How to Create a Successful Social Media Campaign

Introduction

            In my first post, I spoke about the importance of social media to small businesses and the pros and cons of various social media applications. This post will discuss how to create a successful social media campaign and how to best utilize different applications depending on a business’ needs. Though creating a campaign is a long and ongoing process, it is absolutely crucial since businesses can no longer rely on the traditional word-of-mouth method of advertising. This post will also explain what a social media campaign is and what needs to be done even after a campaign has been completed.

What Is A Social Media Campaign?

            According to sproutsocial.com, a social media campaign is “a coordinated set of marketing actions across one or many social channels.” https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-campaigns/

A social media campaign is essentially a group of actions that are carried out to meet an overarching goal. In this case, that goal is to promote one’s business. Social media campaigns include advertisements themselves, along with giveaways, promotions, hashtags, organic posts, creator partnerships, and contests and giveaways. Many content creators also run similar campaigns, where they give away high-demand items such as video game consoles or highly-sought-after Yu-Gi-Oh cards, as do game shows such as Wheel of Fortune and Deal Or No Deal, where viewers can win prizes by entering their sweepstakes competitions. Social media campaigns differ from Unlike other advertising campaigns, which are intended to reach a broader audience, social media campaigns are tailored for specific audiences and their collective needs.

 How To Get Started

            There is no one way to create a successful social media campaign, but the best way to start a social media campaign is by brainstorming the theme for the campaign. This involves identifying the target audience of the campaign, their needs and challenges, and how to address them. It is also important to accept input from each team. The 2022 edition of the Sprout Social Index revealed that many organizations’ social media strategies are previously informed by non-social media teams, including HR, research and development, sales, and product development. At this stage, organizations also need to identify the goal(s) of their campaign. A good acronym to use is SMART: the goals of a social media campaign need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Once the goals are established, the metrics to measure success or failure need to be set. Examples of concrete goals include attaining a certain number of subscribers by a certain date or sell a minimum quantity of a product by a certain date.

            Once the campaign’s goals are established, the content itself has to be built out. One way to do this is through leveraging already-popular content creators’ influence.  Since they already have an established subscriber base, their clout will go a long way toward popularizing a social media campaign. They can also provide a fresh perspective as to why the product or service being promoted should be used. However, it is important to use creators who have actually used the product being promoted so that it will be genuine instead of contrived. At this stage, buyer personas should also be created to identify the target audience, which is a document that contains demographic information of the ideal customers. Such information can include gender, location, income, hobbies, interests, and favorite social media channels. As for the content itself, the three most popular kinds of content are images, short-form videos, and live videos. Facebook Audience Insights helps in this regard to aggregate information about people connected to a page and those who are on Facebook. It also combines relationship status and location to provide information about the types of people who are interested in a business.

What next?

            Once the content has been built out and the target audience has been identified, the social media channel and metrics need to be chosen. As I mentioned in my first blog post, different social media channels have different functionalities, so it is important to choose the social media platform based on the kinds of content created. According to Sprout Social, there are 17 important metrics, but the three most important metrics are generally held to be:

1.     Clicks: how many users click on a post to view it. Users only click on content related to topics that interest them, so a higher click rate means that the topic has resonated with more users.

2.     Likes: though likes may go hand in hand with clicks, likes are arguably more valuable than clicks because if a user likes a piece of content is liked, their friends and followers will also be notified and may interact with the post themselves, thereby proliferating it.

3.     Shares: shares are even better than clicks or likes since it shows that users were sufficiently interested in a post to share it with their own communities.

Planning and Analyzing the Campaign

            Afterwards, it is important to plan the campaign. Creating a calendar will provide a blueprint for what needs to be done by a certain point in time. Sprout has a Campaign Planner feature that can consolidate all the necessary resources such as notes, schedules, assets, briefs, and posts. Important tasks to include in a social media calendar are content creation, content curation, employee advocacy posts, and social media updates. From the planning stage, it is important to analyze the success of one’s campaign and those of one’s competitors’. RivallQ is a paid service that allows users to analyze their competitors’ social media campaigns but includes a free tool for head-to-head analysis. LinkedIn has a similar feature called Competitor Analytics, and Meta’s business suite offers benchmarking insights to compare competitors’ pages to one’s own. Tracking the desired metrics of one’s own social media campaign not only provides crucial information, it also informs changes that can be made even during the campaign. Google Analytics provides details about site traffic and its source and behavior.

Conclusion

            Creating a social media campaign is no small task for anyone to undertake as it requires lots of planning and tracking long after the campaign has been launched. However, with the right team and tools, it can be an extremely rewarding process. Using the tips and tricks outlined in this post, a successful social media campaign is right around the corner.