Creating an Action Plan for Your SMART Social Media Goals: Your Step-by-Step Guide
For the second part of the 3-part series — Your First 100 Days — you’ll create a Social Media Action Plan for your goals.
Last week, in part one, we developed a SMART goal for Jenifer, who needs to promote her latest book. I recommended she go with her strengths, which are her Pinterest boards.
To review that SMART goal:
Create a Pinterest marketing campaign to sell 1,000 books (measured by her publisher’s numbers), starting one week before the book publication date.
JENIFER'S SMART GOAL:
Create a Pinterest marketing campaign to sell 1,000 books, starting one week before the book publication date.
Now we’ll create an Action Plan to enable Jenifer to reach that goal of selling of 1,000 books.
What is a Social Media Action Plan?
An action plan is a step-by-step road map that spells out exactly how you’ll achieve your SMART social media goal. In the words of Steven Covey, “start with the end in mind.” Once you identify your SMART goal, you can break it down into specific tasks, with dates, and put actions behind each.
While the SMART goals says WHAT you want to accomplish, the Action Plan specifies HOW you’ll do it. While goals are the start, it’s the execution that makes or breaks your results.
1. Create Your Monthly Social Media Action Plan
Let’s take Jenifer’s example: she wants to sell 1,000 books with a Pinterest campaign, and launch the promotion one week before her promotion date. I recommend creating a table or spreadsheet with your SMART goal a month-by-month breakdown of what it will take to get there. Here’s what Jenifer’s looks like for her campaign timeline:
Jenifer's SMART goal is in the left column; the right three columns are monthly To-Do's that she needs to complete to reach her goal.
This is a Google Docs table breaking down Jenifer’s SMART goal into a monthly social media action plan. Notice each month has its own tasks to accomplish: we worked backward from Jenifer’s publication date of March, and divided the tasks by what needed to happen before her publication date.
Selling 1,000 books is a huge goal: most self-published authors sell, on average, only 100 books. Commercially-published authors sell 1,000 over the life of their book. So to sell 1,000 with one Pinterest campaign is an enormous goal. While it sounds intimidating, breaking it down into smaller chunks makes the plan easier to tackle. Jenifer won’t be worried about those 1,000 books; instead, she’ll focus on putting the individual pieces into place to make those sales possible.
2. Break Down Monthly Tasks into Weekly & Daily To-Do Items
Once you have your monthly Action Plan, you need to take each of the action items and divide them into easily managed tasks by week and day, as in the table below:
The Social Media Action plans breaks down each month's To-Do items into weekly & daily actions. Make the steps so small it's impossible to fail.
Every task from the Monthly Social Media Action Plan table is divided into tactical To-Do’s for each week & day. Jenifer now has a road map for success for her SMART social media goal of selling 1,000 books. She knows exactly what she needs to do today, tomorrow, and every week until her book launch.
Breaking down your goals into the smallest actions possible makes it easy not to fail. Learn exactly how to do this in this brief video:
3. Focus on One Month at a Time
Don’t feel like you need to immediately break down every month’s tasks: focus on this month and this week only. Once you’ve created the Monthly Action Plan table, take the tasks for this month and assign what actions need to happen to accomplish them. Then identify what needs to happen this week, then each day.
Make Actions So Simple You Cannot Fail
Ultimately that's the beauty of a social media action plan: you're chipping away at that enormous goal one small step at a time. Use this 3-step process to create your monthly action plan, divide into weekly & daily steps, and focus on one month at a time. Take advantage of the First 100 Days webinar and other resources at the bottom of this post as well,
