To launch a successful social media promotion campaign would require careful planning and in-depth strategizing in advance. If you happen to have a new service, product, feature, limited offer, etc. that you want to capitalise on, there are always plenty of reasons to start a new campaign.
You might have experts in content strategy, brand monitoring, community management, and other ongoing services, but where should your team start with targeted promotions?
To develop and usher in a successful social media campaign, it would require a reliable workflow, a well-crafted plan, and powerful tools. Apart from what we already mentioned, you’d need a data-driven strategy to help shape the direction of your campaign to enhance your chances of achieving your goals.
Now let’s get to the nitty-gritty details of rocking out a successful social media campaign like a boss.
1. Set and understand your campaign goals.
Perhaps the first question you have to ask yourself is: why are we running this campaign? By answering this question, you get to determine what steps you have to take for the duration of your campaign.
Typical goals for running social media campaigns are the following
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- To increase brand awareness
- Lead Acquisition
- Increasing sales
- Acquiring customers
- To increase engagement
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Do note that in setting these goals, you need to be specific. In creating a social media campaign that delivers results and value, you and your team need clear objectives and avoid overly vague goals.
How much brand awareness do you want to achieve in your campaigns? Is it increased web traffic you are looking for? Or is it increasing the number of your followers by X numbers?
For these set goals to be effective, you have to ensure they are SMART goals. SMART goals make your reasoning, your objectives, and your tracking process crystal clear.
The following details how to set SMART goals for your campaigns.
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- Specific: What is it that you want to accomplish? Why? It is pertinent to be as precise as possible for you to be able to develop a campaign that will truly hit its mark.
- Measurable: You have to set the bar by which you or your stakeholders measure success. You need to choose and set a measurable metric such as website clicks, new followers, and of course, revenue.
- Attainable: Set out for achievable goals. It’s okay to be ambitious, but it has to be realistic yet attainable for your team to be motivated.
- Relevant: Does your campaign support you or your client’s marketing objectives? For your goal to matter, it has to be relevant.
- Time-based: This is an important factor if your campaign is a success or not. Set a reasonable time frame or deadline for reaching your campaign goal. Ensure to make it crystal clear where your campaign starts and when it is supposed to end.
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NOTE: Social media campaigns are not free, it does not matter if they only include organic content. It is therefore significant to calculate and set a budget. Factor in the cost of your team’s fees, content production, and advertising.
2. Do your research and create your buyer personas.
Regardless if you have solidly created campaign content, your efforts will ultimately fail if you are not targeting the right audience. The need to know and understand your ideal target is essential before running your campaign.
A buyer persona is a document detailing pertinent information about your ideal customers. Having this document helps you in the creation of messages that will resonate with your target audience in the execution of your campaign.
Some details that you might have in your buyer persona include:
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- Name
- Gender
- Age
- Income
- Location
- Pain points
- Social media channels they frequently use
- Their hobbies
- Their interests
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Knowing these details can help you in creating messages that build trust and ultimately convince them to take action.
3. Choose your social channels.
It makes a lot of sense to begin with social channels where you already have a social presence, but it does not mean you should automatically disregard or rule out other channels.
From investigating your buyer persona, you can already determine where your ideal audience is on social media. You can also determine this by the type of product or service you are offering.
Looking at past results on your website analytics is another way to select social media channels for your campaign. You can spot which channels referred more visitors in the past. It can also tell you which channels brought you more leads.
To summarise:
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- Use social channels where you already have a presence.
- Determine your target audience through buyer persona.
- Investigate your past website analytics results.
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4. Generate a social media calendar for content creation.
When it comes to running social media campaigns, timing is crucial. By generating a social media calendar, you can outline your content from the moment you begin to when it ends.
With a social media calendar, your team can focus their efforts on what needs to be done at a particular place in time. Some important details you need to have in your calendar are:
Content Creation Overview: for you to be able to track that content is created in time.
Content curation posts: for you to discern when to share curated content.
Employee advocacy posts: for you to track is and when your employees share updates from their accounts.
Social media updates: ones that you get for each social channel throughout the campaign.
A social calendar ensures that you won’t miss a single step in your strategy. Plus, it also helps you with productivity where time is of the essence.
5. Choose the right tools for the job to boost productivity.
You are inevitably going to utilise tools at various stages when running a social media campaign. Your chances for success will be greatly increased if you have the right tools at your disposal for each stage of your campaign.
Content creation
Visuals are an integral part of social media marketing. On Twitter, for instance, tweets with images get 18% more clicks and 150% more retweets.
A popular tool that you can use to create images for your campaign is Canva. Canva is an easy-to-use tool that provides image templates already configured for various channels.
For videos, Animoto is a tool that makes the process easy.
Content curation
Churning out new content regularly is not only a tedious process, but is also hefty on the marketing budget of small businesses, start-ups, and agencies. This is where content creation comes in.
The process involves the process of collecting relevant content from various authoritative sources and sharing them with your audience in various formats.
Content curation helps in keeping your audience engaged during your campaign. A problem is that sourcing these pieces of content manually is ineffective and time-consuming.
Curating tools such as Quuu or Curata can find relevant content for your pages. Curating and creating content are not mutually exclusive. It is considered a better move to aim for a healthy mix of both, keeping engagement high and with a diverse and consistent flow of diverse and relevant information.
Social media management
Social media management tools help marketers better monitor and manage social media channels. In addition, they can help marketers plan, draft, and schedule content more efficiently. They exist to make the social media manager’s job easier and improve marketing productivity and performance.
One of the best social media management tools is Loomly, which is best for team collaboration and SocialPilot, best for small teams.
Regardless of which media management tool you pick to use, the goal is for you and your team would be able to carry out your social tasks on a single platform and save a lot of time.
Social media analytics
Your campaign efforts would be fruitless if you don’t know what your KPIs are. Therefore, you would also need social media analytics tools to track and see how your campaign is evolving.
The data you collect is needed for you to be able to adjust and optimise your campaign for maximised results. Social media marketing and analytics are like a car and petrol. One requires the other to be of use.
Analytics helps you understand what you are doing well, and more importantly what you are doing wrong so that you know what to get fixed and improve.
Google Analytics may seem to be unrelated to a social media analytics tool since it is mainly designed to analyse web performance. But, it also offers plenty of insights into social media channels. Best of all, Google Analytics is free:
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- It can show sources of social media traffic to your website. This tells you what social media platforms bring the most traffic.
- Goal completions for your social media posts. You can assign goals and analyse their completion.
- Conversion from social media posts. You can assign revenue to conversions in social media.
- Assisted social media conversions: You’d be able to see if any of your social media platforms contributed to a conversion.
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Conclusion
You need a robust plan in place to increase your chances of success for your social media marketing campaigns.
This starts with:
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- Your goals.
- Understanding your audience.
- Generate a social content calendar in planning your content.
- Have the right tools to run your campaign.
- Track your campaign performance.
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By following these steps, you’re well on your way to developing your successful social media campaign. To learn more about social media marketing, or you require assistance on how to go about it, we at Accentuate Web Design and Marketing can help you out with our Social Media Marketing and Management Services. Get in touch with us today.
