What is a social media campaign and what are the benefits of this?
Billions of people have social media accounts and with this number still growing month on month it seems the perfect place for your business to reach out to existing and new customers. Social media allows you to interact with existing customers, build on that relationship and create brand loyalty. It also allows you to target new audiences, increase your website traffic and sales.
When creating a social media campaign you need to ensure it is well planned out with clear objectives. If your campaign isn’t planned out well your message may be disjointed and not connect with your audience resulting in less or no conversions.
In this blog post we will look at how we can get the most from our social media campaigns, how to plan a campaign and ultimately get those conversions we want.
Planning and executing your social media campaign
Throughout the planning of the campaign we heavily focus on the audience and how we can influence them. However, we also need to be thinking about our internal team and the people working around us. These people may be able to help us with reviewing the risk factor, highlighting key benefits to the customer, resource requirement and any financial impact.
Planning and managing a social media campaign has six stages which involves objectives, audience, creation, strategy, execution and measurements. We will now look at each area in more detail.
Objectives
Objectives of a campaign are what you aim to do, achieve and the goals you want to target. The following questions will help you assess what these objectives are. Be as honest as you can at this stage as it will only be you that sees this information. If your objective is to clear products that you are struggling to sell that’s fine.
Where did the idea of this campaign come from?
What do you hope to achieve?
How will this benefit the customer?
Do you want to grow engagement? Increase your followers and brand awareness?
Or is it more of a financial objective – sales, conversions, leads?
Audience
You may take the knowledge you have on your audience for granted day to day and we all have an idea on what they look like. However, when you’re planning a campaign it’s time to stop and think about who they are in more detail and what will attract their attention.
The product or service you are promoting in this campaign will more than likely be focused on a particular sector of your audience. Or could even be a new audience you want to target. Start to think about the audience you are targeting, what do they look like? What will get their attention? What are their likes/dislikes? What platform will you find them on? How have they interacted with you in the past?
You may gather this information in a quantitative (facts, numbers, stats) and qualitative (behaviour, opinion, observation) manner. Once you start to gather this information you can build a persona for that audience. Try utilising your existing knowledge, analytics, social media insights, your CRM and sales data plus research social media looking at how this audience has interacted in the past.
Create of the campaign
Now you have gained insight into what you want to promote and who you want to promote to its time to create the campaign. There are different aspects to creating the campaign you need to consider – your content, imagery, user journey and call to action.
Your imagery and content needs to stand out and grab their attention. People easily scroll through social media without actually looking at what they are scrolling through. Consider how you can impact this behaviour? Think about what language you will use whether it will be informative, serious or humorous.
When you are thinking about the user journey map out the steps your audience needs to make the conversion. Can you reduce any of these steps and make it easier for them? Your campaign needs a clear call to action so once they have read the social media post they know what you want them to do. This may be shop now, read more, click to call and so on.
Strategy
A social media campaign strategy is a summary of where the campaign idea came from, what action you want to take and what you want achieve.
In this strategy you will look closely at how you will acquire the audiences attention as you reach people for the first time and how you will stand out to them. Once you have their attention how do you get them to participate in the campaign, take action and engage? Think about each action the customer may take and that user journey to a conversion.
Once they have converted can this customer then help share your campaign and reach more people? Think of the different channels they can do this such as social media and word of mouth. This might be a product review on your website or sharing a social media post.
Executing the campaign
Once you have planned your campaign and created all of the content its time to execute it. You will need to consider the stages in which your content will go live and what days / times are best. Creating a calendar of events for the campaign can help so you know what needs to be done on what day and allow you to allocate time to it.
Consider if you will create everything in advance or possibly create the majority and adapt some as you go along. Again, make sure you factor in time for this. How will you manage any interactions with the campaign? If you are generating leads who are they going to and are they aware? If its sales do you have the capacity to handle an increase? Its good to get everyone involved in the campaign during the planning stage and clearly identify the roles, responsibilities and communication so people know what is expected of them.
Measuring success of your social media campaign
Once your campaign is in full swing what would success look like and how will you measure this?
Measuring success is crucial and will help you to understand what works and what hasn’t. This may be through the social channel insights, for example if the campaign is to increase engagement on Facebook you might look at the Facebook insights tool and the engagement (clicks, shares, comments) for those posts.
Your campaign might encourage people to visit your website and buy product from you. Here we want to see the full journey from the customer interacting on social media, visiting the website and the journey they took to the actual sale being placed. This will cover your social media insights, Google Analytics and your website sales data.
Always plan what you are going to measure before your campaign starts and have clear goals of what you want to achieve. Remember as well as highlighting the good points from your campaign and the conversions you want to achieve also look at the parts that didn’t work so well. Highlighting the areas that didn’t work can help you gather lesson learnt which will increase your knowledge and help improve on future campaigns.
Did you know that project management in marketing can help you achieve higher results? Take a read of our marketing project management guide to find out more.
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