In this digital age, social media is one of the most important platforms for marketing. It lures potential clients in with temptation, but if you’re not careful, you’ll find your campaign and your company dashed along the rocks.
Creating a successful campaign isn’t simple. It requires a considerable amount of planning and creativity. Finding the right balance takes patience, knowledge, and the ability to execute with precision.
So we have come up with 5 tips to check off before you next launch a campaign. These will help to increase your chances of social media success!
What is the Objective?
This is quite an obvious one but many agencies seem to lack thought when it comes to their social media campaign.
You can accomplish so many things with social media. Many of them can impact your company massively, but unless you know your client’s final objective, you’ll be left scratching your head when it comes to answering their important questions and meeting their needs.
Don’t trap yourself in thinking everything has to be focused on bringing in that sale. Customer service and brand affinity can all be positively affected and tracked through social campaigns.
Add a Budget
Back when social media took off, marketers saw the various platforms as a way to broadcast their message to large audiences at no cost.
However, times have now changed. Marketers know that reaching an audience – that will actually engage – requires much more than just posting any old jargon.
Your content requires high production to make the desired impact. Videos, photos, and other images such as infographics are a must, yes, however you will, at some point, need to add funds to your campaign to reach an audience.
Also, if you’re serious about getting a return from your campaigns, you will also need to purchase a few social media tools. Establishing the true cost of producing a social media campaign in advance not only can save you headaches, but it helps you calculate and report the ROI for your efforts.
Your staff
Working hand in hand with your budget is your staffing. A large social media campaign will more than likely include a wide variety of elements. Whether staffed in-house or you have outsourced with freelance, it’s important to recognize the various skill sets you’ll need to achieve the ultimate campaign. These include…
- Copywriter: Your message needs to grab attention and be compelling. You must provide something of value while also driving the right message across. When it comes to Twitter, it’s quite tough to do in 140 characters.
- Designer: Social media is massively dominated by images. And it’s clear why – images grab the audience’s attention. Make sure yours grab the attention as well as send out the right message.
- Photographer: A photographer may be required if you’re looking to promote your gym, product etc. Nothing puts off a potential client more than poor imagery.
- Videographer: Editing, sound mixing, and motion graphics can make your videos stand out.
- Data Analyst: Once your campaign is out there, you will require someone who can generate reports, insights, and create test situations that will benefit future campaigns.
Competitive Research
In the creative world – actually in every world – one of the most joyful moments is when you think you’ve come up with a new creative idea.
That being said, there’s nothing more disappointing then when you officially launch your campaign and discover that your competition has done the same thing 2 months ago.
To overcome this, before you begin your campaign, it’s worth doing some competitive research. Take a look at your main competitors, but also go beyond that to look at other brands that are targeting the same audience.
If you’re basing your campaign around a certain event (Super Bowl, Christmas etc.), look at campaigns that your competitors used last year. What worked? What didn’t?
Engagement Metrics
The true power of social media is its ability to create engagement. It can be as simple as garnering likes, shares, retweets, and comments, or you could go the whole hog and generate sales.
Sadly, not enough marketers give enough thought when it comes to what type of engagement they from their campaign.
If the goal is to generate brand awareness of promotion for a new product, a retweet is more valuable than a favorite. If you want to know what people think of your new product or service, comments are the way forward as they will give you reviews as well as sharing the post to a wider audience. Make sure your engagement revolves around a specific call-to-action that aligns with your campaign goals.
With these five factors put in place, your campaign will be ready to launch without any mishaps. If you have any other tips that you would like to share with our readers, or if you would like any advice when it comes to campaigns, just drop us a message in the comment box below and we will be more than happy to help!
