Be it a small or a huge business, having a social media presence in today’s era is very important. It helps businesses not just to market their products and services but also to understand the market. From the different social media marketing campaigns, different companies have been able to get a better insight on their product or service requirement and curate the product in such a way to make a better impact on the target consumers.
However, launching a social media campaign is not the end of it. Observing it and seeing it through is also necessary for the perfect impact. There are some steps to be taken for a successful social media marketing campaign and they are listed as below:
- Align your business objectives and know your social media goals
You cannot just be in the office one morning and decide ‘today I need to launch a social media campaign’. For a proper social media campaign, the process and its expected impact should be discussed well in advance. A campaign should have a proper goal and objective for campaigners to be able to draw their insights from it. After all, a campaign is not launched without a purpose. You need to align your business objectives with your social media goals.
When you are launching a social media campaign you need to have complete clarity on the desired results you want to see from the campaign. Some of the common objectives of social media campaigns for businesses are to raise brand awareness, increase sales and improve customer retention, drive website traffic, improve customer support and customer loyalty, to increase media relations.
You should have some platform-specific goals. For example, the expected result from Facebook marketing will not be the same as that on LinkedIn. The purpose of marketing in each will be different.
- Understanding the target audience is crucial
One of the primary steps in launching a successful social media campaign is that you need to know more about your target audience. You need to understand what their requirements are, in which social media platform they are more active, their age, sex demographics, etc.
These are small insights on taking a big leap in social media marketing. This in turn will help you in defining your social media goals. You will be able to curate your products and services in such a way that your customers get drawn to them. You need to understand the customer behaviour and trends such as the websites they visit, the social media platforms they are most active in, what kind of influencer tactics they are most drawn to, and the like.
- Gauging your competition and their abilities is important
Before launching any social media campaign try and understand the kind of attempts your peers and competitors are making. Figure out the success rate of such campaigns, how the audience is responding to such campaigns, etc. See what kind of social media platforms your competitors are using. Try and understand the traffic generated through the different social media platforms for your competitors.
There are many tools available in the market to help you understand customer traffic on a competitor’s platform in terms of numbers. Moreover, keep a close look at the attempts made by your competitors or people providing similar products or services on social media and the response of the audience to such attempts.
- Measure the success of your social media activities
If you already have a social media presence, try to measure the amount of success in terms of metrics, out of the previous social media marketing attempts. Measure your page views, user visits and the like for your social media accounts. You need to understand that the requirement and results obtained from each social media platform will not be the same.
Define your goals of each social media platform in such a way that it becomes easy for you to gauge the success. Have a close look at the social media activities on your business account. How the audience is interacting with the different attempts on your social media campaigns can be a key marker in determining the success and the failure of your campaigns.
- Curate the content on your social media platform
Having any random content on the social media platform will not make much sense if you are trying to build a brand or establish one. The content and social media templates on your official social media platform needs to be very direct and put in such a way that the customers can interact with it. You need to keep updating the content on the platform to keep the target audience engaged.
Plan your content promotion wisely with the help of your marketing team. Each marketing attempt should be in such a way that it makes a maximum impact on the audience. Decide and discuss in which kind of platform you will have what kind of content and what the desired goal from them are.
Social media campaign if done the right way can fetch a good return on investment. It is also possible to generate revenue from successful social media campaigns. You can create stunning social media graphics and headers with professionally designed templates for Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and more using PosterMyWall.
- Create a social media content calendar
A social media content calendar comes in handy when launching a successful social media campaign. You need to understand your objective and define your desired results from the social media platform. Based on the desired goals you can attempt to curate the content.
For example, you can decide the weightage of each kind of content on the platform. There are two basic rules to define your kind of content promotion. The 80/20 rule is based on the fact that only 20% of the total posts on a social media platform will be about the brand itself. On the other hand, the rule of thirds states that 1/3rd of your total posts should be directed towards personal interactions, promotional content and thought leadership.
- Monitor the impact of each of your social media marketing attempts
Launching social media marketing is not the end of it, you need to monitor it for the achievement of the desired goals. You need to closely monitor if your social media attempts are being successful in determining the objects of it.
For example, if it is driving the website traffic, if it is, then is it enough. Is it impactful in brand awareness? Is it increasing customer awareness, boosting customer loyalty? Is it improving media relations? And more of your already defined goals. Tracking these metrics will help you define and improve your social media marketing strategy and in turn, build a better brand for the future.
All this said, following these steps can help you drive a successful social media marketing campaign and help in building better brands. However, you need to bank on your intuitions and experience too in terms of choosing the right social media platforms to market in, at the right time and in the right way to have the best impact on your target audience. Understand your brand requirements first, before you go on to launch a marketing campaign to gather the desired results out of it.
