Basic Steps to Start A Social Media Campaign
Social media platforms are an important and lucrative marketing tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes. With more than half of the world’s population using social media, networks like Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are terrific places to increase brand awareness and generate more leads for your business.
Unlike the traditional, one-way marketing methods, social media allows for a dialogue and encourages direct communication between you and your customers. That alone helps humanize your brand and make your products and services more relatable.
To help you launch a successful campaign for your brand, we spoke with several top social media marketing agencies.
Read on to discover their valuable and practical advice that will help you craft a winning social media strategy.
Table of Contents
Define the purpose of your social media campaign
One of the goals of any social media campaign is to attract more followers and subscribers. Raising your brand awareness is getting your followers familiar with your business. When they are aware of your products and services, they are more likely to make a purchase from you.
Other common goals of social media campaigns most often include acquiring more leads and increasing sales. Leads are the people who show interest in your brand. For example, they visit your website or subscribe to your newsletter.
But no matter what the purpose of your campaign may be, it’s important you define what you want to achieve so that you can measure your success.
Most social media channels already have built-in analytics tools. For example, Facebook has an option called Insights. This tool enables business pages to measure the reach of their posts, monitor user engagement, and more.
However, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest require switching to a business account in order to make these analytics available. Make sure you switch to the business account to use the analytics option. Otherwise, you won’t be able to track your progress.
The built-in analytics tools are a good option if you are on a budget. But if you would like to dig in deeper and learn more about the performance of your social media accounts, there are plenty of premium analytics platforms you could use in your work
For example, Sprout Social or HubSpot are terrific options. HubSpot gives you all-in-one experience, which makes it easier for you to keep track of things like SEO or convert leads. Sprout Social allows you to manage all your social profiles from a single platform.
Define your target audience
Defining your customer demographic is one of the key elements of a successful social media campaign.
Say you have some amazing products to sell people can benefit from. However, no matter how useful your products maybe, if you are addressing the wrong audience, you’ll probably struggle to make any sales.
To ensure your social media campaign does not fail and figure out who your average customer is, we suggest creating a buyer persona
A buyer persona is a research-based representation of your ideal customer. Once you gather all the information about your average customer, you will better understand what your marketing campaign should look like and how to best organize it.
Define your average customer. Are they someone who spends a lot of time on social media? Are they comfortable with shopping for something they have seen on social media? Last but not least, are they your customers, or do they prefer other brands?
When defining your buyer persona, you should focus on the customer’s age, gender, education, income, location, marital status, etc. For example, if you are vending children’s toys, you should target young married couples with little children.
Another good method of collecting information from your customers is to survey the customers that you have gathered even before making a social media account. Find out why they chose your products in the first place. Find out what their core standards are and what goals they have.
You should use simple questions in your survey which are relevant to your niche, but avoid the basic “yes/no” questions. For example, if you sell clothes, you could ask your customers what they would like to wear during a specific season or on a certain occasion.
Choose your social media channels
Once you select who your target audience is and what your goals are, the next step is to choose a preferred social media channel for your business.
On most platforms, you can gain followers, get likes, insert hashtags into your posts, etc. But you can’t post the same type of content on every social media channel.
Some platforms are suitable for visual content (e.g., Instagram), while others, such as Facebook, give you room to tell your stories and share a lot of text.
The apps also have different “personalities,” Take Twitter and LinkedIn as an example. These platforms are more business-oriented, and some are made for more casual and entertaining content. B2C (Business-to-Consumer) companies usually aim to grow their audience and increase user engagement.
On the other hand, social media platforms like LinkedIn or SlideShare are well suited for B2B (Business-to-Business) companies. They are great not just for promoting brands but also for building professional relationships with other businesses and clients.
Create a personality for your brand on social media
Imagine your brand as a person and think about how you want it to be seen online.
You should be mindful of the way you communicate with your audience, the vocabulary you use, as well as the format in which you post your content. When you define what you want your business to promote on your social media, the easier it will be to form a lucrative relationship with your followers.
You can use your established goal to create a message you want your audience to hear. The message has to be clear and consistent.
For example, you can use videos, blog posts, or pictures on your social media accounts. You will eventually see what type of content works best with your audience and keeps them heavily engaged.
To stand out from your participants, you should do your best to post unique content that will make your brand recognizable. Don’t be afraid to be a bit different. Make sure you keep the content consistent across the social media you use to build authenticity. You can always hire a branding agency to help you manage your content and help you succeed.
What your brand needs to have on your social media account is authenticity. Think about your brand as a person. The way the brand communicates with its customers and what its core values are will define the persona and the way your customers see it.
Even though a brand’s personality and your brand’s persona sound like they are the same, they are very different. A brand’s personality reflects your relationship with your customers, while a brand’s persona is more specific – it refers to the name of a business as well as its logo, the dominant color scheme, etc.
Plan your content
Once you set your goals, you should start devising a plan for posting your content. Don’t forget that the content you’ll publish needs to reach a certain target group. Therefore, you should try your superlative to make it informative, exciting, and appealing to users.
When you decide on what to post, make sure your content suits all social media platforms you plan to share it.
For instance, Twitter lets you post messages with a limited number of characters, so you can’t copy long posts from your Facebook page. Instead, you’ll have to make some adjustments to make posts fit the rules on Twitter.
On the other hand, Instagram does allow for inserting long captions. However, Instagrammers primarily focus on pictures, often disregarding captions altogether. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add captions to your photos, but your images will do most of the talking on this platform.
When it comes to content sharing, be careful not to do it too often. Your followers could find your brand annoying if you post on your social media several times a day. This can even be counterproductive, with your followers “unfollowing” you on social media.
Another common mistake some brands make is allowing their social media profiles to appear as if run by an AI system. Remember, keeping it friendly and engaging while also establishing a connection with your followers will make your brand relatable and more comfortable to interact with.
Research your competitors
Looking your competitors up will help you understand what kind of content would best suit your business.
Explore a brand’s feed to find out which posts have the highest reach, how frequently they post, and what their overall brand personality is like. Analyze what works for them to understand if the same strategies could benefit your brand.
Researching your competitors and the way they conduct their social media campaigns helps you realize which tactics work and which don’t. That allows you to avoid repeating the same mistakes they made and improve your campaign.
Create social media calendar
Timing is very important when posting content to your social media. For example, many YouTube creators post videos on Thursdays and Fridays because that’s when viewership usually ramps up. Similarly to them, you can plan your posting schedule and share your content when it is viewed the most.
For example, according to Social Sprout, the best time to post on Facebook would be on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays between 9 am and 1 pm. The same source suggests that on Instagram, it’s also the best to post on Tuesdays, but between 11 am and 2 pm.
Apart from posting during the periods with the most engagement, you also use your social media calendar to remind yourself to update your profile.
Most brands use social media bios to promote something, like sales or promo codes. Once the offers expire, your social media calendar will remind you to remove them once they are over.
Social media calendar helps you stay organized. It allows you to create an online publishing schedule and focus on the tasks that need to be completed, e.g., share your posts on specific social media channels at a particular time, choose the accompanying images, write captions, decides on the links, tags, and hashtags to implement into the text, and much more.
Conclusion
Social media is an innovation of digital marketing. Not only is it easier to communicate with people from all over the world, but it helps your brand appear more approachable.
Social media campaigns will also raise your brand awareness and bring you more leads, which successful business is all about.
