How can you gain social media marketing skills?
Today’s marketing side project is the perfect start for someone interested in social media marketing. It will also work perfectly if you’ve started taking a marketing course or any other form of learning.
As always, I recommend doing these projects while you are learning. The benefits are worth it.
Project overview
This project aims to perform a social media strategy and action plan. We won’t dive too deep into implementation today; we’re only focusing on the strategy and action plan.
Here are the skills you’ll gain with this project:
- Conducting actionable market research.
- Communicating the right message to your audience.
- Planning and strategizing.
The goals
- The primary goal is to choose a business from any niche and to do social media marketing for them as if you were the social media marketer.
- Create a social media strategy and action plan to provide social proof and gain traction.
The business.
After looking up small business ideas, I decided to pick a Pre-purchase Inspection business for used cars. (You can choose any)
This one is about inspecting used cars to help customers avoid buying lemons. I like cars, so this was good enough for me.
Planning
After choosing a business, you’ll do the following two things:
- Decide if you’ll create the strategy for an existing or newly created hypothetical business (I went with the latter).
- Conduct extensive research on the business. (Product research, Competitor research, Customer research)
Business name & purpose.
CheckMyRide : Conducts pre-purchase inspections for customers who are not knowledgeable about cars.
Purpose: This social media strategy aims to break the business into the market and gain genuine followers on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Market research, Strategy and Action Plan.
Every decision in marketing needs support…
Here’s a summary of how I did market research for CheckMyRide:
After researching, I realized a few established businesses already exist in this niche. However, these businesses are not so well known on social media, and people don’t really know much about them. This will be a good opportunity for us!
To create awareness and social proof, our social media will have the following:
- Our name and business selling propositions.
- Our story, background of our founders and employees (Establishing relatability).
To increase engagement, our social media will do the following:
- Reports of our work, successes and goals.
- Flaunting our expertise, giving tips and advice for free (Joining the conversation).
To create new leads, our social media will do the following:
- Influencer Marketing: Because of the rising cost of new cars, there’s been a rise in the number of used car content creators in my country. Some review cars for customers with tight budgets, and others review high-mileage cars. There’s real potential for leads here. Some low-budget influencer marketing could yield good returns.
- Connecting with car fanatic accounts (Liking and commenting).
That’s it for the planning!
Here’s a summary of today’s project.
Here’s a summary of today’s project.
- Choose any business of your liking.
- Set their social media goals (Good to start small).
- Conduct market research (Your product, your competitors, your audience).
- Create your strategy and action plan(Detailed and realistic).
We were able to pick a business, do the research, and set up real, actionable strategies. Next, we’ll go straight into implementation.
It’s just you, your pen, notebook, and PC. There are no fancy tools. We dove right in and did some marketing.
Did you have fun doing this? Let me know in the comments!
