Five Key Steps for Creating a Social Campaign

Let’s look at the fundamental steps necessary for building a social media marketing campaign. To start, all of the social ad platforms require you to name your campaign. Avoid vague names like Campaign 1 March, 2020. Name your campaign something you or your team will easily recognize and understand. When you’ve named your campaign, the first step in designing an effective one is to set your objectives for the campaign. It’s important to set objectives that can be achieved with digital marketing. For example, an objective of driving more sales could be achieved by increasing brand awareness on social media. And it’s also important to align your objectives with key performance indicators or KPIs, which we’ll deal with shortly.

There are different types of social media objectives. These include awareness, site traffic, purchase, lead generation, and brand affinity. Be sure to familiarize yourself with all of these objectives to ensure that your campaign is optimized in a way that is meeting your business goals. The second step in defining an effective campaign is to define your audience. Every campaign should have a clearly defined target audience.

Knowing your audience is necessary If you want to produce the most resonant creative. So, begin with your consumer and define your audience. Create target personas to establish audience channel and content preferences. You can do this by writing down all that you know about your ideal customer to create a profile of them. For example, their interests, location, gender, and age. Take note of the websites they visit and how they like to be communicated with. When you’re done, your persona should represent the traits and characteristics of your ideal customer. You can then refer to your different persona types when planning and creating content for social campaigns.

To maintain efficient audience targeting using paid social, you should set up remarketing tags on your site to serve ads to past visitors or audiences with similar traits to your past visitors.

You can target multiple audiences in a campaign. These target groups are called ad sets. Each ad set will have its own audience target and choice of creative, so you can serve different messages to different audiences. You should always name your ad sets logically so the name is easy to understand.

Pro tip, use persona templates to define your audience and help plan your campaign.

The third step in defining an effective campaign is to set KPIs or key performance indicators and measure performance. You can set KPIs to measure success as a standalone social campaign or as part of a multi-channel campaign. Remember, social is most impactful at engaging people at the start of the buyer’s journey in the awareness and interest stages. As a result, it’s best to measure the effectiveness of social activity and how it influences higher numbers of sales and conversion channels or how it has helped drive awareness and increased the number of people searching for your brand from the normal level. Social shouldn’t be measured with direct sales from social channels.

Its function is to drive awareness and assist in driving sales and conversions.

It’s important to assign KPIs as they are the metrics you will track to understand whether or not your campaign is meeting your business goals. An objective of awareness can be tied to the following KPIs, reach and impressions, social engagements, follower growth, views, and app downloads. A site traffic objective can be measured by clicks and signups. If your objective is in fact direct conversion, you can also measure this by clicks and conversions or app downloads if this is your KPI. If your objective is to generate leads for your business, you can track signups and app downloads as your KPIs.

Finally, if your objective is to increase brand affinity, this can be indicated through social engagements, follower growth, content views, signups, and app downloads.

The fourth step in designing an impactful social media campaign is to set budgets and run dates for your campaign. So, decide how much you’re going to spend on each social channel and decide how long you want your campaign to run. All of this activity should be detailed in your media plan. Your media plan will show your total budget per channel, cost metrics, both CPM and CPC, and delivery targets, such as the number of impressions and clicks.

Pro tip, use a media plan template to detail your costs and run dates.

The final step in producing an impactful social media campaign is to design your creative content. Design your creative in a way that’s in line with each of the platform’s best practices. But remember that it’s also helpful to make your content look like matching luggage. That is, that they all have different sizes and shapes and designs, but they’re part of the same set visually. This will increase brand recognition and affinity. Your creative should be designed as a mobile-first. Most social media consumption happens on mobile devices. So, it’s important to design content that is optimized for a mobile environment. The creative should also have branding clearly upfront, but in a subtle fashion to avoid looking too promotional.

It’s ideal to launch your campaign with at least four creative variations so that the platform’s algorithm can optimize against the best performing content. As such, you should be updating your creative often to avoid consumer fatigue. Choose the ad formats that are best for your campaign and use a posting calendar to help you plan your campaign.

A posting calendar is a centralized document you can use to detail your posting dates, content choices, social channel external links, and other details. Its role is to ensure you are always prepared in advance of the campaign going live. Your calendar can be modified to take into account market changes or new information that might affect your campaign. Pro tip, use a posting calendar to plan your activity on a monthly or weekly basis.