Are You Wasting Your Time DIYing Your Social Media Marketing Plan?
Social media is fun!
Why pay someone else to create and manage your business’s social media marketing plan? You already spend plenty of time browsing Facebook and Twitter every day. You’re an expert at sharing memes. You can totally handle this.
Except you probably shouldn’t.
There’s a good chance you’re wasting your time on a dead-end approach. The more you think about it, creating a social media marketing plan should be left to the experts if you want it done right.
The fact of the matter is, social media marketing is an important component of any company’s overall marketing plan. In the current business climate, digital advertising is not something to be fooled around with. For many types of businesses, to realistically compete in the marketplace, a strategically curated social media marketing plan calendar is the key to a dominant social media presence.
A good social media marketing plan for business also requires some sort of spend – whether that’s in the form of time, money or other company resources. Of course, it’s tempting to want to do it yourself so you don’t have to pay someone else to do it. But what you save in dollars is made up for in time. Any time spent on your social media marketing plan is time taken away from other aspects of your day-to-day job responsibilities. Plus, there’s much more to digital advertising than simply writing a few posts and sharing a few photos. You have to consider:
- The scope of the campaign. In other words, what’s your plan for engaging your followers, answering their questions and responding to their messages? What sort of content are you going to share? Where will that content come from? Are you going to pay to advertise any of your content? Are you prepared to analyze the results of your campaign?
- Project management. This refers to overseeing the campaign from start to finish and making adjustments as needed.
- Organic vs. paid advertising. Some social media posts perform well organically – without any advertising dollars behind them. Others will require you to make decisions about how much money to spend on them, as well as who to advertise to.
- In order for your campaign to gain any traction, you have to execute on all facets of your plan. And someone needs to be there to actively keep your audience engaged.
- Measuring, reporting and improving. To properly track the success of your campaign, there should be some sort of data analytics dashboard working in the background; and you’ll need to know how to read those numbers to ensure your campaign is performing as it should.
If you choose not to pay a marketing professional, can your workday handle all of that? For many small business owners, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to begin with. Taking on the role of your business’s social media manager on top of that is downright impossible. Your focus is shifted in a million different directions, and before you know it, you’re completely overwhelmed by what you imagined would be a relatively simple add-on to your daily responsibilities.
On the other hand, hiring an expert to manage your social media marketing may be exactly the solution you need – and it may not be as costly as you think. Your return on investment has the potential to be quite substantial when you consider all the skills a marketing professional brings to your organization, and all the potential they can help you tap into.
An outsourced social media manager saves you time and brings a wealth of knowledge and resources to the table. They help you define your digital marketing goals, work with you to create a strategy based on those goals, and then identify the key performance indicators that most accurately measure the success of your efforts. This combination is the ultimate key to social media marketing success.
For additional help determining whether an outsourced digital marketing manager is right for your business, contact Paradigm Marketing & Design to schedule a consultation.
About the Author
Kaitlyn Wilcoxson, Account Group Supervisor, is a data-driven, problem-solving marketing guru who, as one of the firm’s longest employees, has worked with almost every client Paradigm has ever partnered with, and has been instrumental in their success. Kaitlyn ensures Paradigm’s clients and internal teams are positioned for growth. She manages resources, develops team members, monitors the quality of deliverables, and manages process and procedure planning. She was awarded the Gold Level Stevie® Award for Customer Service and Sales Manager of the Year in the 17th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.
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