Creating Your Campaign Strategy

Using the social media campaign strategy template, which you can download at the bottom of this page, let’s go through each section of a social media campaign strategy.

Business Goals

What are the organisational brand goals for this campaign?

Campaign Objectives

What are the objectives of this activity? Remember to use the SMART objective setting framework to ensure your objectives are valuable and useful. These objectives can relate to any aspect of the campaign and any channel that it might affect.

Social Media Objectives

Define the social objectives that this piece of activity will contribute to achieving.

Audience

Who is the audience for this specific campaign? Whilst you have already defined the audience targeted with your social media platform/s, a campaign may have a more specific, or even broader, target audience. Usually, it is likely to be the former, as social media is particularly well suited for highly-targeted campaigns. Remember to describe your audience beyond simple demographic terms. It is important to mention their likely age, gender and location. However, to really tailor your campaign creatively, you will need to find out more about your audience:

• Interests
• Attitudes
• What content publishers do they consume and engage with
• When and how they like to consume content
• Their information needs – if relevant.

Channels

A social media campaign does not, necessarily, have to live within all your chosen social media channels. Depending on the campaign objectives and targeted audience, you may want to only use some of these channels. You may even decide to use a platform which is not part of the core brand channel strategy, such as Snapchat or YouTube, to run a temporary campaign on. Pick the channel/s you want to use for the campaign and specify how you plan to use them. Explain why each one will effectively carry your campaign message to the target audience and contribute to your campaign objectives.

In the next two steps, we’ll look at a case study for AutoTrader, and how they designed their strategy for a successful campaign.