In 2019 Use the Power of the 5 Ps in Social Media Marketing

5 Steps to better social media marketing

Are you covering all the essentials within your social media marketing strategy? How can you know that you’re starting from the right foundation with your planning? One way to ensure you’re on the right track is by applying the ‘5 P’s’ methodology, which can help to outline the essential strategic elements.

The ‘5 P’s’ are usually used in reference to content marketing, but I feel they apply to social media marketing also (and the two go hand in hand more often than not). The ‘5 P’s’ of content and social media marketing are a basic starting point for any new social media strategy.

If you’re looking to ensure your 2019 is on track, this can be a great starting point – here are the 5 P’s of Content and Social Media Marketing.

1. Plan

Social Media Plan

Planning and organizing are the building blocks to success. Start with your objectives, and work from there – think about the best ways to maximize your return, the creativity that you’ll need to create your campaigns, and any tools or technology you will need for your social media accounts.
This is also a good time to consider your goals and/or benchmarks and how you’ll measure the success of your social media presence or content-specific campaign.

2. Produce

Next, it’s time to get your hands dirty – or to hire a content creator. Think not only about your main content piece/s, but also about any images or videos you want to create to promote your material. You can produce content and messaging and have it all ready to go for the next step, which is…

3. Publish

Now that you have a campaign plan (or social media schedule) ready and have created content, you have to have somewhere for this content to live. Choose where you’ll host your content based on your objectives.

Are you trying to increase web traffic? You can publish your content to a blog. If you want to grow your email list, you may want to gate the content on a landing page on your website. If you want more reach on your social channels, then solely publish it there (Think IGTV, Twitter Moments etc.)

4. Promote

Promoting is how you give your content legs. And while you no doubt correlate “promote” with “money”, this isn’t necessarily true – posting on social media organically is promoting your content.

Other strategies for promoting your content can vary from sending an email to your subscribers to including it in your email signature. Of course, if you want to give your content an extra push, putting aside a budget for social media ads is always helpful.

5. Prove

The last step is to prove whether or not what you did worked. Here’s where those benchmarks and goals come in handy – keep track of your analytics, hashtags, clicks, downloads, or any other key performance indicators you may have identified. Finally, quantify all that information and put together a report of how your content did to prove success.

 

This article originally appeared here