To successfully create a social media campaign, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of your audience, brand, products, and competitors. Throughout the entire process, it is crucial to remain concentrated on your brand’s objectives and the requirements of your audience.
It is important to track, monitor, listen, and analyze campaign outcomes to refine your social media marketing strategy and demonstrate the significant impacts your team has on company goals. Also, note that the campaign does not conclude after your team publishes it.
Social Media Campaign
A social media campaign consists of a cohesive group of marketing actions that are implemented on one or multiple social platforms. These tactics are collectively aimed at achieving your company’s objectives. The elements of a social media campaign encompass:
- Organic posts
- Paid promotions
- Contests and giveaways
- Branded hashtags
- User-generated content
- Creator partnerships
Social media campaigns are frequently included in an omnichannel approach. For instance, Sprout Social’s Year in Social campaign begins by producing a distinctive recap report for the end of the year using our platform. The report features impactful data and a stylish design that aligns with current trends, making it highly shareable. As a result, our customers are motivated to share it on their personal accounts.
Ways to Launch a Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign
1. Brainstorm Social Campaign Themes
Sprout’s Senior Customer Marketing Strategist, Justin Woods, stated that the objective was to highlight all the positive contributions made by social media managers throughout the year, as they often tend to underestimate their achievements and feel like their efforts are insufficient.
When our customers see everything they have achieved, they are able to take a broader perspective and enjoy the fruits of their labor. By assisting them in recognizing the worth they contribute to their organizations, we reminded them of how our collaboration empowers them to excel.
Consulting with teams from other business functions is essential during the ideation stage of your social media campaign. This is because it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of your customers, products, and competitive landscape.
According to the Sprout Social Index™ 2022, numerous organizations incorporate input from teams outside of social media when developing their social strategies. These teams may include customer service, corporate communications, product development, HR, R&D, and sales.
2. Build Out Your Creative and Content
Once you establish the reason for your campaign, the next step is to develop the content. Here are five creative sources of inspiration that will assist in creating a successful and unforgettable social campaign.
1. Leverage influencers and creators
Social media stars elevate the recognition of your brand and contribute to generating trust and boosting sales through their use of digital word-of-mouth strategies.
Influencers and creators excel at crafting relatable content. They have established a loyal fan base through the captivating content they share on social media. Leveraging their skills, they can create distinctive brand content that resonates deeply with their audience.
When incorporating influencer and creator-generated content into your social strategy, you can benefit from a new viewpoint without exerting a significant amount of effort. It is vital, however, to ensure that the creators you choose possess genuine knowledge about your product and come across as authentic; otherwise, there is a chance that your campaign will not be successful.
2. Align with the customer journey
Instead of creating content that appeals to every member of your target audience throughout the sales process, it is more effective to tailor your content to where individuals are in their buying journey during your campaign.
In this stage, the content you generate should be visually appealing, without directly promoting your brand. The objective is to capture your audience’s interest. “Edutainment” content, such as entertaining and educational social posts, is ideal for this phase. Infographics and how-to videos are examples of this type of content.
3. Share user-generated content (UGC)
According to 2022 Index data, approximately 39% of consumers desire brands to share genuine customer demonstrations or testimonials. By utilizing user-generated content (UGC), you meet your audience’s expectations and concurrently save time and creative resources within your team. Furthermore, your brand advocates would be thrilled to be showcased by your brand and have an opportunity to expand their own followers. Hence, incorporating UGC results in a triple win situation.
4. Post content formats your audience wants to engage with
When planning your campaign strategy and content, remember that according to consumers, short-form video, images, and live video are the most engaging types of in-feed social media content. Use popular formats and trends to shape your creative development.
5. Size up the competition
If you’re struggling to come up with content ideas for your social campaigns, you can look to your competitors for inspiration. Since your brand and your competitors might be targeting the same ideal customer personas, focus on observing which social efforts are giving them a larger share of voice. What strategies are effective for them? Where do they fall short?
When thinking sequentially, rephrase the following passage without altering its meaning. Avoid duplicating your rivals’ content, but instead utilize their social strategies as inspiration for your innovative concepts.
3. Choose Your Metrics and Measure Success
It is crucial to select the right metrics for tracking and analyzing in order to accurately measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and their impact on achieving business objectives. With the abundant social data currently accessible, make sure to opt for metrics that are in line with your goals.
In terms of campaign tracking, engagement metrics are usually the most persuasive data to measure the overall effectiveness of your campaign. These metrics include the number of individuals who have clicked, liked, commented on, or shared your posts.
The major social networks universally have three engagement metrics.
- Clicks: Users are only going to click on content that interests them. If you experience high clickthrough rates, your content is intriguing enough for users to want to see more, meaning that your content is effective.
- Likes: If your content resonates with an audience and is receiving a high number of likes, it will naturally gain popularity (and hopefully collect more clicks).
- Shares: Clicks and likes are good indicators of audience interest. However, when users like your content enough to share it, you’ve achieved the holy grail of relevancy and will increase your visibility.
After identifying the key metrics for your campaign, you should commence the process of measuring your success and reporting on your social media analytics. By continuously evaluating your performance, you will be able to adapt your strategy and content based on real-time feedback from your audience.
4. Utilize various forms of content to convey a single message effectively.
In this stage, after finalizing the messaging you want to use, you will employ various formats, such as infographics, videos, and blog posts, to deliver the message and assess their effectiveness.
You have the option to promote one product using various media types. Assess the response of your audience and continue utilizing different formats, particularly those that perform well. This approach will maintain the appeal of your channels and keep your users actively involved.
5. Achieve a balance between promotional and non-promotional content.
Due to Facebook’s new algorithm, it is crucial to strike a balance. If you solely post promotional content on social media, followers will lose interest and unfollow you. Conversely, if you exclusively share nonpromotional content, you won’t attain the desired outcomes.
By incorporating external sources into your feed, such as reputable media outlets in your industry, you can share their top-performing content. This way, your audience will be exposed to valuable content they may have overlooked, and you can also establish connections with other professionals in your field.
6. Release content that is both original and currently popular.
Although it may seem contradictory, this approach is highly effective. Discover popular subjects or techniques, and add your own distinctive touch to them.
In the event that numerous marketers are discussing the potential negative impact of Facebook Zero on reach, it is crucial for you to focus on highlighting the benefits it holds for businesses that actively enhance their connection with customers.
Because you, your business, and your product are one-of-a-kind, avoid generating generic content.
7. Maximize the efficiency of your daily tasks by utilizing scheduling software.
If you attempt to generate social posts spontaneously, it will not be sufficient. Instead, enhance your campaigns and regular tasks by utilizing scheduling software in order to streamline the procedure.
By carefully planning and scheduling posts in advance, you can create a social media calendar. This will save you valuable time that would otherwise be spent uploading content on various platforms, allowing you to allocate more time towards generating high-quality content and interacting with users.
One way to effectively engage with your audience is by utilizing social listening tools.
Social listening tools are extremely potent as they provide the ability to observe the opinions expressed about your brand, which may diverge significantly from what people communicate directly to your brand.
To monitor the impact of your campaigns and determine the topics of discussion, employ social listening tools. Additionally, focus on examining the queries raised by individuals regarding your product, brand, and industry as they can provide valuable content ideas.
The instruction is to create a different and distinctive hashtag for every campaign.
Hashtags possess great influence on Instagram and Twitter. They have the ability to enhance user interaction and, equally importantly, allow for monitoring the outcomes of your campaigns.
You can track engagement and user-generated content more effectively by creating a custom hashtag for your brand and specific campaigns, even if users forget to directly tag your brand in their posts.
To maintain the same meaning, rephrase the text below step by step without adding or removing information: 1. Utilizing branded hashtags should not be seen as a substitute for the more frequently used hashtags by your audience. 2. In order to optimize both the extent of reach and the ability to track, it is advisable to incorporate both types of hashtags in every post.
Proceed to begin broadcasting.
Livestreaming has become increasingly popular in the realm of social media, and if you fail to utilize this platform, you will be letting go of a valuable opportunity. Make use of Facebook or Instagram by going live and discussing subjects that align with your social campaigns. To enhance participation, organize Q&A sessions and provide responses to customer inquiries received in advance or during the live stream’s comments section.
The great thing is that after the broadcast is finished, you can save it and share it as a regular video on your platforms, which will provide you with native video content.
