Building a social media campaign from scratch is challenging. A well-planned social media campaign can pay dividends by releasing a new feature, preparing a holiday special, or simply looking to boost sales.
With 3.3 billion people on social media globally, you have a vast audience. Let’s jump into planning your next social media campaign step-by-step.
Set Your Campaign Goals
What do you want to achieve from your campaign? You cannot target every metric in one campaign. There’s a reason why professional social media services ask what you want to get from your campaign. Your answer will determine which steps you should take to perfect your campaign.
The most common campaign goals include:
• Increase sales
• Boost brand awareness
• Acquire more leads
• Get more customers
• Bolster your engagement rates
These are only generalized goals. Get more specific about your plans. For example, if you are looking to increase your engagement rates on social media, you may decide to set a goal of increasing your engagement by 25% in the next six months.
The metrics must be clear so you can easily measure them and define the line between success and failure.
Create Your Buyer Persona
You could create the best content for your campaign, but if it’s not targeted toward the right audience, you won’t get the results you expect from your campaign. Who is your ideal audience?
Buyer personas are documents containing details about your target customers. You need to create messages that resonate with this audience. Factors like income, location, age, pain points, and interests all play into the buyer persona. Knowing these details is crucial to crafting a customized message that urges your ideal customer to take action.
Furthermore, with tools like Facebook Audience Insights, you can use advanced targeting measures.
Select Your Social Media Platforms
You need to choose the right platforms for you. Trying to market on every platform spreads your resources and reduces your overall impact. Use no more than one to three social media channels as your focus.
Use your buyer persona to determine which platforms your customers prefer to use. Different platforms are aimed at different audiences. For example, Facebook can target anyone from middle-aged people and upwards. Pinterest is designed for people who like to indulge in crafts and creativity. Likewise, LinkedIn is perfect for B2B sales, as this is where the decision-makers of the business world often browse.
Create a Schedule
Timing is everything on social media. Use a social media calendar to outline when you post your content. You should have a clear timeline that maps out the period of your campaign.
A calendar is not simply the things you post but all the other metrics that go into your schedule, such as:
• A content creation overview to track your content
• Sharing curated content
• Employee advocacy posts
• Social media updates
There are many third-party platforms to consolidate your activity on every social media platform. The calendar is the central document that ensures you keep track of every part of your strategy. Without it, you might struggle to manage the various aspects of your calendar.
Research the Different Parts of Your Strategy
Running a full-blown social media campaign requires the right tools to make it work. If you’re managing a social media campaign, the tools you use can make or break you at every stage.
So, which tools are vital?
Content Creation – Tools like Canva and Animoto enable you to create the images you need to make sure your campaign catches the eye. If you have the budget, you might even want to consider Adobe Photoshop.
Content Curation – You need more content than you can realistically produce to populate your social media feeds. In other words, you need content from other sources to engage your audience. Curata and Quuu are two excellent options for tracking down shareable content.
Social Media Management – Sharing updates, scheduling, tracking comments, and more requires a social media management tool. Hootsuite, Agorapulse, and others can meet the needs of your team.
Social Media Analytics – Analytics helps you define whether a campaign has succeeded or failed. Analytical tools track your KPIs and provide reports you can distribute to shareholders. Tools like Cyfe are useful, but multiple management tools offer the same options.
Ultimately, you will find which tools work for you and your team. Many paid options will even offer free trials, so you can test-drive them and see how they integrate within your organization.
Analyze Your Competitors
What your competitors are doing is just as important as what you happen to be doing. The activities of the competition can inform what to do and what not to do.
Some of the aspects to watch for include:
• What content are they sharing?
• Which social media channels are they using?
• How often are they posting updates on their channels?
• What results are they generating?
You can answer all these questions by monitoring them and recording the data. The competition is a goldmine of data that can empower you to avoid making the same mistakes as them.
Track Your Performance
You need to track the performance of your campaigns. Analytics offers deep insights into your social media campaign and your strategy as a whole. It provides real-time updates you can rely on. Without analytics, you lack the data to tweak your strategy as you experience changes.
The metrics of your campaign always depend on your current goals. However, you may gain additional insights that can inform future campaigns. Tools like Google Analytics are beneficial for finding out where the traffic originated and a person’s activities when they land on your website.
Conclusion
Not every social media campaign can be a success, but you can increase those chances by implementing a detailed plan before launch. Setting your goals, understanding your audience, developing a calendar, implementing the right tools, and being able to track your campaign performance are all critical.
