A social media campaign is one of the many tactics you can leverage to help build your business. In essence, a social media campaign is any concerted effort to promote a brand, product, or idea on social media.
By being strategic about the elements that you incorporate into your campaign, you can help improve your chances of success. Having a strong strategy will lay the groundwork to continually optimize and improve your performance.
There are a lot of benefits to social media campaigns as opposed to other media. The first, and most obvious, benefit is they can be completely free. You can use the native platforms and create a marketing campaign specifically built for them.
Another lesser-known benefit is their ability to be optimized. With a social media campaign, you can take action quickly based on your insights. More traditional media may take days, weeks, or longer to be able to adjust a campaign and see improved results.
Social media allows you the flexibility to adjust your creative, your copy, your targeting, or anything else that may be hindering you from improving your performance. Similarly, you can quickly see what’s working and report on those results in a significantly shorter timeframe.
Getting Started with Your Campaign
Okay, so you’ve decided you want to run your first social media campaign, or maybe you’ve been running them for ages but haven’t been able to get them to “work.” You can use the classic five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why—to plan a new campaign or audit your social media performance. Below we’ll walk you through each W to help you instantly get a handle on your social media marketing goals.
1. Who?
The most important thing you need to keep in mind when planning a social media campaign is “Who are you targeting?” There are many different answers to that question based on your business.
You may be targeting “engaged shoppers,” “parents,” “college students,” “people with pets,” or a host of other groups. Additionally, your target audience can change based on each campaign. The more accurate you can get your audience targeted, the better results you’ll see as you begin to optimize your creative assets to fit that audience.
In addition to who you’re targeting, it’s also important to keep in mind “Who are you?” Whether “you” is a brand, product, or idea, knowing the ins and outs of who you are can help to highlight the most successful aspects to feature. Or, you may find underperforming areas of your business that you can lift by a strong social media campaign.
2. What?
Now that you know who you’re targeting, you have to decide what you’re showing them. Before you can start designing creative, you need to settle on “What will your campaign be about?” Are you looking to drive conversions, brand awareness, web traffic, or something entirely different? The goal you set will have a major impact on the type of campaigns that will work best with your audience. Keeping your campaign idea in mind, you can begin to formulate creative concepts.
At this point, you should also consider whether your campaign will be organic or paid. With an organic campaign, you won’t need to put any funding behind it. Paid campaigns utilize a monetary spend to help push your reach further on a given platform. You can choose to do all organic, all paid, or a hybrid approach where you have some paid content and some organic content that helps to support the paid efforts.
Knowing your goal will help you to better optimize your campaigns, especially if you choose to utilize paid efforts. Each platform has different algorithms in place to best distribute your dollars based on your campaign optimization. For example, Facebook will spend your dollars differently if you optimize towards conversion goals as opposed to web traffic. Take a moment to decide what your top KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is referring to and the top metrics that you’ll use to gauge campaign performance.
3. Where?
Once you have all your information in place, you need to decide “Where will your campaign appear?” Or rather, which platforms will your it be on? Based on the platform you choose, your creative assets, copy, and voice may change based on the audiences of those platforms. For example, a social media campaign on TikTok will sound a lot different than one on Twitter. Taking the time to gain a deeper understanding of the platforms you choose to advertise on will provide tremendous benefits to your campaigns in the long run.
With any platform, you may also have to decide on which placement, or location, within the platform you want to advertise. With organic content, your number of placements is generally more limited than with paid campaigns. However, you may find that your performance varies greatly depending on which placement you choose.
If you already have your social media up and running, take the time to look at your analytics. See if there are certain placements within each platform that tend to yield stronger results. Does your audience interact more with your stories than your feed posts? Do you get twice as many likes on Facebook as opposed to Instagram? Any data you can use to help inform and support your decisions is encouraged.
4. When?
Another key decision is “When will your campaign run, and for how long?” The timeline of your campaign can also impact the way you build it. It may be helpful to decide if you want to run an “evergreen campaign” or a “seasonal campaign.”
With an evergreen campaign, you’re pushing an idea or product that remains unchanged for a long period of time. This is something that you could run seven days a week for three months, six months, a year, or longer, without the core message changing. With evergreen campaigns, you can still expect to make small changes to the creative and copy, but the core messaging that you’re presenting will remain roughly the same.
The opposite would be a seasonal campaign. Seasonal campaigns can work to support your evergreen campaigns and products. Or, they can work as a diversion from your normal content. Also included within seasonal campaigns could be short-term promotions, launches, or other messages that you’d like to rotate out quickly.
If you’re deciding to use a paid spend to help supplement your campaign, it’s extremely important to decide the timeline over which your campaign will be running. For example, $5,000 for a one-week campaign will produce different results compared to the same spent over the course of a year.
5. Why?
Before you launch your campaign, it’s important to take a moment to decide why you’re running your campaign. What are the KPIs that you’ll use to measure your success? What’s your ultimate goal? If you could only get one thing out of this campaign, what would it be? Many advertisers neglect this upfront and opt to view all the analytics at the end. However, it’s recommended to have one or very few distinct goals for each campaign.
This will allow you to gauge your success, but will also give you a guideline of what to focus on in the event that you need to adjust, or optimize, your campaign throughout its lifespan. By using the five Ws to analyze, plan, and optimize your campaigns, you can put your business in the best position to be successful in your next social media endeavor.
For more social media tips and advice, take a look at these articles:
Cover image via Irina Strelnikova.
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