How to Create a Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign from Scratch

Regardless of the business niche you operate in, it is highly likely that a well-calibrated social media marketing campaign would benefit your brand revenue and popularity. Social media remains a great platform to launch marketing campaigns, and with contemporary tools and approaches, you can achieve significant results. Whether you are promoting a product or service, aiming to increase brand awareness, or engaging your target audience, you need a well-structured social media marketing campaign to maximize the outcomes of your business efforts.

To create a successful social media marketing campaign, you need to understand deeply your audience, brand goals, and how to track data. Something more, to get the most out of your social media campaigns, you need to constantly analyze and recalibrate each detail along the way, as each campaign is an ongoing process and not a static setup.

In this guide, we share how to create a successful social media marketing campaign from scratch and go through all the essential steps in the process, so you achieve all your company goals.

Contents:

1. Set Measurable Campaign Goals
2. Make Sure You Know Your Audience Well
3. Select Social Media Platforms with Greatest Potential
4. Create Relevant and Compelling Campaign Content
5. Track Campaign Performance at All Times

 

 

1. Set Measurable Campaign Goals

The first step in each successful marketing campaign is to set clear and measurable goals. Remember that you can only manage what you can measure, and if your goals are really measurable, then you can calibrate each of your campaign elements for greater effectiveness. Without clear goals, you can quickly lose focus and spend resources on the wrong activities, and end up with unsatisfactory results, even though you have put tons of marketing efforts. Furthermore, a list of such goals helps you track campaign progress and evaluate performance by adopting various social media analytics tools.

Depending on your business goals, campaigns can aim at various final results, such as (but not limited to):

• Increased brand awareness: Should this be the goal, then a successful social media marketing campaign might be the one that makes your business known to a larger number of social media users and therefore benefits from a wider audience when you promote new goods and services, announce discounts, or simply maintain online presence with various blog publications.
• Increased website traffic: A successful social media marketing campaign may also mean more website visitors. Such efforts may be focused on encouraging social media users to visit your website and engage with its content. Such a campaign goal might be adopted as an aim to track which products and services the attracted visitors browse the most, and create a follow-up sales campaign that targets social media users who are more likely to purchase your brand.
• Generating sales: In most cases, generating sales is the final goal for most social media campaigns.

Regardless of your campaign goal, always remember that you should be specific and clear about what exactly you wish to achieve with your social media marketing campaign: make sure the goal is measurable, so you can track and analyze performance, align it with your business strategy and make sure you set realistic targets, based on your resources and used social media channels.

Tips:

Do: Focus on achieving a single goal and put precise efforts that drive you towards that exact aim.

Avoid: Achieving several goals at once, as this would dilute your impact and you would spread resources too thin across many activities.

 

2. Make Sure You Know Your Audience Well

 

Understanding your audience is crucial for the success of your social media marketing campaign. Without delving deep into knowing who your potential customers are, what they care about, what they need, how they interact with the world around them, and what they would prefer from your brand, your campaign may fail in delivering satisfactory results, regardless of how creative and ambitious it is.

To know your target audience well, you need to do more than fundamental segmentation, such as defining age, gender, and location. For a more convincing strategy, you also need to understand the interests, preferences, and overall behaviour of your potential customers – learning more about them, their needs, and pain points can help you craft products, services, and a marketing message that speaks directly to them precisely the way that would convert them to paying customers.

Along with the mandatory segmentation, always monitor your audience’s online conversations, adopt social media analytics and listening tools, so you are aware of what they need at any given moment, so you can deliver it through your campaign. By doing so, you ensure that each of your social media posts is relevant and can inspire action, whether it is visiting your website, subscribing to an email list, or directly making a purchase.

Tips:

Do: elve deeper into segmentation and learn as much as possible about your audience so that you can differentiate groups more effectively. The more detailed your segmentation and study of potential customers, the better.

Avoid: Spreading the same message with the same tone towards each audience segment. Segmentation is only effective if you speak to each group the way it is most effective for conversion.

3. Select Social Media Channels with Greatest Potential

 

Now that you know your audience well, it is time to proceed to the next step in creating a successful social media marketing campaign – selecting which social channels to use. As with all of the rest, this step is important, as it helps you focus your resources and endeavours towards the social media users that are most likely to convert. Each social media platform attracts different kinds of users, and if you decide to focus on all of them at once, you risk diluting your marketing efforts too thin and contributing to an overall weak impact. To avoid such a scenario, you need to focus only on the channels that your potential customers use and ignore the ones that are unlikely to deliver any results.

To select the social media platforms that have the greatest potential for your campaign’s success, follow these two suggestions:

1. Monitor behaviour and publications on each channel, so you get a notion of what users on this particular platform talk about and what type of people they are. This approach can help you filter out the social media platforms with the most potential customers – always focus on these and avoid including platforms that do not attract any of your audience.
2. Check and consider the content type. After you filter the platforms you would focus on, check these platforms’ most used types of publications, so you can use such in your campaign. This would ensure that your campaign looks as natural as possible to your target audience. For example, relevant content for Instagram is highly visual, while LinkedIn and Facebook publications often focus on text rather than anything else. Keep such observations in mind when crafting your strategy.

 

Tips: 

Do: Focus all your efforts on the social media platforms where your target audience dwells and is most active.

Avoid: Maintaining online presence on every single social media platform “just in case”, as this will weaken your campaign’s impact.

 

 

4. Create Relevant and Compelling Campaign Content

 

A social media marketing campaign without relevant content is of no use. Think of your content as the heart of each campaign – it is what the audience sees, interacts with, comments and shares. This means that even the most ambitious and best-calibrated campaign will fail to deliver results should it include content that is not engaging, irrelevant, or not interesting.

Read also: 5 Reasons Why You Should Create a Blog for Your Brand

In today’s noisy world, competition is aggressive, users are constantly bombarded with promotional messages, and attention spans are short. In order to have a competitive edge in such an environment, your social media campaigns should include content that is timely and highly relevant to your target audience, specifically tailored to meet certain needs and natural, as contemporary online audiences can instantly distinguish organic tone from bare corporate intentions.

Although this is a highly competitive field, there’s a lot you can do to enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns.

First, you need to achieve a natural connection with your audience. For this, you should use storytelling, relatable scenarios to create a natural connection between your social media content and your audience. For optimal results, cover topics that would appeal to your audience’s interests, values, and emotions. However, make sure your brand tone remains natural and easily flowing, as too sugary content and artificial tone are instantly recognizable and will lead to users’ alienation.

Second, you should communicate with your social media audience. Along with sharing relevant content at all times, you should also engage in discussions, asking and answering questions, and make sure that you are a part of a community and not only present in social media for brand profit. Always keep in mind that natural tone and natural conversations are valuable for both you and your potential customers. Also, communication with your audience can give you great insights for future content ideas. Never miss such golden opportunities!

Third, try to create content that engages your audience. This means to put effort into guiding social media users towards taking any kind of action, whether it is to visit your website, sign up for a newsletter, fill in a survey, or directly make a purchase. However, never be pushy and always keep your engagement efforts smooth, natural, and polite.

Tips and tricks for creating highly impactful content for your social media campaigns:

• Always maintain a consistent brand voice. Across all selected social media platforms, you should publish content that is consistent in tone and always reflects your brand values and aims.
• Incorporate strong, but not aggressive CTAs. Always prompt your audience to take the next step in your campaign and do so with simple and yet persuasive messages – “Download now”, “Subscribe for More Tips”, “Join the Webinar”.
• Incorporate media in your campaign. Videos, photos, and graphs can greatly increase visibility and engagement, so always find a way to include relevant media files in your campaign.

 

Tips: 

Do: Use natural tone, incorporate storytelling and showcase relatable scenarios.

Avoid: Too aggressive prompts, overly corporate and buzz words, as these can alienate your audience.

 

5. Track Campaign Performance at All Times

 

Social media campaigns are a dynamic and versatile phenomenon. They perform at set requirements and always try to deliver set results; however, such results might not meet the initial expectations. This means that you should always look at your social media campaigns as a living creature, instead of a monumental structure. In other words, you should always track performance, monitor current results, and change settings, so you get the most out of each ongoing campaign.

Oftentimes, mid-term results can showcase that your initial prognosis is not entirely correct, and in order to achieve better results, you should change a given setting in your campaign’s setup – demographics, overall segmentation, content type, media type, tone, or anything else. However, to be able to make such adequate changes, you should constantly track the performance of your social media campaigns.

In short, creativity can capture attention, but data analysis is what determines whether this attention will transform into conversion. This is why constant monitoring and analysis are essential for the success of your social media campaigns – without such, you would not know which campaign set up drives traffic, generates leads, or increases brand awareness.

Oftentimes, social media platforms provide users with comprehensive campaign analytics tools to track performance. These tools allow you to be precise in calibration and help you with:

• Notice various behavioural patterns. Campaign monitoring can help you detect which topics, visuals, or any other details of your campaign resonate with your target audience.
• Measure progress towards the campaign’s final aim. Monitoring helps you determine precisely how close or far you are from achieving the initial goal of the given campaign. This is important as such a notion gives you an insight into how to distribute your resources for better performance.
• Determine whether adopted approaches are effective or not. Monitoring and tracking help determine whether your ideas are effective in converting potential customers to paying clients. Tracking can help you filter out the ideas that sell and the ones that are ineffective and focus more on what drives revenue.

Furthermore, should the built-in analytics tools not be sufficient for you, you can always turn to third-party tools that do the job just fine. If you are interested in such tools, then definitely check our article on the topic:

6 Best Social Media Marketing Tools for Your Business

Use the built-in and third-party tools to collect analytics data and use it to your advantage, like:

1. Adjust your content type strategy. Should you notice that videos contribute better to conversion, compared to carousel posts, then increase video publications in your campaigns. If educational posts are not performing good, compared to behind-the-scenes publications, focus on delivering more from the latter.
2. Leverage activity periods. Check when your audience is most active throughout the day and calibrate your campaign so it shows posts in these exact moments. This can help you with engagement and conversion rates.
3. Improve CTAs. If users are not converting, then try to change the CTAs of your campaigns – never be afraid to experiment with different messaging and different conversion prompts.

 

Tips: 

Do: Constantly monitor your campaign’s performance and make changes depending on the momentary outcomes.

Avoid: Leaving your campaign untouched, as “it will do its magic”. It won’t, you need to track and calibrate it throughout its entire lifetime.

 

Conclusion

Creating a successful social media campaign from scratch is not an easy task. This is a strategic approach that includes creativity, business insights, and data-driven decisions. However, knowing how to start and what steps to undertake, this process can become effective and help you gain revenue, brand popularity, and tons of new customers.

Key takeaway is to look at your social media campaigns as an ongoing process that can be moulded at any given time – from setting the goals, understanding your potential audience, choosing channels, and delivering relevant messages, you can refine and recalibrate each section at any given moment for better results.