition to fill in your template.
  • Perpetual access. Save the link to the template to always access the latest version of this template anytime.

Do not miss your deadline and present your social media strategy with this premium template today!

THE TOP 7 BENEFITS OF THIS EXCLUSIVE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE

  1. Saves you time. Get this premium Social Media Marketing Plan template and craft your strategy straight away! It includes all you need: worksheets and formulas. You and your team can access it from anywhere as it is been developed as a Google Sheet file for cross-team collaboration in real-time.
  2. Easy campaign planning. With this template, you can identify and plan key social media activities to aid your customer buying process from category awareness to loyalty and advocacy.
  3. Strategy alignment. A successful Social Media Marketing planning process forces you to articulate realistic and measurable objectives, define the metrics that matter, and align your marketing resources around a shared and agreed strategy.
  4. Allocate responsibilities and track progress. Within your Social Media Marketing Plan template,  you should be able to allocate key social media marketing tasks, activities, projects and campaigns to members of your team. Any changes or updates to the responsibilities of your team can be seen in real-time if you use our premium template developed as a Google Sheets file.
  5. Pre-screening of possible future events. Think of it as early detection: if done right and done well, it will help you identify nascent flaws in your execution and strategy before it metastasizes into an actual social media crisis. This will be particularly important as you build out your social media team and ramp up spending.
  6. Results-driven. Planning your social media strategy will help you define the output expected, the input ($$, headcount) required and begin to work through the trade-offs.
  7. Keep track of progress. This Social Media Marketing Plan template has been designed to help you present and track your marketing objectives, strategies and tactical executions and get buy-in from other stakeholders.

Get this Social Media Marketing Plan template today!

BONUS

When purchasing your Social Media Marketing Plan template, you will also receive the below templates and guidelines:

+ Social Media Strategy Presentation Template – On Google Slides ready for cross-team collaboration, you can also save it as a “Microsoft PowerPoint” presentation.

+ Brand Voice Guidelines“. Keep all your content creators on the same page with well-documented brand voice guidelines.

THE TOP 6 REASONS YOU DESERVE A PREMIUM SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE

  1. Get the results you want. You know already that you want to show your boss your social media efforts help to increase sales or boost brand equity. This exclusive template will help you focus on these.
  2. Save time. You can either start from scratch and figure it all out or use a pre-populated template that will save you tons of time.
  3. Easy briefing. By sharing this premium template you can quickly and easily collaborate with your agencies on your social media strategy, activities and tactics.
  4. Keep your boss happy. Your boss will appreciate you putting great effort into crafting and presenting a well-written social media plan.
  5. Use consistent URL tagging. This template offers a premium campaign tagging tool so you have unified tagging parameters, ensuring your social media campaign tagging and measurement are right.
  6. Keep track of progress. This template offers well-structured sections to manage and track all social media marketing activities so you keep track of all progress delivered by your team, agencies or contractors.

WHAT TO HAVE READY BEFORE USING THIS TEMPLATE

Key aspects to transfer across include:

  • A summary of your business strategy to help you either increase profit or brand equity.
  • Your company’s mission and vision
  • Your brand positioning statement, brand personality and brand values.
  • Your branding guidelines

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ An Awesome Template

We are happy with our new template, we use it daily. Saved us so much time, really useful for managing stakeholders’ approvals and expectations 

Kelly D.   Verified purchaser

Do not miss your deadline and present your social media strategy with this premium template today!

WHAT’S INCLUDED

This Best Social Media Marketing Plan template  includes:

  • The strategy section. Before you start your social media activation, it is critical you and your team design the social media strategy for your brand.
  • Branding elements section. In this section of the spreadsheet, the template asks you to write down key information about your brand including what issues/problems the brand is trying to solve. Unique elements brought to market: product features, range, delivery, customer service, rewards, program, convenience and cost-saving. This social media marketing plan template will also ask you to define your brand mission, vision, values, language and design.
  • The budget split section. Interactive worksheet with pre-defined formulas for budget allocation per channel and actual spending so you can easily track the progress of your social media spending.
  • Monthly campaign report section. Different cells for own media vs earn media.
  • Campaign flow section. You can map out all the social media activities to reach every single customer touchpoint within the Customer Purchase Journey.
  • Campaign tagging section. A specific sheet to add specific targeting parameters to each of your social media campaigns.
  • Social media calendar section. In this section of the spreadsheet, you will be defining the top tactical social media activities you will be performing every month.
  • WIP (“Work in progress” task list) section. When working with a different team and/or on multiple projects, it is important to have a list of key social media activities/tasks you and your teams need to track and ensure they get completed.
  • Engagement benchmark section. A separate sheet for a social media engagement performance benchmark. Compare your engagement levels against your competitors.
  • Url generator section. Are you new to social media URL tagging? A specific section has been dedicated to creating tagging parameters for all your social media URLs. Just add a few parameters and the tool will do the magic!
  • Weekly post log section. Access an organised way to see what you or your team have posted during the week.
  • Live streams calendar section. A visual monthly calendar to pinpoint your live streams. Useful if you go live on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook or Instagram.
  • Activation ideas log section. Everyone at your company has ideas. It is great to listen to them all and have a place to record them. Depending on your key objectives and top priorities, it is natural that some ideas will get actioned and others will have to wait.
  • Inspiration log section. You or your team members might find great inspirational social media posts on other social media accounts. This specific sheet allows you to log all those inspirational posts so you can always go back and make use of them.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Incredible value!

The feedback from the team has been wonderful. We have customised the template to fit our strategy and it is been applicable for managing our unique social media campaigns. 

Allan  S. Verified purchaser

GET INSTANT ACCESS TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE

STEPS:

  • Complete payment on Paypal. It is fast, secure and easy!
  • Once payment is completed, choose “Go back to merchant” to be redirected to a confirmation page where you can find the link to the template on Google Sheets.
  • Any issues, you can always contact us. We respond in less than 8 hours.

THIS PREMIUM TEMPLATE WILL ALSO OFFER YOU:

  • ✅  Social Media Management Software Request for Proposal  – The top 50 questions you must ask your potential social media management software provider. Choosing a social media management solution can be a tough process. The questions are broken out by different solution functionalities and you can delete any question that isn’t a consideration for your organisation. You can also add lines for functionality not listed. Once you have decided what features and solutions your team needs, brand this document and send it to providers. If you have your own RFP template, just pull out all of the questions you thought were important and put them in your own document.
  • ✅  Global Holiday and Celebrations Calendar. Whether you’re raising awareness for World Mental Health Day or celebrating your inner foodie with National French Fry Day, there’s a national holiday to link your brand to. Pro marketers like you rely on hashtag holidays to get people to engage, share content, promote a cause or celebrate. However, with the vast number of hashtag holidays celebrated across the globe, it’s difficult to realise which version of the hashtags is correct and the most used. Access now the World’s most popular holidays and celebrations with correspondent hashtags.

Do not miss your deadline and present your social media strategy with this premium template today!

social media strategy celebrity funny meme

Social media strategy celebrity funny meme. Ridiculing celebrities has become one of the top ethical issues in Marketing

Next: Get your social media marketing plan template now!

UPDATING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN

You will adapt this Social Media Marketing Plan as you bring learnings and insights from your key social media metrics, sales data, marketing data and customers’ feedback, competitor review and observation and evaluation of your industry environment.

ASSIGNING RESPONSIBILITIES TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN 

Your Social Media Marketing team should be actively involved in the production and tracking of all the elements committed in your Social Media Marketing Plan. Assigning responsibilities in advance will clear up any questions to make sure everyone is on the same page.

MEASURING PROGRESS AND SUCCESS 

The last phase during the execution of your Social Media Marketing Plan is to ensure you are measuring progress, tweak the template accordingly and have your success metrics ready to be compared with your initial baseline.

TEST ASSUMPTIONS  AND TAKE DECISIONS

Once you have a first draft of the plan, you should stress test the assumptions for achievability. For example, can you hire the number of people you are planning to hire? Have you factored in ramp-up time? Have you factored in social media marketing training and/or software management and analytics costs? Have you factored in customer attrition?

Eventually, a company is not a democracy, and planning is only useful if you make choices along the way. At the same time, you need to make sure your marketing team buy into your social media plan, including the key assumptions/metrics. And if they don’t really buy in, then you need to make the choice of changing the plan or letting them go.

Annual Social Media Marketing planning, done well, is an opportunity to set the overall direction for your company, empower the team, and deliver clear SOcial Media Marketing leadership and best practices.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR A PRODUCT LAUNCH

Social media platforms have brought consumers closer to their favourite brands than ever before, and many people follow their favourite brands to stay up to date with the latest product launches. Apple, for example, turns to YouTube to announce the newest iPhone model. In 2019, Apple live-streamed the product reveal for the public for the first time ever, drawing nearly two million viewers. Social media surely has become one of the most popular marketing channels for brands to launch new products: you can update followers in real-time and consumers can provide brands with direct feedback about their initial impressions.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING DURING A CRISIS

Marketers are also using social media to broadcast important updates during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortly after the pandemic started, In-person business models shifted to online or virtual models. Some brands used their Twitter account to keep customers up to date with the latest policy changes while remaining transparent about the steps they were taking to address certain challenges. Social media is often the first place where customers will turn for product and service information, so be prepared to share timely updates as soon as they’re available.

Next: Get your social media marketing plan template now!

THE 3 ESSENTIAL TWEAKS TO IMPROVE YOUR CURRENT SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

  • Customer profiling tweak. Is your current social media strategy really taking care of your most profitable customer segment? Your most profitable customer segment tends to be that 20% of customers bring 80 per cent or more of your revenue. How is your social media inspiring them to buy more quantity, more often, more premium or bring more of their friends?
  • Content tweak. Are you only sharing info that talks about you and your products and/or services and engagement rates are low? You might want to try re-sharing real authentic customer stories using your products or services. We at eDigital, for example, have found success publishing micro-niche “ever-green” content that solves very specific digital marketing issues. Some of this content does not necessarily sell any of our services and is part of our top 20 most visited pages on our site. As long as we are helping a marketer solve an issue is worth the investment, even if that means it is not a direct sale.
  • Channel time investment tweak. For some reason, your CEO says you need to be on all social media platforms so you go and open accounts in all of them to realise you do not really have the time it needs to really build an audience on each platform. With limited time, budget and human resources helping you with your social media strategy you will need to choose your top 1-2 platforms where you believe your most valuable customer segment is more open to hearing from you. Do not be afraid to deactivate a social media platform (keep the account just in case)  if that means you will have more time to post, respond, participate and build deeper relations on a specific platform. If you need advice on how to present the case to your CEO, please contact us.
customers types marketing eDigital graph

Customers’ types – Marketing – eDigital graph

THE 5 KEY ELEMENTS FOR CRACKING THE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY CODE

  • Use last year’s data to inform this year’s strategy. Dive into last year’s social media analytics and figure out what worked and what fell flat. Look at the success (or failure) of the social media campaigns you launched, the activity and engagement on all of your platforms, and what type of content resonated with your audience the most. You can do this by conducting a social media audit. An audit keeps your finger on the pulse of your social media strategy to see what’s working and what’s not. Based on the previous year’s data reports, you might want to switch up the time of day you post, in order to reach more of your target audience and drum up more engagement. Or, you might want to focus on Facebook over Instagram because you’ve seen a more consistent return on investment (ROI) on one platform versus the other.
  • Review top social media marketing trends. The social media industry moves quickly so it makes sense that you’d want to incorporate—or at least consider— some of the top social media marketing trends. Assess them against your business goals to determine if any of them are right for your brand’s strategy.
  • Craft your brand’s visual story consistently. Does it feel like your social media profiles are from different businesses? If so, get this fixed immediately! This is the most important component of the social media strategy. You must define your visual branding, voice and tone. Are your messages conveying “value” to your most valuable customer segments? Keep an eye on what your competitors are communicating and be alert to approach opportunities.
  • Use growth hacking tactics. What automated growth marketing software are you using that is helping you build your social media audiences? Contact us if you need professional advice in this regard.
  • Make the plan visible. It’s both – one of the biggest challenges and the greatest privileges – a social media manager’s work is so visible in an organisation. To ensure there are no surprises – and mitigate negative feedback after posting- make sure there is cross-functional integrated planning to give your wider team visibility to your plan and its content.

Conclusion

A professional social media marketing plan will help you attract fans, build a positive brand reputation and increase leads and sales. Marketing teams using the best social media plan template are more effective at increasing brand preference and organising and delivering promotional activities on social media platforms.

Next: Get your social media marketing plan template now!

THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE FOR 2024

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Mau is one of the most popular marketing consultants offering the best digital marketing strategy workshops and the best social media training. Top marketers use Mau’s popular Digital Marketing Plan and Social Media Plan templates

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