10 Essential Tips for a Social Marketing Campaign That Flourishes

Are you ready to create a social marketing campaign that adds real value to your company?

Too many companies launch social media strategies and campaigns haphazardly as if posting on Instagram a few times a week will make all their dreams come true.

The reality is that social marketing campaigns require serious strategy if you want them to deliver a serious return on your investment.

Whether you’re trying to launch an affiliate marketing campaign on Facebook or you’re trying to reach new customers, there are a lot of reasons to get organized.

Here are the 10 essential tips you need to know before you launch your next social media campaign.

#1 Start with a Strategy

Social marketing campaigns run haphazardly will fail. Even if they don’t, you won’t be able to make the most of it.

Before you even begin writing copy, finding content, or coming up with themes, you need to create a strategy.

A social media campaign strategy requires you to:

1. Define Your Audience
2. Identify Your Measurements
3. Choose Your Channels
4. Elucidate Your Message

Define Your Audience

Defining your target audience used to mean describing their demographics: 18-25 year-olds, smokers or non-smokers, males or females, etc.

Today, it requires nailing down those measurable demographics and identifying more distinguishing features within the group you’re targeting. Essentially, you’re looking to know more than that a member of your audience is 35 and female.

You also need to figure out how they feel about your niche, their values, what motivates them, and their culture. In other words, you need to figure out how they behave and what factors drive their behavior.

Identify Your Measurements

How are you going to measure the success of your campaign? How will you know if you met your goals?

You’ll need to determine what matters most to you. Are you hoping for engagement or sales? Are you worried about likes on a post or the number of comments you receive?

These measurements matter not only because they’ll help you assess your success but because they’ll help you develop your overall strategy and the content you choose.

Choose Your Channels

The trick to finding your customers isn’t throwing content into the wind and hoping for the best. You need to go where they are.

Choose channels based on:

• Your audience
  • Where does your audience spend the most time? Where are they the most engaged?
• Your goals
  • Are you trying to sell more product, drive engagement with current followers, or grow new ones? Different channels are better from some goals.
    • For example, Instagram is a better channel than Twitter for brands trying to increase sales across their cosmetics line.

Elucidate Your Key Message

You know who you’re talking to, what you want them to do, and where you’re going to find them – but do you know what you’re going to say?

Messaging is critical in social media because you have an incredibly short period of time to make a point.

Here are a few things to consider when crafting your key message:

• Does it clearly encourage the behavior you want (likes, comments, shares, purchasing)?
• Is it in your voice?
• Is it in your tone?

#2 Make It Valuable

What kind of value do you want to add to the world with your social media campaign?

Is it informational? Maybe you’ve got a discount to give away?

Regardless of what you’re giving away, make sure you’re offering something of value to your followers (and potential followers).

Value gives them a reason to pay attention and even participate in your campaign.

Creating value doesn’t mean showing customers your products or services in every single post. It means establishing your business as an authority in your niche and providing valuable information based on that.

So, share information about your product. Get involved in giveaways. But more importantly, share information that your target market wants and needs to know to make your social media channels the place they need to be to get what they want.

#3 Nail the SEO

Social media and SEO are two strands of the same cord. In today’s digital landscape, you can’t excel at one without nailing the other.

There are two places you should consider how your SEO is working for your social media campaign.

First, consider how the channels you’ve chosen optimize their search functions. You’ll need to identify the keywords best suited for SEO optimization within that channel to ensure your posts are found by those who search for them.

Here’s an example. According to Buffer, Instagram’s organic algorithm considers the following traits when it ranks posts in its search function:

1. Engagement
2. Relationships
3. Relevancy
4. Timeliness
5. Direct Shares
6. Profile Searches
7. Time Spent

What does this mean for Instagram campaigns? It means you’ll need to post regularly, create shareable content, and ensure the content you create is relevant to what your target market is looking for.

Second, consider how your social media campaign affects your SEO.

The rules of SEO are unclear: if content goes viral on Twitter, does Twitter engagement boost the engagement of the original post?

No one knows, but they do know it doesn’t hurt.

However, you can marry your SEO and social media by creating campaigns based on effective keywords, evergreen content, and link building techniques. Every little bit helps, right?

#4 Play by the Rules

Social media channels are beginning to take advertising laws seriously, which means you need to play by the rules when you create campaigns.

Gone are the days when influencers can hawk products as if they’re really ‘recommending’ them to friends – not being paid to flog them by the brand.

Be sure to pay attention to advertising rules and regulations, but don’t forget about contest rules.

Running contests illegally can not only get you in trouble but also get you kicked off social media.

Looking for more?

Here are the promotion guidelines for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

#5 Engage, Engage, Engage

Talking at customers is not the best way to hold a conversation in real life, and it doesn’t work in a social marketing campaign either.

Create content designed to not only inform customers but engage them. Build communities around your product using social media to bolster your brand and increase excitement.

Here are some ways to engage during a social marketing campaign:

• Ask questions
• Use hashtags to participate in conversations
• Run competitions
• Run polls
• Inspire a reaction
• Ask for a review
• Stream live videos

#6 Use a Calendar

Your content needs to be well-thought out, well-organized, and evergreen, even if you’re running a short social marketing campaign.

Calendars are the best tool at a social media marketing campaign manager’s disposal.

Not only do they provide a way to marry your strategy and goals to improve the effects of your campaign, but they can save you hours of work.

#7 Make It Simple With Apps

Are you trying to run your social marketing campaign directly from Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? Stop.

Social media management applications allow you to channel your energy and your content while nailing all the essential details. These apps offer different features and levels of intuition that invaluable to marketers.

For example, want to queue up Instagram Stories but don’t want to be forced out of the office to generate brand new content every 24 hours?

No big deal. There’s an app for that.

Lifewire created a list of management tools that will not only improve your social marketing campaign but will shave hours off your workday.

#8 Measure Your Success

When you created your strategy back in step #1, you also decided how you’d measure success.

There are many metrics available; you need to decide which metrics mean the most to you.

But don’t forget to take time to actually measure it.

Social media success can be measured daily, weekly, monthly, and at the end of the campaign.

Don’t be afraid to use short-term numbers to impact long-term strategy. If something isn’t working – change it. Don’t run a full-length faulty campaign because you think it is a good idea. If you’re not connecting, find a way to do so before you run out of time.

#9 Test and Modify

#9 goes hand in hand with measurement. Don’t look at measurements as a way of determining success. Look at it as a way of finding methods to improve.

Use metrics and other available testing options to figure out what’s working. Then, modify your current strategy based on the results.

#10 Write a Report

After your social marketing campaign is done, take everything you’ve learned and put it into a report.

Here are some things to include:

• Your strategy
• All relevant data
• Results of testing and rationale
• Changes you made along the way

Then, use your report to figure out how to take future campaigns to the next level.

Make Your Next Social Marketing Campaign a Success

Now is the time to start your own online business, and we’ve just laid out the keys to the kingdom.

Social media can be your biggest asset online, putting you in front of millions of willing eyeballs. You just need to be strategic about your approach.

Do you have any questions or tips for running a social marketing campaign? Let us know in the comments below.