What is Social Media Campaign

Whatever you’re releasing a brand new product, running a giveaway or trying to boost brand awareness, you may need a social media campaign to tell the target audience what your brand is doing. However, creating a successful social media campaign is no easy task, especially when you haven't developed a comprehensive strategy. If you are struggling with starting an actionable social media campaign, here’s good news for you. This article will get you through every aspect of planning, executing and evaluating a social media campaign.

Definition of Social Media Campaign

A social media campaign is an organised marketing effort to increase brand awareness, user interaction, customer loyalty, or achieve a certain business goal through one or several social media channels.

4 Key Goals of Social Media Campaign

Setting social media goals is important for your business. A social media goal is a statement about what you want to achieve with your social media strategy. Without a goal, it is hard to know the performance of your social media campaign. To ensure social media success, a clear social media goal helps you stay focused so that you can know which KPIs you should track. Here are five social media goal examples to get you started.

1. Driving traffic to your website

A high-traffic website helps your brand build an online presence and gets more people to notice your product and service. As we all know, social media can be a great source of traffic to your website if having a well-planned strategy. Your strategy might differ based on which social media platforms your target audience spends most of their time on. However, there are still some general rules that you should stick to.

If your goal is driving website traffic from social media, make sure that your website is easy to find and access. Never underestimate the impact of adding a call-to-action (CTA). Try to include call-to-action in every post to direct potential users to your site. It is an essential step in boosting your click-through rates and driving traffic to your website.

To measure your website traffic, there are some metrics you should keep an eye on:

Unique visits to your website: Monitor the number of visitors who land on your website from social media platforms. You may check either daily, weekly, or monthly unique visits, depending on your business needs.
Email sign-ups: The number of visitors who have used their email address to sign up for more of your content.
Click-through rate: The ratio of clicks on your ads/ link to the number of people who viewed.

These metrics can be tracked by using Google Analytics which is one of the powerful tools for monitoring your site’s performance. If you find it difficult using Google Analytics, our professional team is here to answer any question you may have.

2. Increasing brand awareness

Using social media to build brand awareness can be effective if done right. With a ton of people on social media, you can easily deliver messages to potential customers and get them to know your brand. Whether you are using KOLs, ads, or simply delivering good content yourself, social media has proven to be a key factor in increasing brand awareness.

But your competitors are probably implementing their own social media campaign. How does your message stand out from others and catch users’ attention? The answer is providing timely, engaging and consistent social media content that answers customers questions or addresses hot topics. Using paid ads is also necessary to your social media strategy if you want to maximise content reach.

There are several ways to metrics to track brand awareness:

Post reach: The number of people who saw your specific post.
Impression: The number of times your content is displayed to users, no matter if it was clicked or not.
Share of voice: Measuring your brand's visibility compared to your competitors.
Followers count: how many followers you have.

3. Generating leads

Growing your social media following and increasing brand awareness is not enough. It is important to get leads on social media and bring them into your sales funnel. Lead-generating campaigns will help you find people interested in your brand and collect their information so that you can follow up with them. That includes email address, names, occupations, or any other information they share.

Here are some metrics to evaluate your leads:

Bounce rates – How many people land on your website and leave without taking any action.
Social media conversion rates – How many people complete the desired conversion action from social media.
Conversion rate: The percentage of website visitors that complete a specific action.

4. Improving overall brand engagement

Social media has changed the way businesses and customers interact with each other, and it’s important to build a long-lasting relationship between the target audience and the brand. Engagement refers to any types of interactions with your brand on social media, which is measured by the number of likes, shares, and comments that your content receives from users on a social media platform. A high engagement rate shows how engaged an audience is with your content, and how well your social media campaigns are performing. By boosting engagement you can increase brand awareness and reach potential customers who might be interested in your social media content. It is also a good way to develop a unique and consistent brand voice that speaks to your target audience and build a community on social media.

The metrics to measure your brand engagement are:

Interaction performance: the number of shares, likes, and comments
Engagement rate: the level of interaction users have with your content.
Hashtag tracking: hashtags enable your content to be found by the right people. Keep checking how many people actually notice the hashtags you use.

Which Social Media is best for your campaign

Social media provides your business with new opportunities to reach potential customers. However, there are so many social networks out there, it is impossible to find time to be active on every platform. Before you choose the best social media for your business, the first step is to define your goals, identify your target audience and evaluate if the platform fits the personality of your brand.

For instance, when you are looking for a platform that provides the most advanced targeting options, with a huge user base, Facebook should be your top choice. One of the advantages of this platform is that it is very easy to get started because almost all forms of content are available on Facebook. With over 2 billion monthly active users making it an effective tool to reach your target audience, no matter how niche and specific your market is.

It is no surprise that visuals are the best way to communicate and get your message across to people. If you prefer using visual and reaching younger users, Instagram is a prime option for your business. On Instagram, having a strong visual brand identity can give an instant impression of your brand’s personality. Being consistent with your visual content allows you to be recognised by your audience as well as improve your brand awareness.

For B2B companies, Linkedin is an essential channel that helps to grow your professional network. There is no other network that has so many professionals from various career fields, backgrounds, industries, and more. Most importantly, users on Linkedin regularly update their profile information, meaning that brands can easily define target audiences based on demographic characteristics and deliver relevant content. Try to share your opinion and insight on pertinent topics to sharpen your professional image.

Just remember, each platform requires its own dedicated strategy. Once you’re using more than one social media platform, make sure to tailor your content for each channel and stay on the top of the latest social media trend. As a general rule, you should be where your customers are.

9 Steps to create a Social Media Campaign

Step 1: Set Your Social Media Campaign Goals

Setting goals is essential for how you implement your social media campaign and what results you want to achieve. Your campaign goals will also affect the ad settings and cost, so think of it carefully. Below are some examples of specific social media campaign goals:

Drive traffic to your website
Increasing Brand Awareness
Generate new leads and sales
Increase your social engagement rate
Improve brand reputation

After setting campaign goals, you also need metrics and KPIs that help you measure the success of your social media campaign. Social media metrics are the data points that give you an inside look at how well your social media strategy is performing. For example, if your goal is increasing brand awareness on Facebook, you should track metrics like reach, impression, and click-through rate on Facebook posts.

Step 2: Define your target audience

Defining your social media target audience helps you develop brand guidelines, so you can speak the same language as your audience and create the content they want to consume.

To create a good buyer persona, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

Who is your current audience?
What are their jobs? Age? Income? Interests?
What are their pain points?
What kind of information are they looking for?
What problems does your product/service solve?

Focusing on a few specific target groups helps your brand develop an effective social media strategy as you will have a better understanding of where you need to spend money and resources.

Step 3: Choose the appropriate channels

Now that you have your goals defined and know your target audience, it’s time to determine which social platforms to use for your campaign. Consider how active your target audience is on that platform. You may also check your website data to see where your referrals are coming from. Here are examples of the most widely used social media platforms for business:

Facebook

With nearly 3 billion monthly users, Facebook is the largest social media network in the world. The biggest advantage of Facebook is the advanced targeting filters that help you reach people who are most interested in your products or services. If your goal is to create an online community around your brand, you should consider incorporating Facebook into your social media strategy.

Instagram

A visual-focused platform with high engagement. Instagram has shaped the landscape of social commerce, where it enables users to research new products and stay updated with their favourite brands. Creating interesting content with stunning images is the key to attract customers and encourage them to engage with your brand.

A social network that is focused on building professional and business relationships. If you are in B2B business, LinkedIn is probably an important marketing and sales channel to establish yourself as a professional in your field by sharing your insight. With the right strategy, you can generate high-quality leads and increase brand reputation on LinkedIn.

Step 4: Choose the best ad formats

Next up, choose the right ad format that pushes your message to your audience. The ad format you choose depends on the platform you’re playing on and your campaign goal. Knowing the strength of each ad format will help you boost the efficiency of your advertising spend. Here are the most popular ad formats:

Image ads

Allow you to show off your products, services and brands using a single photo. They are simple, easy-to-use and effective at driving traffic to your website. Image ads are one of the most common types of ads and available on almost every social media platform. Try to use a stunning image on your ad to capture audience attention in a few seconds when they are scrolling down.

Video ads

One of the most popular ad formats because they are highly engaging and great for introducing your products/services to target audience. For Facebook video ads, it is recommended to upload the highest resolution source video in aspect 16:9 or 9:16. You can also attach a call-to-action (CTA) to the ad allowing users to take further action.

Carousel ads

Allow you to showcase multiple products by combining up to 10 images or videos into a single ad, each card with its own individual link and CTA button to help raise your click-through rate. You can also incorporate storytelling into your carousel ads to keep the users engaged throughout and swipe through to the end.

Lead form ads

Help you build your list of interested customers by letting people submit their information in a form directly in your ad. Not only collect contact information such as name, email address and phone number, you can also include custom questions on lead ads to help understand the interests and behaviours of potential clients.

Step 5: Set your budget

Every company’s social media ad strategy varies, but they all want to have a cost-effective investment. When planning your social media campaign for the first time, you might be confused about budgeting because no one can give you an accurate answer. In fact, how much your social media campaign costs is based on several factors, such as the size and scope, the duration, the goal as well as the platform you use. You should research the pricing model of each social media platform because it determines how much you need to pay for your ad. Social media platforms generally offer three main pricing models including cost-per-mile (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-action (CPA), each pay for different actions your audience takes with your ad.

Step 6: Prepare content and creatives

Once you know your target audience and which ad format you want to use in your campaign, it’s time to prepare your content that catches users attention. Remember that visual content is a vital part of your social media campaign. You should develop a brand identity and visual language across social media channels to translate your brand’s distinctive style. Also, never underestimate the power of copywriting. A great copy helps create an emotional bond with your audience and convince them to take action. An engaging social content consists of different components such as images, typography, infographic and copy. You should use A/B testing to compare a variable between two content types and determine which one works best.

Step 7: Schedule your content

A schedule for posting on social media will help you to create and organise content in advance for all your upcoming social media campaigns. If you are planning a product launch or seasonal campaigns, a content calendar can keep everything organised and make sure you get all the tasks done on time.

Step 8: Manage Your Campaign

After publishing your content, you should monitor engagement in real time and adjust your strategies if necessary. Each social media platform provides tools that make management easier, like Facebook’s Ad Manager and LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager. Keep your audience engaged by regularly responding to their comment, as well as answering their inquiries if they are interested in your products.

Step 9: Analyze the Results

Tracking performance is an essential step to determine the success or failure of your social media campaign. Depending on your goal, you may use various metrics and data collected from social media platforms to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign. Analysing the result also gives you insight that helps you determine where to go with your future campaigns.

6 Best Social Media Campaigns in 2022

Coca-Cola - Coke Starlight Launch

Coca-Cola introduced a limited-edition flavour "Starlight" on social media, only saying that it is inspired by space and the taste includes additional notes reminiscent of stargazing around a campfire, as well as a cooling sensation that evokes the feeling of a cold journey to space.

Heep Hong Society - Autism Awareness Week

Heep Hong Society organised "Autism Awareness Week 2022" and published information about autism on social platforms from time to time, improving public understanding of the difficulties faced by autistic people.

Netflix – Wanna Talk About It?

Netflix and Instagram were partnering to launch Wanna Talk About It?, a livestream show where stars of popular Netflix movies and series talking with a mental health expert about self care during a global pandemic.

Dove – #ShowUs

Dove launched #ShowUs project on social media and posted images of real women from all walks of life to challenge unrealistic stereotypes of women in the media and advertising. Women can share their images through the #ShowUs hashtag to become part of the collection.

Apple – #ShotoniPhone

The Apple campaign is based on user-generated content, encouraging users to share photos taken by iPhone through the ##ShotoniPhone hashtag, aiming to highlight the high quality of iPhone cameras.

Spotify - Wrapped Campaign

Spotify Wrapped created personalised playlists including the songs to which they have listened to most. Every year, millions of Spotify users share their Spotify wrapped on social media.

Let’s plan the result-driven Social Media Campaign with SDMC

A social media campaign is a multi-faceted approach that, when used properly, can help create brand awareness, engage with customers, and generate leads for your business. It can be hard to keep up, or even know where to start!

If you are looking for a social agency that drives results, SDMC can help. As a full service digital marketing agency, we work with clients of all shapes and sizes across every industry. Whether you’re starting from scratch or building on an existing profile, we can tailor social content based on your brand’s tone of voice to meet your business goals.

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