How to run a successful social media campaign

A campaign is defined by the Oxford dictionary as “an organised course of action to achieve a goal”. Rather than talking about social media as a general marketing tool, we’re now talking about it as a specific channel to use to achieve a defined goal for your business. Sounds serious, well read on to find out some simple steps to work out what you need to do.

What do you want to achieve?

This is almost like the defining question of life, or your business, or in this case, your marketing campaign. This should always be the first question you ask. What is it you want to achieve, what is the ideal end result, use some blue sky thinking to define the bigger goal, and then define several smaller goals. For example, getting more social media fans is not really the goal. Well it is, but why do you want more social media fans, what are they going to do to help your business?

Create a plan.

Once you know your aims and goals, work out a method of achieving them through your social media campaigns, some ideas:

• Are you going to pay for advertising? Social media tends to have relatively high ROIs if you play it right.
• Are you offering a prize for people doing something like liking your page, following you, signing up to your newsletter, sending you some information? People like prizes.
• Are you using visuals for promotion, a video or image? If so, you’ll want to get these done professionally so that they showcase your business in a good light.
• What data do you want to capture, and what do you want to do with it? You can embed data capture into your campaign, which is useful for customer analysis and future targeting and brand work, as well as for marketing purposes.
• Remember to keep it simple. People don’t want to have to like this post, share the page, tweet that hashtag and then balance their phone on their nose to enter. Making it complicated causes a barrier to engagement.

Was it successful?

How do you know you’ve run a successful campaign unless you measure it. Social media channels now tend to have built-in analytics methods where you can track the reach, engagement and call-to-actions, as well as the cost per engagement/conversion (depends on your aim and tracking method) if you decide to run a paid-for campaign. Firstly this will give you the all-important ROI (remember to include staff time in this as they don’t work for free) and will also allow you to evaluate what worked, what didn’t and maybe adapt work you do in the future.

If you want a hand setting up a campaign or planning one then get in touch, we’d love to help: hello@webfwd.co.uk