The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Campaigns
Social Media Campaigns are a series of organized events aimed at achieving a particular target over a given period of time, with results that can be tracked and calculated. It may be restricted to a single network or may take place through several social media channels. A social media strategy should concentrate on a specific business objective, whether it’s on Facebook or Instagram.
Popular objectives of social media campaigns include:
- Get input from the users.
- Building e-mail marketing lists
- Increase traffic on the website
- Improved overall brand engagement
- Direct sales pushing
Objectives must be confidential and measurable. Before a campaign, get a reference measure of your target metric so that you can track changes and results through the campaign and beyond. The objectives are shaped by means, the message, and the target audience. Different audiences also have different expectations for social media sites, so select a platform that matches your target audience.
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Social Media Campaigns Best Practices
- Action-gate – Ask users to connect with social-media messages. Invite them to ask questions, take surveys, provide feedback, enter competitions, and join mailing lists.
- Provide incentives– Please offer them a reason to include details about themselves. Offer rewards, discounts, and exclusive content in return for their attention and knowledge.
- Make prizes relevant– To the company if you’re using a contest. It makes no sense for a t-shirt company to sell the Xbox as the first prize in your contest (instead offer a year’s worth of t-shirts!).
- Proactively engage throughout the campaign – React and resolve feedback quickly and improve constructive relationships with personal attention.
- Promote across all social media accounts– even if the campaign focuses on one platform,(e.g. Facebook)
- Adapt the look– To enhance the campaign and messaging of your entire online presence. On headers, landing, and home pages, provide campaign branding and terminology.
- Carefully monitor performance– And change the plan, if necessary.
How To Plan Social Media Marketing Campaigns
1. Set Campaign Goals
Before a campaign, the first question you need to consider is: why am I running this campaign? The other steps you take during your campaign will be decided by answering this question.
Generally, the common objectives for running social media campaign include:
- Increase brand recognition
- Acquiring Leaders
- Increase revenue
- Customer acquisition
- Increase interaction
To set successful objectives, they must be precise, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Then, after setting your targets, it is important to state the metrics that you use to assess the achievement of your goals. Don’t make a mistake, objectives are highly important. It influences every aspect of your social media campaign and helps to determine the success or failure of your campaign.
2. Decide how to promote the campaign on each channel-
It’s time to determine what kind of content you’re going to need for each social media site. You may want to make a short video for Facebook and Instagram. A special banner image will be required for an event on Facebook. You would also need to create pictures for Twitter and Pinterest. The secret to making this step work is to understand the intent of each channel.
Social media advertisement is important if you really want people to see and engage with your content. Start with only one platform and experiment to figure out what works best for your audience and content, if you have not begun using the advertisement tools native to each social media channel.
3. Choose your social media channels-
If you’re running a social media campaign, you’re likely to get better results by concentrating on a few social media platforms. From your customer, you have an idea of the favorite social media platforms of your ideal audience.
Most of the time, it also depends on the type of product or service you sell. For example, LinkedIn is a common social media network for B2B companies since many decision-makers are present on the site. Another way to pick social media platforms for your campaign is to look at previous outcomes on your web analytics. What platforms have provided more visitors to your website in the past? What networks have brought more leads?
These channels would have an effect on your campaign as each channel has its best practices. In addition, each channel has its best content form and frequency of posting. For example, what works on Twitter doesn’t necessarily work on Instagram, and there’s a big difference between LinkedIn and most other major social networks.
4. Have a social media calendar
The next step of the planning phase is to plot out the schedule on a calendar. What days and times of the week are you going to share material on your social channels? What message and creative copy are you going to use to connect with people? You may create a simple overview of what each day looks like on a calendar template for the week or month of the promotion.
Some critical components in your social media calendar include:
- Description of content development to monitor the content is created in time.
- Content curation posts: when you want to share curated content.
- Employee advocacy: if/when the workers post updates from their accounts.
- Updates on social media for each channel throughout the campaign.
Your social media schedule will help ensure that you don’t skip any crucial steps in your plan, while also helping to make your time more efficient.
5. Research the right tools to boost productivity
you will inevitably need tools at different stages of your campaign. If you have a list of the tools you want to use at each stage of your social media campaign, you will maximize your chances of success.
6. Carry out competitive analysis-
Carrying out a strategic study will help you understand what your rivals’ methods are like and see what techniques and platforms work for them and what don’t. This will enlighten your plan for the social media campaign.
Some of the critical parts to watch from your rivals in social media campaigns are:
- Used social media networks
- Shared Content Category
- Frequency of social updates;
- Outcomes produced
Besides watching your rivals for their best practices, you also need to look out for their errors. You should make the most out of them to gain a lead over your rivals.
7. Put in place a system to monitor results
Tracking your campaign performance helps to assess the success or failure of your campaign. Moreover, this will provide insights to help you change your social media strategy even though a campaign is still underway.
Another advantage you get from monitoring the metrics is that it will help you to make improvements to your future campaigns. It’s important to remember, however, that the metrics you track for your campaigns will depend on your goals. For instance, to track traffic from your campaign to your website, you can use UTM parameters. A tool such as Google Analytics will provide information on your website about traffic from a source and its actions.
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Types Of Social Media Campaigns
1. Influencer Outreach
The influencer outreach program is one of the most popular types of social media campaigns. This campaign typically takes the form of identifying influencers that your clients are following on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and elsewhere. They are the professional influencers who cover a topic or a passion point and have a following.
Influencer outreach programs allow these influencers to publish information about your brand or product by giving them incentives. You can give them rewards by inviting them to your company’s R&D labs and treating them with the same deference that mass media enjoys, sending them samples of goods, and giving them prizes to run competitions via their social media platforms. Social media campaigns are often designed around influencers.
2. UGC Contests
Contests in all their different forms have always been a big hit in the world of marketing campaigns. But now the competitions organized around user-generated content (UGC) are all a rage. And for good reason: they’re always incredibly popular, engaging, and enjoyable. You are organizing a contest based on participants who contribute something in exchange for prizes.
For example, Applebee’s ran a successful contest in the summer of 2014. Applebee’s asked its customers to take photos of their meals or snack themselves. The best photos were then released using the #fantographer hashtag on Applebee’s Instagram feed and with the help of Facebook and Twitter updates and advertising, they were cross-promoted.
3. Brand Utilities-
The basic concept behind brand utilities is that instead of selling a certain amount of ads to the customer, you build their confidence by giving them a utility application that offers real value. If the utility serves a reason, consumers may follow the application and think more favorably of your brand.
For example, Estee Lauder introduced a Facebook brand utility called “Shine a Light on Breast Cancer.” It lets survivors of breast cancer and their families post “messages of hope.” It also lets you know where breast cancer activities are taking place around the world. This connects people from all parts of the world to assist each other in the fight against breast cancer.
On a social network, an application does not always have to take the form of an application or a widget. The popular Nike+ solution, considered to be the world’s largest running club, is a virtual community that helps users boost their performance through real-time audio coaching, track distances, compare with peers, and share their running statistics on social media.
4. Podcasting
A podcast is a digital audio file that has been made available for online syndication through technologies such as RSS. While it is not strictly speaking social media, it is often labeled as such because it allows anyone to easily syndicate their own audio content. As a way to share knowledge with your viewers, you can use podcasts.
Sometimes, podcasts take the form of celebrity interviews or conversations about your brand or product. Butterball Turkey Talk podcast is a good example. Via iTunes and other online podcast directories, you can subscribe to it.
5. Sponsored Conversations
The simplest is also the most successful social media marketing strategy. These campaigns involve customers in a transparent, honest way on a social network, as well as aggregating other discussions, pointing to new ones, and stoking the culture.
On Spotify, Twitter, and IGTV, Casper released a sleep channel in 2019 that lets people fall asleep very literally. Casper releases new episodes on these channels every week with relaxing sounds and educational video clips and promotes them more broadly on their other social media sites.
Here, Casper does not endorse a particular mattress, nor do they ask their customers to do so on their behalf. However, as a branded utility might do, they support their customers by encouraging sleep. And when they set up a sleep channel, they behave like an influencer. Needless to say, Casper sometimes promotes his own mattresses, and when he does, he’s behaving as though he’s sponsoring a discussion somewhere!
Some Of The Finest Examples Of Social Media Campaigns
Starbucks #WhatsYourName
The Platforms used were Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and traditional advertising. It is one of the top social media campaigns.
In February, Starbucks UK collaborated with Mermaids, an organization to empower transgender and gender-based youth, on the #WhatsYourName initiative. Combining TV ads and social media interaction, the value-driven campaign centered on Starbucks’ ability to be respectful towards people of both sexes by honoring their preferred names.
The campaign builds on a well-known feature of the Starbucks experience—having your name written on the side of your cup-by pledging to honor the names that customers want to call.
This campaign used one of the most conventional advertisement strategies, the TV spot, to generate a social media buzz. They have developed a simple, straightforward campaign hashtag and they led with their principles, which allowed this campaign to have a genuine, emotional impact.
#DistanceDance with Proctor and Gamble
The Platform used was Tiktok.
Proctor & Gamble—the consumer goods giant responsible for your toilet paper and toothpaste, probably—partnered with TikTok Sensation Charli D’Amelio to encourage people to stay home and avoid corona-virus from spreading in March 2020.
They introduced #DistanceDance on D’Amelio’s channel with support from the ad agency Grey.TikTok users have been urged to record their own version of the campaign hashtag, and for each first 3 million posts, Proctor & Gamble donated to Feeding America.
Dance challenges are TikTok’s bread and butter. Users share a simple, original choreography, set to common songs, which other users can mimic or riff on and teen users also involved their parents in dance challenges. By knowing TikTok and his audience, the makers of #DistanceDance hit the home run.
Spotify #2019Wrapped
The Platforms used were Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
They went bigger for 2019, with a summary of the previous decade(2010-2019) showing how the listening patterns and interests of users had changed. In shareable image formats, these overview snapshots were given, perfect for sharing through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
By providing users with enjoyable and informative data visualizations to share, Spotify has effectively created a winning ad campaign and let its users do their job of promoting it. That kind of social evidence is difficult to beat. So familiar is the Spotify Wrapped format, it also became a meme.
Common Elements of Successful Social Media Campaigns
What makes a marketing campaign for social media success? Here are the main elements:
1. They are true to the brand-Each of these ads represents the personality and values of the brand in a way that resonates with their fans. A campaign that doesn’t make sense for your brand won’t succeed, no matter how creative the idea or how large the budget is.
2. They are focused- Each campaign has a single, clear message at its core: it’s “your year in music” for Spotify. Your clients should never try to find out what your campaign’s point is, or be confused about what you’re asking them to do. Stick to one goal and one key message for each initiative.
3. They are trackable-Each campaign has a distinct hashtag or platform, which ensures that businesses can calculate key measures of performance. For awareness campaigns, that could be references or shares; for competitions, that could be the number of entries. Whatever your campaign target is, make sure that you have a plan to determine your effects.
4. They are unique to each platform- For the social media team, broadcasting similar content across every channel is less work, but it looks messy. Good campaigns have key messages customized to each channel and capitalize on the strengths of the network.
On Twitter vs TikTok, user perceptions are different and the wrong tone or messaging can be pretty distracting. When designing your post, make sure that you remember your audience on each social network.
5. They are timely- Every campaign above has been attentive to current events and activities that have been of the utmost importance to their audiences. You can prepare and seize opportunities to make an impact by creating a social media content calendar that helps you keep track of annual activities.
6. They are emotional- Emotional does not necessarily mean nostalgic or tear-jerking. But to be unforgettable, they’re supposed to make you feel something when you see them.
A great advertisement delivers a positive and authentic message to the viewer that they can communicate with. If you want people to feel inspired, nostalgic, satisfied, or understood, the campaign should be focused on a common feeling.
7. They are original- A campaign is successful only when it is unique and interesting. Social media users are bombarded with content on a regular basis. You need to have something new and exciting to stand out.
Importance of Social Media Campaigns
Social networking ads reach consumers in a low-cost, cost-effective, and responsive manner. That’s why social media campaigns have become the main marketing tool for companies all over the world. With billions of people on social networks and continued growth in monthly users and power, it is difficult to imagine how companies will remain relevant without having a social media presence.
With so many different promotional resources available on these social media forums, you can make use of this opportunity and market your product cost-effectively. The great thing about social media marketing is that you don’t even have to use advertisements or tools to promote your brand.
Getting an online presence as a company on any of the social media forums like Facebook or Instagram is a perfect way to communicate with and engage with your audience on a personal level. That gives you the chance to share your story with all of your followers and inspire them with your achievements or past failures.
A social media campaign is one of the cheapest ways to market your company online. You can reach your target audience, connect with current and future customers, generate brand loyalty, increase website traffic, and boost sales by using social media. Social marketing isn’t just a trend, it’s a strong industry tactic that’s here to stay and help you reach more people around the world.
Having a presence on social media makes it easier for your customers to find you and communicate with you. This would help to increase customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. As the creation of a loyal customer base is one of the key objectives of every company, social media should be part of your strategy.
One of the best reasons for your company to be marketing on social media is that your consumers are already investing time in these channels. It’s a good way to communicate and connect with consumers on a personal level. Simple market analysis will help you decide which social networks your target audience uses the most.
In addition, by interacting and connecting with your consumers, you can gain their attention and communicate your brand message. That way, you can meet more audiences in real-time and build yourself on the market.
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Concluding thoughts on social media campaigns
Presence in social media is becoming a crucial element in the measurement of rankings. The algorithm that ensures a good ranking continues to evolve. Nowadays you have to do more than just customize your website and constantly update your blog. A good social media presence helps the brand to become successful. This presence acts as a signal to search engines that your brand is important, credible, and reliable.
Today, it’s almost difficult for any company to succeed without the involvement of social media, and social media campaigns. It’s a low-cost way to communicate with consumers and increase brand awareness. Daily changes to the right social media marketing plan will lead to increased traffic, improved SEO, brand loyalty improvisation, and more. So take the first step and build a profile, the sooner you start, the quicker you’ll see your business grow.
