Every online marketer understands the importance of social media and how it can help build their brand and boost their sales. The reach of the popular social platforms is enormous. Ignoring them can be deadly for your business. Despite this awareness, some marketers have not been willing to invest the time and effort needed into properly planning their social media campaigns, leaving everything to chance.

If this sounds like you, you may be missing out on a lot of opportunities for increased visibility and ultimately increased profits. In this post, we want to help you start the planning process so your future campaigns will be more effective.

When you start planning your social media strategy, you need to first ask yourself if you are going to take the initiative and do it yourself or, if finances are not a major concern, hire someone to do it for you. Hiring a professional social media specialist can be beneficial. However, this can also be expensive, even on gig sites like Freelancer.com, UpWork.com, and Fiverr.com.

If you are starting out, then there really isn’t any need to hire a specialist because you will want to actually plan your own strategy. The great news is that you don’t need to have a lot of experience to create effective marketing strategies on your own. You just need to have a few key pieces of information and a bit of creativity.

Your first step in planning your product launch campaign (and any campaign, for that matter) is to work on a press release. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth telling the world about it. Give it some thought and write down everything you need to include in your press release. Here is some useful online information on How to Write a Press Release.

You will want to anticipate the questions people will have about your campaign announcement and include answers in your press release.

The next step in planning your media campaign is to determine which platforms you will use to spread the news. Besides traditional news sites where press releases are typically sent, there are many social media options you should consider, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and a handful of other platforms.

Once you know which platforms you are going to use, the next step is detailed planning for your social media strategy. The various popular social media sites have different slants, different vibes, different marketing roles. Research them to see which ones fit your marketplace best. You don’t want to just send out a press release to a couple of different websites and hope for the best. Neither should you focus just on optimizing your website and creating its content in the expectation that search engines will highlight it in the SERPs and hoping that this SERP placement will attract the right kind of people to your site.

Instead, you should take positive action to assure that you reach as many people as possible, using various media such as:
✓ Blog posts
✓ Social media posts
✓ Guest posts on other sites,
✓ Engaging influencers to promote your announcement
✓ Submitting articles (linking back to your site) to article directories
✓ Pay per Click advertising
✓ Podcasting
✓ and many others.

Once you know the strategy you want to pursue, you can start building the various components that you need to make your plan a success, such as:
• Graphics
• Videos
• Photos
• Textual content
• Reaching out to influencers
• Scripts
• Endorsements and testimonials

So, how to organize your rollout plan for a new product or event? Take some time to think about the best way for you to reach your goals as a marketer. If you want to learn more about how to plan your media campaigns effectively, take a look at our previous articles:
IM NewsWatch articles on Press Releases
IM NewsWatch articles on Product Launches
IM NewsWatch articles on Influencer Marketing.

Sharing is caring