For the second part of the 3-part series — Your First 100 Days — you’ll create an Action Plan for your SMART social media goals.
Last week, in part one, we looked at 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.
Now we’ll create an Action Plan that will enable Jenifer to reach that goals 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:
This is a Google Docs table that outlines Jenifer’s SMART goal exactly what tasks need to be accomplished to achieve her goal of selling 1,000 books. Notice each month has its own tasks to accomplish: I 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:
Every task from the Monthly 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.
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.
Click here to access Part One of this series.
Next week, we’ll identify how you can measure the ROI for your social media action plan, so stay tuned!
