How to Create a Social Media Marketing Campaign
Now that you read about 10 of the most important social marketing campaign examples, let’s also go through the steps you should follow while building a campaign for your own brand.
Here is how you build a social media marketing campaign:
Identify Your Campaign Goal Craft Your Social Media Strategy Decide on Your Main Campaign Message Brainstorm Content Ideas Use a Social Media Scheduling Tool Engage with Your Target Audience Create a Branded Hashtag for Your Campaign Collaborate with Influencers Share User-Generated Content Monitor & Adjust Your Social Strategy
Let’s get started with the first item from our list…
1. Identify Your Campaign Goal
As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, what sets social media campaigns aside from other social projects is their targeted approach.
So, in order to craft a truly effective campaign, you have to start by writing down one specific goal you want to accomplish. Maybe you want to generate more leads, increase your sales, or attract more people to your website.
Stick to one goal to make sure you put all your efforts into achieving the desired result.
This is the structure your goal should have:
Wanted result + activities that will lead to that results + the social channels included in the strategy + deadline.
Example:
Increase brand awareness by 20% by running a giveaway on Facebook and Instagram in the following month.
2. Craft Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
To make sure you create a strong social media marketing strategy for your campaign, you have to ask yourself the following questions:
Who is your target audience for this campaign？What are the main channels you will use？What are the activities that will help you achieve your goal？How much content should you post on social media？How will you measure your performance？
Once you have the information, you can start shaping your strategy and run social marketing campaigns that will exceed your expectations.
3. Decide on Your Main Campaign Message
The same principle we applied to campaign goals works for messages too.
Focus on one message and put all the spotlight on it. As a result, you will ensure your message comes across loud and clear. Don’t distract your audience from the one message they should focus on by including multiple other statements in your campaign.
Look at our social media campaign examples, especially the NatGeo #ThinkBeforeYouLike campaign, and follow their lead.
The best way to go about creating your campaign message is to follow the KISS formula:
Keep it Simple, Stupid. Take the message you have created and bring it to its simplest form.
Besides being simple, your message should help you achieve your social media goals while emphasizing the wants and needs of your target audience. However, this depends on the purpose of your campaign.
The best way to evaluate your message is to test it by asking the opinions of your employees, colleagues, friends, and family. Make sure you only show it to them once and see if the message is simple and easy to understand.
4. Brainstorm Content Ideas
Now that you have a clear strategy laid out, it’s time to get creative and come up with some content ideas that will engage your audience.
What type of social media post will help you get your point across？
In our examples, you have seen that some brands prepared several posts with the same aesthetic and message (e.g. Fisher-Price, LinkedIn) and posted them one after the other to make the most out of their campaign.
Other brands created regular series or launched challenges and contests that were designed to encourage interaction and user-generated content.
Don’t forget that your content is a way of achieving your goal, so keep it in mind while brainstorming post ideas. For instance, if your goal is to increase your sales, try to use a similar approach to Ikea or Cadbury.
5. Use a Social Media Scheduling Tool
When it comes to social media, timing is everything. So pay close attention to the way you schedule your content.
It’s best to use a social media management tool that will help you keep a consistent posting system at all times and save time by creating and posting your content from the same place.
SocialBee is a prime example of an all-in-one social media management tool that takes half of the responsibility off your hands.
Connect all your social media channels to SocialBee and start managing the posts for your social media campaigns from one place.
Start your free 14-day SocialBee trial today to create and schedule your content with ease!
Moreover, besides using a killer social media tool, you also need to strategize your posting approach to make the most out of your content.
There are three main aspects you must take into consideration when it comes to planning your content marketing strategy:
How much will you post on each channel？When will your audience be online？What are the best times to post on your social media platforms？
With this information in mind, you can start creating a customized schedule that will help you reach more people and boost your online exposure.
6. Engage with Your Target Audience
Engagement plays a huge role in the success of your social media campaigns. When people keep interacting with your content, they turn the algorithm in your favor.
What engagement basically signals to social media platforms is that your content is great, and it needs to be shown to other social media users. So, the platforms boost your posts and make sure your content gets exposed to a larger audience.
But, how can you encourage your audience to like, comment, and share your posts？
There are a few ways you can go about it, such as:
Create challenges, giveaways, and contests where your audience has to engage with your content to participateCreate pollsAsk questionsRequest feedback and recommendations
You can also be the first one to initiate connections—start following relevant accounts, reply to comments and messages, and handle all your reviews in a timely fashion. By doing this, you show that you care about your community and value the customer-brand interaction.
7. Create a Branded Hashtag for Your Campaign
As you might have noticed from our social media campaign examples, branded hashtags are often used to let audiences know that the social media content they are seeing is part of a bigger initiative.
However, that’s not all.
Branded hashtags have quite an important role in social media campaigns:
They build brand identityThey generate brand awarenessThey encourage user-generated contentThey organize all the content posted as part of the campaign in one place
Each social media campaign should have a specific designated branded hashtag. In this way, brands can use those hashtags on social media to see how much impact they had through a certain campaign (how many people posted about it, the content that was generated as a result, and the overall sentiment).
But don’t limit yourself to only one. You can also include more of the hashtags that contain your tagline and your business name.
Here are examples of branded hashtags we use for our business: #SocialBee, #LifeAtTheHive, #SocialBeeOffice, SocialBeeTeam, #KeepBuzzing.
To keep your hashtags organized and ready to go whenever you post new social media content, SocialBee has included in its large set of features the Hashtag Collection functionality.
Organize your branded hashtags in separate collections and add them to your social media posts with a simple click whenever you need to use them.
Start your free 14-day SocialBee trial to optimize the way you use hashtags on social media!
8. Collaborate with Influencers
Did you know that 49% of consumers rely on influencer recommendations for their buying decisions？ This is huge!
Influencer collaborations can help brands:
Expose their business to a larger audienceGain the trust of their customersCreate buzz around their brandGenerate leadsBoost sales
And don’t worry, these types of collaborations won’t drain your budget. You don’t have to go after the biggest social media influencers to see results. In fact, you will see better results by collaborating with niche online personalities with lower price points that target the same audience as your brand.
But why should you collaborate with influencers specifically for your social media campaigns？
Well, by having popular online personalities promote your campaigns, you will get immediate exposure and achieve your marketing goals faster and easier than ever before.
9. Share User-Generated Content
In the first part of the article, we talked about the social media marketing campaigns created by Zoom, Dove, Getty Museum, and Zalando.
They all had one thing in common: user-generated content.
Their campaigns relied almost entirely on the contributions of their audience.
All they had to do was add an incentive or just make it fun and challenging enough that their audience was willing to participate.
By getting their audience to send them content and share it on social media using branded hashtags, they managed to:
Expose the brand to a larger audienceImprove their reach and engagement levelsGenerate more leads for their business
All of this is for free.
So, if you are looking for a way to get your brand in front of a larger audience, create a contest, challenge or giveaway, and encourage your following to be part of your campaign.
10. Monitor & Adjust
Once you launch your campaign, you have to keep your eyes on the numbers and see the progress you are making toward your goals.
Monitor the social media marketing KPIs that are relevant to your goals and be ready to change your strategy if things are not going as planned.
For example, if your goal was to increase your website traffic, your KPI should be the number of visitors that came from your social media content.
Also, remember to constantly evaluate your content performance and discover if people like and interact with your social media posts, which you can easily do from SocialBee.
SocialBee allows you to keep an eye on your social media platforms and evaluate the performance of your content with ease from just one dashboard—an especially useful feature while running social media campaigns for your brand.
Start your free 14-day SocialBee trial to manage your social media campaigns from the same place!
Maintain a Successful Social Media Presence with SocialBee
No matter what type of campaign you are planning to create, one thing is sure: your content is the most important part of your strategy.
So, your best chance of seeing results from your campaigns is to focus on posting valuable content on the right social media account at the right time.
And what better way to do this than by using SocialBee—the all-in-one social media tool that will help you create and share posts on all your platforms from one place？
Begin your SocialBee 14-day free SocialBee trial to plan and evaluate your campaign performance from the same platform!