Planning A Social Media Campaign? Stop And Ask Yourself This First

What are social campaigns?

There will be times when as a business, you need to execute special, one-off promotions to reach a defined business objective.

Marketing and advertising campaigns are often scheduled and incorporated into longer-term marketing strategies and plans, with a clear, defined goal that is time-sensitive: such as achieving a certain number of Christmas bookings by a certain date, or selling a set number of units of a new product you are launching. Marketing and advertising campaigns are part of your longer-term marketing plan and strategy to help you reach overall, larger business goals, alongside your other marketing efforts.

Due to its meteoric popularity, extensive usage, and huge reach, many businesses turn to social media to run marketing and advertising campaigns.

So, if you’re wanting to plan a social media campaign, here’s how, and what you need to consider first.

Planning a social media campaign: what to consider first

Who you are targeting

You need to have a distinct audience or audience segments in mind when creating content and planning your social campaign. Without this, you’re not going to produce campaign content your target customers will enjoy or engage with.

Determine audience personas and decide on the demographics, behaviours, and interests of the people you want to reach and appeal to with your social media campaign in order to achieve your business objective.

What content appeals to your audience, how will you add value to them, what will lead your audience to convert?

Once you’ve defined the target audience for your social campaign, you’re off on the right foot.

What content do you need, and where do you need it for?

Now you’ve established your campaign’s online audience, you need to decide which channels you’re going to use. Campaigns work well cross-platform because they are time-sensitive and need to generate as much impact as possible within an allocated period.

To determine the best channels, go where the majority of your audience are, and if you are going to use multiple social media channels or platforms, ensure you’re not regurgitating the same content – you’ll need to create content that’s tailored to each platform you’re going to use.

Define a schedule of what you will post, where you will post it, and when.

Social media campaigns need a lot of content created for them, despite being of a shorter duration than an ongoing strategy. To help you, repurpose content into different mediums, and create a variety of content types, such as video, reel, lives, images, guides, blogs, and more, because different people engage with different types of social content.

How will you generate campaign build-up?

Ahead of your social campaign, allocate a time frame of which you’re going to offer sneak previews and teasers to generate build-up. Give people an incentive to engage with you before your campaign’s even begun – such as early access or a discount.

The response generated will also give you an indication of how your campaign is going to go, and what results you could expect from it.

By encouraging engagement, interaction, leads, and awareness ahead of your launch, you’re putting your campaign in good stead for success because your audience is already aware of what’s coming and you’re generating more touchpoints with them – after all, it takes a certain amount of consumer touchpoints before a conversion!

Launching your social campaign

Kick-off your social media campaign with a BANG! Ensure the content you use is 10x the quality of your competitors, include CTA’s, use relevant keywords and hashtags, and post at the time you have the most followers online. For product launches, businesses tend to pick payday, and for sales launches, bank holidays, or seasonal events because people are wired to spend more during such occasions!

Running your social campaign: how long for?

All social marketing campaigns should run for a short duration as opposed to a plan or strategy which is ongoing.

It depends on your average consumer purchase decision time, as well as your AOV, and how long a lead takes before they convert – this is unique to your business.

If you have a longer lead time and conversion journey funnel, start your campaign earlier rather than later – run it over a matter of weeks. If your products are of a lower AOV and leads convert pretty quickly, you can run shorter campaigns over a few days.

If you run a social media campaign for too long, leads and conversions will drop off and audience ad fatigue will kick in.

Measuring a social campaign’s success

If you’ve run social media campaigns before, you should have learnt what worked and what didn’t, and you’ll also have results to compare to. However, if this is your first social media campaign, you should leverage data – which content are your audience interacting with most? What is driving the most leads? You could try A/B testing with target audience segments to see which are the most receptive, or learn which creatives perform the best.

Related Reading:

Social media strategy for start-ups and SMEs

Social media content advice to grow your audience