These past few months have been fascinating, what with all the changes taking place on social networks and their effect on businesses. Are you planning a social media campaign? Want to learn how to create a results-driven and effective social media campaign?
I have summarised below five simple steps to creating an effective social media campaign. But first, we need to know what it is.
What Makes an Effective Social Media Campaign?
According to Hootsuite, a social media campaign is coordinated marketing designed to reinforce information or sentiments—about a product, service, or overall brand—through at least one social media platform. Social media campaigns can drive massive brand success. How? You need to plan and strategise it in advance.
Social media marketing aims to foster a community and establish connections between your business and its loyal customers. Communicate with your followers instead of only posting general content and messages to your page.
According to Marketing Land, before starting any marketing campaign, you need to define your goals clearly. Decide on what you want to achieve at the beginning of a campaign. It makes it easier to measure and analyse your results. Your campaign can have multiple goals. Each piece of your strategy can also serve a different aim.
Pay attention to things that make a difference, such as your blog post headlines, headline quality. For best results with headlines, use a post headline analyser. It is also essential to use the right image that will resonate with your audience. Avoid using images that will spark controversy within your audience.
It will help to use content calendar software to find the right time for sharing your post. This will ensure that your content is not only posted at a most effective time; it will also give you time to edit your content to help you with your SEO.
How Do You Create an Effective Social Media Campaign?
Here are five crucial steps to creating an effective social media campaign that will expand your social reach and positively affect your bottom line.
Step 1: Social Listening
The first step is to listen to what your target audience is saying about your brand, business, or industry on social media.
Social listening is using tools monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, and more. Social listening allows brands to track, analyse, and respond to conversations about them on social media. It’s a crucial component of audience research.
According to Sprout Social, social listening can help find the most relevant and popular hashtags to leverage in your posts to increase reach. Find new trends to write about when they first come to light, solidifying you as a thought leader with your customers. Identify your key social audiences by the network to ensure your messages resonate with top audiences.
Social listening allows you to use specialised tools to monitor keywords and mentions and understand your target audience and industry more. It helps you discover potential leads, engage with your customers and broader audience to hear what they are saying. It also helps identify top influencers and potential brand ambassadors in your industry and types of content to see the trending topics.
A social media listening tool is software that monitors and analyses online discussions about your brand, a particular topic, your competitors or anything else that applies to your company. It pulls in mentions of specified keywords and helps marketers analyse these mentions.
Brands have realised they need to build a strong following on social media and establish a presence on the internet. It helps you develop relationships with potential customers in your industry who can nurture social selling relationships. Reach out, make a relationship, and share helpful information. It will help establish your brand as the best resource when potential customers are making a purchase decision.
Careful application of tools to listen to online conversations about your brand or industry will provide you with valuable insights into your existing and potential customers and what makes them tick.
Step 2: Setting Goals
The second step is goal setting. Goal setting is where campaigns are won and lost. As with most things in life, before you venture into it, have a purpose.
Before you can set your goal, you need to have a clear picture of where you stand right now regarding social media. So, you need to conduct a social media audit. It will help you record all your social media accounts and programs. You’ll also get a grasp of your current performance level, which you can use as a baseline.
Next, give some thought about what’s essential for you to achieve with your social media campaigns. Forget about all the vanity, social media metrics like increasing likes, followers, etc. Instead, look at your comprehensive business strategy and your social marketing plan and look for ways to better adjust the latter with the former. Once you decide what kind of growth or improvement can help improve your business, it’s time to craft some specific social media goals.
These frameworks will help you create meaningful social media campaigns that will support your business in the long run. The most popular goal-setting frameworks are:
The S.M.A.R.T. goal framework.
SMART is an acronym for a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. It is a goal you can align your social media activity, and it is an excellent guarantee of online marketing triumph. Once you have your clear goals, you can record your KPIs and metrics more accurately.
A smart goal is a goal you can achieve within a specific time frame, considering your available resources. It must be a measurable goal. For instance, besides increasing your fans/followers, you can also consider increasing the number of people seeing, liking, commenting and sharing your posts. Whatever your social media goal is, it must align with your business’s overall vision and mission.
The O.K.R. goal framework
O.K.R. is an acronym that stands for Objectives and Key Results. It is the goal-setting framework favoured by Google. Unlike S.M.A.R.T. goals, we do not intend for O.K.R. goals to be 100% achievable. We set the objectives to be very ambitious and reaching 60% or 70%; we consider it a success!
Step 3: Your Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy summarises how you plan to use social platforms to promote your brand and its products. It summarises everything you plan to do and hope to achieve your social media campaigns. It is a hugely important document for your business, and you can’t assume you’ll get it exactly right on the first try. An effective social media strategy will involve tracking trending topics in your industry and covering those for your audience. Start developing your social media strategy by writing at least three goals for social media.
Social media is here to stay. It is not a fad. Therefore, you need to have a long-term social media strategy in place on how to integrate social media into your other marketing efforts. Your strategy has to look at the ‘big picture’ regarding your ultimate business vision and mission. And it is best to have a social media strategy that integrates your online and offline marketing activities.
What you need to learn about your audience to shape your social media marketing strategy is accessible if you know where to look.
Your social media marketing strategy depends on your content. Which types of content should be part of your social media marketing strategy? Crucial as we come out of COVID-19, personal and personable content should be a cornerstone of your social media marketing strategy.
Step 4: Your Tactics
What do these hashtags #NationalFriedChickenDay #WantAnR8 #ShareACoke have in common? They are popular hashtags created by companies as part of their tactics to create compelling social media campaigns.
Creating a memorable hashtag and making a bold statement across all your social media channels helps make an effective social media campaign. Also, crafting teaser campaigns, providing behind-the-scenes insights will be an additional boost to your campaign. Employing user-generated content, getting your fans and other social media users involved in content creation also helps. Consider hosting exciting contests, using a social media calendar when making regular social media posts and updates on your social media channels. Creating a countdown to a product launch on social media are all tried and tested tactics that yield positive results in creating effective social media campaigns.
Regarding your strategy’s actual implementation, ask yourself: What social media channels ( Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn ) are my customers using? What types of content and posts do they appreciate? Answers to questions like these will help you implement the right tactics.
Step 5: Measuring Your Performance
As stated earlier, whatever your goal is on social media, you need to identify how you’re going to measure it. There are several analytics tools available. Find an effective tool that suits your needs and use it to measure your performance.
According to Sprout Social, the most common and often essential metrics to pay attention to are:
- Engagement is the measurement of all comments, likes, and shares.
- Impressions would be the number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it were clicked or not.
- Reach is the number of users who have come across a specific content on a social platform such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
- Share of Voice is the percentage of total mentions of your brand based on social media conversation within your industry or among a defined group of competitors.
- Referrals this is the entire process involved in increasing your website traffic or simply drawing attention to your company by your customers and other stakeholders and doing so through social media platforms like Twitter, etc. According to these stats, 92% of people trust individuals’ recommendations – even if they don’t know them – over brands.
- Conversions/Response Rate is the percentage of consumers who take the action you want them to take on Twitter, etc.
- Time is about finding the correct times to post to your various social media channels. Note that the correct times to post to Twitter may vary from other social media platforms.
These combined will give you a 360º view of your social media performance. The actual KPIs you can measure will vary by the social media platform. Whichever metric you use to calculate your performance must apply to your overall business mission and vision.
Final Thoughts
These are the five simple steps you need to take to create compelling social media campaigns. Social media is simple, but it’s ever-changing subtleties and finer points take years to master. Also, learning the ever-changing algorithms on Twitter, etc., makes social media an exciting challenge.
By setting actionable goals and addressing each of the steps above, you’ll already be way ahead of the curve with your social media marketing strategy.
Does all these sound too daunting for you? Do you have more questions on social media marketing or social media campaigns? Get instant marketing advice from an experienced social media marketing consultant today. You have nothing to lose.
Related Article(s)
- Why Is Social Listening Important for Your Business?
- Four Trends to Include in Your 2019 Social Media Strategy
- 6 Things You Need to Know about Social Media Marketing
- Digital Marketing Questions and Answers
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