Now that you’ve identified your demographic, social media platforms and content sources it is time to start putting together a plan. Having a plan will allow you to be current without having to be tied to social media every day.
Identify a Monthly Theme
The first thing you need to do as a small business owner in Fredericksburg, VA is identify a monthly theme. In general, there are monthly holidays that are heavily advertised. Sticking with these holidays and planning your marketing around them will help you stay current. For example, New Years is the time of year when people are engaged in making new commitments or resolutions. People are resolving to lose weight or work out but they are also recommitting to do better at work or growing their business. For a remodeling contractor the marketing campaign might be something like, “Resolve to love your home again.”
Your goal during the month is to drive your customer to make a purchasing decision. You will need repeated posts around this singular theme, here are a few examples,
- “It’s New Years, while you’re committing to weight loss goals don’t forget to resolve to love your home again!”
- “The first step in loving your home again can start with just a coat of paint.” (Make sure to add nice picture for visual effect).
- “Here is a great article from This Old House about how to paint the right way (with article linked).”
- “We can help you love your home again with our painting services, give us a call for more information.” (Only 10% of your posts can be ads).
You’ll set the theme, plant a seed, make the consumer realize they can’t do it themselves and drive them to call you.
These are preplanned. If something relevant happens in the news about home remodeling, you can always share it in between your planned posts.
Create a Calendar
Once you’ve identified your monthly theme you can start to plan your posts around these themes. Be strategic and remember that only 10% of what you post can be an ad. Sharing good content is always better than over advertising to an audience that doesn’t want it! It’s also important to remember that only 10% of what you post will be seen by your audience so repetition (not verbatim) is necessary.
Here is an example of a monthly themed plan
This calendar can be as micro or macro as you want. Macro would be filling in the monthly theme and then using it as a reference for pre-planning your posts in Lamppost.social. Micro would be filling in all of the posts for the entire month/quarter in advance. You can actually download/create an excel template from the social media management sites so when you are ready and everything is just how you want it, you can bulk upload straight into the site (not pictured in the example above)!
Start Small
Thinking about planning the whole year at once can be overwhelming. Perhaps the themes are easy but 365 days of posts will take you out of the game quick. Start by doing a month or quarter first. If you’re not feeling better about social media just by reading this, we can help with our Social Media Management program!
Next week we’ll be talking about weekly themes in an effort to get a little more micro for our small business friends in Fredericksburg, VA!