The social media campaign is an organized marketing activity aimed towards achieving a certain company’s objectives with the help of one or several social media networks. Its major goals can be the growth of brand popularity, the attraction of new clients, drive more traffic to a company’s website or increase customer engagement.
Key Steps to a Successful Social Media Campaign
- Define the primary goal of a future social media campaign
- Define a target audience
- Determine the social networks to execute the campaign
- Choose the strategy of future campaign
- Create a project plan of the campaign and set its timeline
- Choose the proper instruments to track KPI (key performance indicators)
- Create messages, creatives for the chosen audience
- Launch a campaign, track on a daily basis, improve the plan
- Key takeaways and comparisons
POST Method for Better Social Media Campaign Realization
Basically, when you start any online activity it is essential to verify factors crucial for its successful realization. Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff in their book Groundswell propose an interesting method that presumes the determination of four factors being crucial for any online activity and helping to broaden your social media campaign definition. It is called POST
P – people,
O – objectives,
S – strategy,
T – technology.
The meticulous description of these four factors helps to set up the attainment of any social media objectives.
- People – understanding your customers is the first step to success. What is there to understand? Demographics, age income, daily routine for a few things. Then define the social networks your target audience hang in. Example The key characteristics of your followers, including their demographic characteristics, interests and preferred online activities. This information will help you to choose the proper marketing activity for reaching the company’s goals.
- Objectives – any activity requires a specific purpose. It should have a proper timeline and has to be measurable. These two characteristics of a campaign will help to track its performance over time and measure its impact on the company’s development. The most popular social media intentions are the growth of the customer base, an increase of audience engagement, growth of website traffic, and rise in brand popularity.
- Strategy – it is a real action plan to achieve your objectives. It presumes the choice of instruments for the digital campaign. At this step, you have to determine whether the tactic will be paid or unpaid.
- What type of content do you plan to use?
- Are you planning to use some form of video content, any special Infographics, etc.?
- Will you use any paid advertisements?
- What audience will you target on social?
- What message will you use?
- Technology – at this step you choose the tactics to realize your strategy. It means you have to determine the proper instruments for the realization of specific social campaign objectives. You can use some social media marketing platforms like PromoRepublic to create content and schedule across different social media networks, tracking its performance and analyzing the results according to KPI.
Best Practices for Launching a Social Media Marketing Campaign
It is crucial to investigate some best practices in social media tactics to determine your own strategy.
Look through these 10 tips to make your first social media campaigning victorious from the very beginning:
- Know your customers – never start any marketing activity before a detailed research of the people you plan to target. Gather data about previous interactions with clients invest in the CRM system and find other tools to investigate their preferences. Remember to ask proper questions – sometimes one interactive poll can save you millions of dollars on advertisements.
- Talk with customers and respond to them a.s.a.p. – the worst thing you can do in digital is performing any social media tactic without proper interactions with clients in the process. You have to be ready to answer any question. The on-time response can build trust among followers and will bring you one step closer to the deep engagement with your clients.
- Investigate your competitors – when you do not know where to start, a good thing is to see what other businesses are doing. Look through public network profiles of your competitors and define their most effective undertakings. It does not mean that you should copy their marketing efforts. With that said, you can use similar types of content or gain some interesting ideas from them.
- Make engaging content – people are overwhelmed with advertisements these days. Try to avoid direct promotion online if you like to build trust among followers. Mix various types of content and try to be informative, bringing more value to your customers. Do not forget about quizzes and contests – customers like interactive content.
- Measure your results – any campaign can fail if not properly analyzed. Keep track of what’s working, what’s not and how to improve your social media tactics. When you investigate metrics in real-time there are higher chances to adapt your online efforts and gain better results at the end. Try to be as flexible as possible to achieve success online. The dynamic approach to social media undertakings is the best way to capture the new trends in digital.