How to Create Successful Social Media Campaigns

Social media is easily the most recognizable and more compelling ways to market a product or service online. However, for many businesses, building a successful social media marketing campaign may not be easy to identify, plan, or execute.

However, if you took a good look at a successful social media campaign, you would find that all of them have four common components that contribute to their success and success for the brand.

In this article, we are going to go over those four elements to keep in mind that will help you achieve desired results and increase your bottom line.

1. A Thoughtful, Carefully Developed Plan

The best way to start a social media campaign is with a well thought out plan of action. This plan should be specific to your goals and should be a continuation of your brand’s style and voice.

Start building your plan by doing thorough research on the following:

Social followers across all your social channels
Areas of improvement in comparison to your competition
Identify the target audience you will be going after in this campaign. For example, while Instagram and Facebook are great networks to target millennials, you won’t find Baby Boomers on Instagram.

What budget and resources can you allocate to this campaign? Will you be using paid social efforts or going all organic tactics? Will you be using a social media platform, CRM, or automation platform to help you schedule posts?

After you have selected the target audience, social channels, budget, and resources you would like to use, select a team that can make it all happen. Whether it’s an in-house team or an agency team, clearly defining roles ahead of time helps avoid confusion and doubling work. At a minimum, assign roles to your team for messaging, designing, and promoting.

2. Define Your Goals (Make Them Specific)

After you have your game plan in order and a dream team that can’t be beat, it’s time to define what you would like to accomplish. At this step, it’s important to be specific; this makes it easier to measure and analyze your results later down the road.

Every social media campaign can have multiple goals, but it’s important to make each goal personalized to your business’s needs. Here are a few common goals to consider:

Brand Awareness: Every business, especially new ones, needs to distinguish themselves from their competitors in the same space. If your audience isn’t able to identify your brand, your campaign will have little effect.

To measure your brand’s social influence, consider benchmarking shares, new links & followers, mentions/retweets, and referral traffic to your website from social media channels.

More Website Traffic: Who doesn’t want more site traffic to their website or blog? The more people that visit your site, the more opportunities you have to wow them with great content that they can share out to their friends and followers.

To measure your brand’s website traffic, consider incorporating a landing page that a user would land when they click on a link from your social media post. Google Analytics is also a very helpful platform that can provide you with data on what specific pages on your website are getting the most hits, how much time is being spent on those pages, and whether or not they are being driven by social media.

Increased Visitor Loyalty: It is every business’s dream to not only acquire new customers, but also keep them coming back for more for the long term.

If customer loyalty is your goal, incorporate tactics that require a user to enter your website several times to enter or find information. That’ll give you the opportunity to find out how often a user comes back, the pages per session they visit, average duration of each session and percent of new sessions on your site.

Increased Conversion Rates:

Lastly, if you are an already established brand that receives a lot of website visits, increasing conversion rates may be a great goal for you to consider for your next social campaign. Whether a conversion means an account set up or product purchase, create a social campaign that incorporates a form or sign up to gather the user’s information.

To measure conversion rates, pay attention to metrics such as total site entries compared to total conversions and social conversions.

3. Cross Channel Promotion

The best social media campaigns use an integrated approach that supports efforts not only on social media channels, but a number of other channels as well. This allows your campaign to reach your social media followers and remind them of the campaign through different outside outlets. Reaching different people at various times across many different marketing channels increases your reach and the likelihood that the campaign will be successful.

Try not to overwhelm existing customers or both potential ones. Instead, gentle reminders and mentions across a number of touch points that step outside of social media can be very helpful in delivering your brand better results.

4. Thorough Analytics

To determine if a campaign was successful in reaching the goals set, every marketer needs detailed analytics. Identify those key metrics related to the specific goals you defined before the campaign and see how they compared against your initial starting point. Did you see improvement? Are there any areas that stayed the same or even lowered during that time? What would you like to see improve next time? Additionally, you can look at the revenue from customers acquired through your social media campaigns compared to revenue from customers acquired through search campaigns.

The bottom line: social media campaigns should do more than increase your follower account. With the right set up incorporating these 4 aspects, you will be on your way to not only increasing your follower base, but gain better understanding of your target audience and achieving long term goals for your business as well.