Social media is everywhere, and it’s a powerful tool, with around 4.55 billion users worldwide. So, for any business that takes its marketing seriously, it makes sense to utilise social media to attract potential customers. However, in order to get your message across and engage and attract a wider audience, a social media marketing strategy is vital. Social media marketing and management are more than just popping out a post.
How to plan a social media campaign
Any social media marketing strategy must outline the goals that you want to achieve from your campaign. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Maybe you want to sell more products and services? Perhaps you want to measure how people feel about your business. It could be a mixture of all three, but no matter what the goal is, it needs to be documented. At the same time, you need to be able to identify your starting point, so you should list all your existing and planned social media, including follower numbers and current metrics. This gives you a great comparison point to judge how successful your social media campaign has been.
For a social media campaign to be successful, it needs to follow 9 specific steps.
SMART Goals
After identifying what your social media goals are, for example, increasing brand awareness, you then need to drill down into them and become more specific. It’s important to have specific goals because you need to use them to measure the return of investment from the campaign. A key consideration with any goal is to try to avoid vanity metrics. Instead of focusing on follower numbers, think about post engagement, click-through and conversion rates. You can have loads of followers, but if they aren’t engaging or buying, it’s pretty pointless.
Alongside this, you may also want to consider having different goals or uses for each platform. Because each social media platform has different audiences and different ways of displaying your message, having a different goal for each one makes good marketing sense.
Learn about your audience
The next step is to learn about your audience and discover the key demographics for them: where they are based, what age category they fall into, and what are their other interests. From this, you can then create audience and buyer personas, which will help you develop better content for your campaign.
One word of warning, though: make sure that you gather the data. Don’t make assumptions about your audience. Making assumptions can mean that your message ends up being off point or that you focus your efforts in the wrong areas. Audience data doesn’t lie, and the information that you can glean from your social media accounts is worth its weight in gold.
Find out about your competition
We like to call this ‘competitive analysis’, and it is based on learning and understanding what your competitors are doing. Aside from being a great base to see what does and doesn’t work, it also helps you to spot opportunities that they may be missing. Spotting those opportunities can help you to define your unique selling point (USP).
Don’t be afraid to search relevant hashtags and keywords to help you find out what people are sharing and reacting to.
Complete a social media audit
Right, you know about your audience, you’ve discovered what the competition is up to, and now you need to focus on what you’ve been doing. A social media audit allows you to see what’s already working and what isn’t. It looks at who’s already engaging with your content and which platforms they use. The audit also helps you to see where you stand compared to your competitors.
At this point, you can then begin deciding what the purpose of each of your social media accounts is and whether they are worth keeping. For example, if your audience isn’t on LinkedIn, is there any point in running marketing through that platform?
This part of the process is also an excellent opportunity to identify any imposter accounts that may be using your company name and to get official verification from each social media platform.
Improve your existing social media profiles
Now is the time to ensure that all your social media profiles are up to date and are filled with high-quality content and images. At this point, it can be a good idea to write a mission statement for each platform which outlines what you plan to achieve and how.
Get inspired
This is the fun part of building any social media campaign. Finding inspiration involves researching impactful and award-winning campaigns and discovering your favourite social media brands. It may be that they use clever plays on words or that the images they use are eye-catching; whatever the reason, make a point of noting down what it is you like about it. At the same time, you can also ask your followers what they would like to see more of.
Design a social media content calendar
You now need to set up a social media posting schedule. This is where you decide what kind of content you’re going to post and how regularly you will do it. This stage is very much about getting the balance right on all levels. The first thing to consider is your content mix. In much the same way that you look for a return of investment on your marketing, your audience requires a return for the time spent interacting with your content. With that in mind, your content needs to be varied and not fully ‘salesy’. A good way of starting is to split your content so that 80% is informative and educational and 20% is promoting your brand. It’s also a good idea to reshare content from other accounts, as this will build your online reputation, and don’t forget that social media should be social!Â
Alongside avoiding being too ‘salesy’, you also need to avoid being too spammy. Over-posting can sometimes be more damaging to a brand than under-posting.
Create some great content!
Ok, you’ve decided when and where you’re going to post; you’ve been inspired by some award-winning campaigns, and now is the time to create some amazing content and get it out there. Make sure that you get your spelling and wording right and that you have permission to use any images or video.
Track your performance and re-evaluate
Remember how we told you to make notes of follower numbers and engagement metrics? This is where they become useful, as you now have a baseline to begin evaluating how successful your campaign is.
It’s always good to remember that campaigns can be adjusted. What might seem good on paper may not work when implemented, so if the metrics aren’t looking great, re-evaluate and adjust your campaign. Also, remember to be patient; campaigns rarely go viral overnight.
Alternatively, you could just speak to a professional about how to plan a social media campaign.
Obviously, it is possible for a business to write and run its own social media campaign, but in many instances, it makes more sense to ask a professional to do it for you. Marketing agencies are specialists in designing and implementing eye-catching and memorable social media marketing. They have a wealth of other professionals like copywriters, graphic designers, and photographers at their fingertips and are best placed to make sure that your campaign is a success. If you’d like to chat with a professional marketer about how to get your business seen, we’d like to hear from you.
