Don’t have an idea- how to plan a social media calendar and how to execute your social media marketing campaign on social media platforms, then must read this article
If you are working for a company then there are lots of things to do like branding, create awareness for releasing a brand new product or providing a specific service, there are always a number of reasons to make a strategy for social media marketing campaigns.
But to ensure that your campaign is as successful as possible, the campaign needs to be planned and strategized in advance.
What is Social Media Marketing Campaign?
A social media marketing campaign is a concreted marketing effort that uses one or more social media platforms to improve or assist with a business target.
Creating a day-to-day plan is very important for any successful social media campaign.
In this blog post, you will know seven steps you need to go through to help plan a social media campaign to improve your chances of achieving your goals.
This social media campaign strategy will help you create an integrated social media marketing strategy that shows you how to increase engagement to boost leads and sales using social networks.
To ensure the success of your overall social media marketing activities, a successful social media strategy is necessary.
A social media strategy helps:-
- Maintain clear channel-wide posting schedules
- Avoid scrambling last minute to find content to share
- Stop missing the boat due to poor planning on-trend topics
In short, an effective social media marketing strategy helps you to do better and work more efficiently.
Access the Social media marketing strategy step by step:
1 . Set campaign goals:- Whether you are launching a new product or promoting your services, social media campaigns work effectively with the key moments. Social media is the foundation of your success whenever you need to share goals or regenerate buzz.
The first question you need to ask before a campaign is: why am I running this campaign? Answering this question will determine other steps you take during your campaign.
Generally, common goals for running social media campaigns include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Acquiring leads
- Increasing sales
- Acquiring customers
- Increasing engagement
Here are the general social media goals to use as a starting point:
Increase brand awareness: This is good for newer businesses that are trying to make their brand more well-known through growing and engaging a social media following.
Generate new leads: If you’re looking for new leads, you can use social media to get email subscribers, event registrants, and new leads.
Drive website traffic: If your business wants to increase traffic to blog posts or product pages on your website, you can share links on social media to drive traffic back to your site.
Increase online sales: If you have an e-commerce business, you can use social media to run promotions and ads to increase sales.
Strengthen customer support: If your business needs a central place to address customer questions and concerns, you can use social media as your hub to interact with customers online.
However, after setting these goals, you need to be specific. What level of brand awareness do you want to achieve with your campaigns? More website traffic? 2,000 new social media followers?
To set effective goals, they need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
Then, after setting your goals, it’s vital to state the metrics you will use to measure the achievement of your goals.
Make no mistake, goals are extremely important. In a CoSchedule survey, it was found that marketers who set goals were 376% more likely to report success.
It affects every aspect of your social media campaign and helps to determine its success or failure.
2. Create buyer personas
Even if you create the best campaign content ever, if you’re not targeting the right audience with your content, the campaign will likely fail. That’s why you need to understand your ideal target before a social media campaign.
A buyer persona is a document that contains extensive details of your ideal customers. This helps you to create messages in your campaigns that can resonate with your target audience.
Some details to have in your buyer persona include:
- Name
- Gender
- Age
- Income
- Location
- Pain points
- Favorite social media channels
- Hobbies
- Interests
Knowing these details will help you create messages to build trust and convince your prospects to take action.
With a tool like Facebook Audience Insights, you can input a few details and then get more details from Facebook’s huge database.
3. Choose your social media channels
When running a social media campaign, you’re likely to get better results when you focus on a few social media channels.
From your buyer persona, you have an idea of your ideal audience’s favorite social media channels. Most times, it also depends on the type of product or service you’re offering. For instance, LinkedIn is a popular social media network for B2B companies because many decision-makers are present on the platform.
Another way to select social media channels for your campaign is to look at past results on your website analytics. Which channels have referred more visitors to your website in the past? Which channels have brought in more leads?
Stating these channels will affect your campaign as each channel has its best practices. Furthermore, each channel has its best content type and posting frequency. For example, what works on Twitter won’t necessarily work on Instagram and there’s a huge difference between LinkedIn and most other major social networks.
Social Media Platforms Overview
| Social Media Channel | Audience Demographic* | Best For |
| Over 2 billion daily active users, 56% men and 44% women, Popular for all age ranges | Businesses that want to reach a wide audience, run advertisements, and post live videos. | |
| 335 million monthly active users, Evenly split between men/women, Most popular for 18-29-year-olds | Businesses that want to share timely updates, provide customer service, or share relevant articles. | |
| 600 million active users, Used by 38% of online women and 28% online men, Most popular for 18-29-year-olds | Visual brands that want to share photos and videos of their products, staff, and customers. | |
| 467 million registered members, Used by 31% of online men and 27% of women | B2Bs that want to make professional connections, share industry or company news, and post jobs. | |
| 175 million monthly active users, Used by 45% of online women, 17% of online men, Popular with 18-49-year-olds | Ecommerce businesses that want to share product photos, drive website traffic and increase sales. |
4. Have a social media calendar
When you run a social media campaign, timing is very important.
Using a social media calendar, you can outline your content from the beginning of your campaign to the end.
The team will concentrate on what needs to be done at a given time with a calendar in place. In your social media some important tasks include:
- Content creation overview to track that content is created in time.
- Content curation posts: when to share curated content.
- Employee advocacy posts: if/when your employees share updates from their personal accounts.
- Social media updates for each channel, throughout the campaign.
Your social media calendar will help ensure that you don’t miss any important steps in your strategy, while also helping you be more productive with your time.
As you create your editorial calendar, include columns or tabs for:
- Category
- Keywords
- Article type
- Promotion
- Content format (in the form of text, image, video, audio, infographics etc)
- Related marketing
- Additional tracking dates (due dates, other signoffs)
5. Research the right tools to boost productivity
If you’re running a social media campaign, you’ll inevitably need tools at various stages of your campaign. You can increase your chances of success if you have a list of the tools you want to use at each stage of your social media campaign.
Here are some aspects where tools are vital:
Content creation: Visuals have become a vital part of social media marketing. For instance, tweets with images get 18% more clicks and 150% more retweets.
Therefore, you need to create images and videos to reach your audience. A popular tool you can use to create images for your campaign is Canva. It provides templates of the ideal image size for various social media channels.
For your videos, a tool that makes the process easy is Animoto.
To meet your content needs on social media, you’ll need more than the content you produce. Sharing relevant content from other sources will help keep your audience engaged during your campaign.
One problem though is that sourcing for these pieces of content manually is ineffective and a time drain. A tool such as Quuu or Curata can find relevant content for your pages.
6. Social media management
Tasks such as sharing updates, scheduling updates, social listening, collaborating with team members, and others can be accomplished through a social media management tool.
Consequently, you and your team members can carry out your social media tasks on a single platform and save a lot of time. Agorapulse is an effective tool for social media management that can meet your team’s needs.
7. Social media analytics
You need social media analytics tools from the start of your campaign; once you know what your KPIs (key performance indicators) are, use social media analytics tools to track them and see how your campaign is evolving.
With this data, you can then adjust and optimize your campaign for maximized results. To help, tools like Cyfe allow you to connect your different social media network analytics, along with your website traffic so that you can track all of your results in one place.
8. Carry out competitive analysis
Performing competitive analysis can help you understand what your competitors’ strategy is like as well as see what tactics and channels work for them and which don’t. This can then inform your own social media campaign strategy.
Some vital parts to watch from your competitors are:
- Social media channels used
- Type of content shared
- Frequency of social updates
- Results generated
Apart from watching your competitors for their great practices, you also need to watch out for their mistakes. Thereby, you can exploit them to gain an edge on your competitors.
9. Put a system in place to track performance
Tracking performance for your campaign helps to determine the success or failure of your campaigns. More so, it can provide insights to help adjust your social media strategy even while a campaign is still running.
Another benefit you get from tracking your metrics is that it can necessitate changes for your future campaigns. It’s vital to note though, that the metrics you track for your campaigns will depend on your goals.
For instance, you can use UTM parameters to track traffic from your campaign to your website. A tool such as Google Analytics will provide details about traffic from a source and its behavior on your website.
Conclusion
To increase the chances of success for your social media marketing campaign, you need a robust plan in place before you start.
This starts with setting your goals. Then, you need to understand your audience, use a social content calendar to plan the actual content, use the right tools to run your campaign, and track your campaign performance throughout.
By following these steps, you’re well on your way to developing a successful social media campaign.