As social media is gaining its momentum with the users being attracted to new websites daily, it has become evident that social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, along with the growing Google+ and Pinterest are great places for marketing your business. Everyone uses social media, including your competitors, your customers, and your target audience. You can establish a social media marketing campaign there, thereby getting the access to diverse and massive followings and expanding your company’s digital reach. In order to establish connections with new users and build on-platform relationships, thus driving your long-term revenue stream, this campaign should be strategically designed and managed. In this blog post, we will share some tips you need to think through to help you plan and launch your social media campaign.
Identifying the main goal of your social media campaign is a good start. Setting the goals that you strive to achieve at the beginning of a campaign makes it easier to gauge and benchmark your results. You can set out your social media campaign with multiple goals in mind, where each direction of your strategy serves a different objective.
Your main goal should be personalized for your business’ needs, but here are a few common ones that most campaigns address:
If this is your first campaign, you probably most need to build brand awareness or enhance engagement. You need to make sure that your current and prospective customers recognise your brand well, otherwise your campaign will not bring you benefits. To assess and analyse your brand’s social influence, you can use key benchmarking metrics such as total number of likes or followers, total brand mentions/retweets/shares, influencer brand mentions and page visits or app downloads though the use of social media.
Researching your competition is equally important in social media marketing as in physical marketing, but a lot of marketers seems to miss this point. By analysing your competition, you could get an understanding on what tools and methods work or not work for your competitors. You can then use that valuable data to adjust and improve your own campaigns.
You can get an insight on what topics and issues are relevant for your customers and what kind of content your competitors utilise. Do they emphasise on Q&As or share YouTube tutorials? Which postings get the most likes and feedback? You can also easily track the times they create posts, its regularity and even their demeanour of communicating with users. Do they use aggressive sales techniques or more of a consultative approach?
It is important to register this information and incorporate it into your marketing plan, so you get the whole picture of your competitors and the tools they use. Planium Pro can help you to outline the key metrics and provide the set up for your Competitors’ Analysis to see where your business stands amongst the competition. In case of social media marketing, you uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ social media strategies and use that knowledge to your advantage. It will also help you spot opportunities. It is a valuable information that you should not dismiss in your marketing plan.
A social media audit is the process of analysing your business’ metrics to evaluate growth, opportunities, and ways of improving your social media presence. Different businesses and brands have different priorities, but it is recommended to include general and common metrics such as:
For any type of measure, you should state the percentage change from the previous period (month or year). It is helpful to perform the tracking year over year so you can understand and account for seasonal changes. For example, retail stores usually see an increase in their social media activity during Christmas period (November and December), so it can distort the month over month comparison for January of the following year.
Once you have the finalised version of your product’s messaging, there are numerous ways and formats to deliver and target your audience with it – infographics, videos, and blog posts – you need to try several to see what works best for your business. Start promoting one product with each of these different media types to assess what audience responds to and keep using various formats. It will help to keep your channels interesting and engaging.
Creating and sharing valuable content is essential to make your social media platforms successful, but along with creativity you should not forget to meticulously plan when you will share content to get the maximum effect of it. It enables you to coordinate the different types of social media activities (conversation starters, blog posts, videos, links, images) across all the platforms. A social media calendar can help you visualise all your planned posts for the next weeks or months ahead. On top of that, in your social media calendar you need to include the time you spend interacting with the audience (do not forget to allow for some spontaneous engagement as well).
Effective social media campaigns can affect your business in numerous ways and much more than just your follower count. Try implementing tips described above when you start your next social media campaign, so it can help your business expand your social reach, gain a better insight into your target audience, and achieve your long-term business goals.