There are 223 million social media users in the US alone, which means that 77% of the population has a social media account on at least one of the platforms. Whether they are online to keep up with their friends, checking out restaurants for their next meal, or browsing for their upcoming purchases, consumers are waiting to be wowed by you!
So it is entirely possible that your next social media campaign can be the one that pushes them to take action!
Due to the insane number of social media users, marketers are mapping out the user patterns and quickly learning about the immense importance of treating customers well on social media.
In fact, in 2021, the social media marketing budget is said to increase to 48 billion dollars!
All this money would help multiple social media marketers plan, execute, and measure better campaigns and strategies
A well-designed and executed campaign can skyrocket your digital marketing efforts and give a significant boost to your branding. Not only this, but with the growing number of people online on social media at all times, this is THE time to carry out your experiments and pave your way to a successful social media campaign and use social media for branding and marketing your business!
What Is a Social Media Campaign?
It is a set of activities aligned to achieve a specific goal. For a successful campaign messaging should be clear and spread over a particular time frame with measurable outcomes. You can spread your social media marketing campaign over a few weeks or even a year (this is not recommended, though). It can also be a recurring campaign and can either target a single social media platform or spread out on multiple ones.
There are no hard and fast rules to build a social media campaign strategy and there is no single formula that works for all. You don’t need to invest a lot in digital marketing campaigns to get desired results. Similarly, there is no guarantee that an organic plan will pan out as you expect.
However, it sure will cost you less than traditional marketing campaigns and would have the reach to make a bigger impact. With billions of people online, your campaign can hit home for anyone in any part of the world.
With a social media campaign, all you need is a plan and a few examples to motivate you. That is precisely where this guide comes into play!
What Are the Types of Social Media Campaign?
There is no cookie-cutter campaign template that will work for all brands, which means what might work for you would not work for others. But with experimentation, you can figure out which of the following works best:
Polls
Polls help increase engagement and give you insights into what your users think about an issue. You can create polls on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram stories.
For polls on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, create a post like you usually would and just use the “poll” option to add choices. On Instagram, upload a story using the create option and add the poll sticker.
Partnerships
Partnerships are an amazing way to increase brand awareness and reach a larger audience. If you pick partnerships, you can potentially increase the number of visitors coming to your posts, which increases the possibility of them converting into followers and eventually into leads and paying customers.
You can partner with influencers, Facebook groups, other brands, and brand ambassadors, among other options.
Events
When you think about a social media marketing campaign, events are not the first thing that might come to your mind. However, you can easily host a virtual event or market the next workshop/seminar/talks as a part of your next social media campaign strategy.
Use the Facebook event option, fill in all the details, and promote your event to the audience.
Contests + Giveaways
Contests are a super fun way to engage with your audience and understand how they perceive your brand. If you throw giveaways into the mix, you can significantly increase the page’s reach and make the posts visible to more viewers.
In general, giveaways are used to achieve short-term goals, such as increasing engagement on the posts and followers.
Giving Back
Giving back to the community that gave so much to you is one of the best social media marketing campaigns ever. You can pledge with your followers to give a small share of your earnings to a local charity.
Alternatively, you can donate a part of your products or services for a certain number of sales that you make for a short period.
10 Steps on How to Create Successful Social Media Campaigns?
It might not be rocket science, but it is not child’s play either.
It requires the right balance of paid and unpaid content, perfect timings, and a plan laid out so well that there is little to no room for error.
Also, make sure that the proposed social campaign is focused on the end goal, has measurable outcomes, and is fun for both you and your audiences!
No one likes a dull image on their social media, after all!
Competitor Analysis
In the planning stage of the social media campaign strategy, it is vital to look at what your competitors are doing. Here are the top three things to check out:
- Have your competitors previously run a similar campaign in terms of content format and type?
- What was the outcome of their campaign, and how did the target audience react to it. How was the engagement on that particular campaign?
- What activities were executed? Do they host giveaways, polls, and similar activities often?
By brainstorming around these questions, you will have better answers to what is working out in the industry. You would have more room for making your social media marketing campaign unique and up to date!
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Craft Your Strategy
Crafting the strategy is one of the most important parts of any social media campaign. Here are the few things that you should map out in this step:
- How will this strategy align with the end goal?
- What is the primary objective of the strategy?
- What type of audience are you trying to target with this strategy?
- What is the potential reach of this campaign?
- How will you market the campaign?
- How do you plan on creating engagement on the posts?
- What’s the time frame of the campaign?
Being informative and staying true to your social media voice should be the only two constants in all of the campaigns you run throughout the year. While crafting your strategy, make sure you don’t deviate from these two things!
To keep track of things and milestones, you need to use a social media content calendar.
Choose a Single Message to Promote
We understand that you want to take the social media world by storm. But do you think you can push multiple messages in one campaign?
Let us answer that: NO!
It is best to stick to a single message throughout the social media campaign and support it with as many secondary arguments as you need. You can also use multiple platforms to deliver that one message to various audiences.
Choose Content Type & Format
Next up, select the type and format of the content that the social media marketing campaign would push to the audience.
Do you want to work with influencers on this campaign or use user-generated content? Or would you just rely on the in-house team to create content?
Maybe try smaller videos or one-liners instead of long-form captions?
This is your time to bring something out of the box.
To identify what format will work best for your campaign, think of why you are running it. It is essential to study how your target audience behaves at that time of the year and go with the type and format to generate the most engagement.
Manage & Define Results
To know how well your campaign did, it is crucial to outline and define the expected results of the social media campaign clearly. It is okay if you don’t hit 100%. Even if you don’t, you still generate loads of data to base your next campaign.
A popular way to track results and create gorgeous reports is using a tool like Social Champ. Use the analytics and tracking feature to check out which posts gained the most traction on which social media channel.
We will let you in on a bit of a secret as well; Social Champ will generate platform-specific reports with customization options to wow your boss at the end-of-the-campaign meeting!
Balance Sponsored & Non-sponsored Content
Your followers won’t be too happy if you keep on pushing promotional content to their faces all the time. Creating a healthy balance between promotional and non-promotional content can impress your audience as the brand that offers helpful content. As a result, the audience would naturally engage more on all posts.
Social media is all about the audiences, and if they feel pressured into liking or looking at something all the time, they won’t even take a second to hit block!
Your social media marketing campaign will be most effective if you balance between content and provide value and engagement opportunities with both.
Ensure the Content Goes Well With the Campaigns
It goes without saying that aesthetics wins everything!
If your content is gorgeous to look at and read, it will gain more traction and shares. This is why we cannot emphasize more on the fact that creating a brand aesthetic that is unique and true to the message you give out with your content.
Anyone who lands on your ad should know that it is yours without reading the name of the profile. Having signature aesthetics makes you stand out from your competitors as well!
Engage With the Audience Regularly
No matter how huge your following is, it is imperative to engage with them regularly. Take some time to reply to their comments, like their content, and respond to all mentions and reviews.
By engaging with them, you show your audience how important they are to you and your brand. This also indicates that you are willing to listen to them and curate solutions that focus on giving them the best experience
These small gestures all year long keep the audience invested in your brand for the long run and would result in a successful social media campaign.
Don’t Forget the Hashtags
Hashtags are the backbone of a social media marketing campaign and can make or break it. Hashtags also unite the content across different channels or platforms.
You can keep track of the interactions and make it easier for your audience to engage with the posts. But here is the catch!
Your hashtag should be unique, catchy, and memorable.
For example, the #WeAccept by Airbnb was one of the most tweeted hashtags during the Super Bowl. It was super unique, supported an extremely visible cause, and was marketed very well by the Airbnb team.
Automate with a Scheduling Tool
Lastly, never underestimate the power of a social media management tool. Planning, creating, and executing a campaign is already a tedious job; you don’t need to add another job to the timeline by manually pushing the content on social media.
Use a scheduling tool such as Social Champ to help your marketers’ schedule content with text, images, videos, GIFs, hashtags, and much more!
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How to Set Social Media Campaign Goals?
All campaign goals should be SMART.
That is, they should be;
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-based
Here are a few other outcomes that you should focus on:
- Increasing brand awareness and building a more substantial presence.
- Connecting and creating meaningful relations with the audiences so that they can stick with the brand long-term.
- Increase your digital footprint by boosting your web traffic.
- Drive sales and help you reach your target!
Get Inspired by These Five Effective Social Media Marketing Campaigns
To give you a better round-up of how you can create some kickass campaigns, here are some of the best-performing ones over time:
- #shotoniphone, a popular social media campaign, has over 24.1 million mentions on the internet and has reached billions of people. Apple shares some of these on their Instagram time and again.
- Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino that took the internet by storm was actually a secret menu item that they launched for a limited time as it helped them drive sales.
- Applebees used user-generated content to populate their Instagram handle with the hashtag #fantographer.
- #Coulduseabeer by Coors light. They gave away 500k beers to grateful customers and made them into customers for life. It helped them increase brand awareness, and they sold a truckload of beer during the lockdown if that isn’t a win-win situation!
- Ending this list with the brilliant master of social media marketing campaigns; Coke. #Shareacoke is a campaign that we are all familiar with. To date, it has an insane number of shares!
Conclusion
Social media marketing has taken the world by storm, and campaigns are a great way to market your business and stay relevant.
With the possibility of your social media marketing campaign reaching billions and billions of people, the ability to directly engage with the audience and sharing the business with so many people can help a startup or even a huge company make its mark on the online world!
Starting creating engaging campaigns, and who knows, you might be the next one featured in successful social media campaign lists!
10 thoughts on “10 Steps to Create an Epic Social Media Campaign”
As a beginner running a social media campaign is very hard. But such blogs allow me to make the process smooth
Love that infographic. Super easy to understand.
Definitely agree with the last step. Using a tool makes it easier!
Cannot agree more with the engage with the audience point. I mean as important as planning a social media campaign is, engaging is even more important. No one likes a dead account that just posts content and never replies to comments.
What a comprehensive social media marketing campaign guide. I like your way of presenting the content, It is really easy to read, with eye-catching headlines and the opening is what caught me into reading the rest. Thank you so much.
I enjoy what you guys are usually up too. This sort of clever work and coverage! Keep up the wonderful works guys I’ve added you guys to my blogroll.
Keeping this article in my bookmarked list to refer to at a later time.
Great article, I must say social media is a whole new world itself. Thanks for listing down the steps to create social media campaigns.
I’ve bookmarked your article it is really informative. Fun fact, 73 percent of marketers believe their social media marketing efforts have been “effective” or “very effective” for their business.
Great post, Thanks for sharing such a brilliant ideas. I really like your blogs. Your blogs helped me a lot.