Social media has changed the way we spend time on the Internet.
Globally, there are 4.95[i] billion people who use social media apps and the average daily time spent on these apps is 145 minutes[ii] per user.
This wide user base represents a vast set of audiences from diverse backgrounds and holds huge untapped potential for businesses.
But how can businesses use social media to achieve their goals?
Successful social media marketing campaigns act as a gateway for businesses to create brand awareness, engage audiences, and generate leads.
However, with 93.79%[iii] of businesses already using social media to achieve their goals, it is important to have a defined plan that helps you stand out.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for planning and executing social media campaigns.
9 Key Steps to Plan and Execute Social Media Campaigns
Effective social media campaigns require careful planning and execution to achieve the goals. So, a well-thought-out strategy is paramount.
Here are essential elements that will guide you towards an impactful social media campaign:
1. Set Clear Business Goals
Defining a clear set of goals is the primary step for launching successful social media marketing campaigns.
Being aware of what you want to achieve from your social media campaign is also critical to measuring its ROI and performance.
If your objective is to engage your audiences you may require visual storytelling and influencer collaboration. And if you are after generating leads from social media, you may need to promote lead magnets or run advertisements.
The common social media goals for many businesses are building loyal audiences, boosting conversion rates, generating traffic, and so on.
To effectively define goals for your campaigns, you can utilize the S.M.A.R.T Goals criteria.
Here’s what it means for your Social Media campaign:
- Specific – Define what you want to achieve
- Measurable – The goal you decide should be measurable
- Achievable – Set goals that are realistic
- Relevant – The goal should be aligned with your overall objectives
- Time-Bound – Set a specific timeframe for achieving your goal
2. Understand Your Target Audience
The Social media space is a massive pool of users from different regions, with different ages, and interests. Merely creating content and displaying it to irrelevant audiences could result in a waste of your time and resources.
So, research your target audiences as if you are going to meet them in real. This is imperative as it helps you in creating content tailored to user interests.
Try to gather data based on the age, location, gender, and profession of your target audiences. Once you have all this information on paper, you can easily connect the dots to create a specific “Buyer Persona“.
Alternatively, you can analyze the users your competitors are engaging with. This will help you find the gaps within your targeting.
3. Select a Theme for Your Campaign
A theme for your social media campaign defines the tone and message you want to convey.
To set a theme for your campaigns, you need to understand current trends, and audience interests to align it with your brand message.
Spend some time analyzing current trends and relevant seasons. Aligning your theme with popular topics or seasonal trends can make your campaign more timely and relatable.
Further, incorporating elements that encourage audience interaction such as contests, polls, or challenges related to your theme can boost participation and create buzz.
Here’s an example of a social media post around Christmas by Primark(an international Clothing retailer):
4. Choose the Right Social Media Platform
Social Media Apps are developed to consume a specific format of content.
Facebook and Instagram are used to share social lifestyles, YouTube is to watch videos of all types and LinkedIn is to share professional updates.
So, the engagement rates, ad spends, and ROI also vary for each of them. While LinkedIn is popular for B2B lead generation campaigns, Facebook and Instagram are more used for user engagement and directly targeting the consumer market.
Keeping buyer persona in mind, you can use the most suitable platform for your social media campaign.
5. Create a Content Calendar
A well-planned content calendar provides you a clarity of what needs to be published and when. This saves a lot of time for marketers to focus on other core tasks.
To create a content calendar, consider the number of posts to be published every day, how often your target audience opens the platform you are targeting, and the time duration of your campaign.
When creating a content calendar, make sure it comes in handy so that there’s no hassle at the time of publishing.
Our Social Media Calendar – is powerful tool designed to plan, schedule, and publish your social media posts effortlessly. The ‘week view’ and ‘day view’ provide a detailed insight into your scheduled content, offering a 360-degree visualization of your complete social media strategy
6. Craft Engaging Content
“Content is KING” for all marketing initiatives and this is where you have to do the heavy lifting.
Thoroughly research your theme, target audience, and social media platforms to come up with unique ideas.
Pro-tip: Learn about the attention span of your target users and create content accordingly.
Infographics and carousels perform better than a single image with complex information. Similarly, videos are apt for how-to guides.
Create all your social media assets with attention to detail and don’t forget to optimize them as per the platform.
Use relevant hashtags, permitted caption lengths, allowed image dimensions, and CTAs wherever required.
7. Implement a Strict Publishing Schedule
The publishing schedule has a direct impact on the reach and visibility of your social media campaigns.
You need to analyze the times when your target audience is most active on social media. Take the help of analytics reports to find the same.
Also, the algorithms at the back end of social media platforms prioritize more relevant and fresh content. So, you need to be consistent with your posting schedule.
You can seamlessly distribute your social media content across social networks with our premier social media scheduler. With its intuitive interface, post-customizer, and flexible scheduling options, this tool handles a substantial workload for you.
8. Track and Analyze the Metrics
After your campaign is live on desired social media platforms, you need to constantly monitor it.
Take the help of analytics from social media apps to understand what is working for you and optimize your campaign accordingly.
If you are not getting the real-time response from your campaign as expected, check if you are targeting the right set of people. For more precision, closely monitor what your competitors are doing.
9. Evaluate the Performance of Your Campaign
Evaluation of social media campaigns is essential as it provides insights into the effectiveness of your efforts. It provides you with the key learnings which can be implemented in future campaigns.
Start by mapping the results against the objectives of the campaign. Get a clear picture of what has been achieved and what needs to be improved in the future to minimize the gaps.
Collect user engagement metrics such as comments, shares, and click-through rates. This will help in understanding audiences more accurately.
In addition to this, learning what content resonates with users is key to refining your content for future campaigns.
The Conclusion
From setting goals to performance evaluation, each step is a building block that contributes to successful social media marketing campaigns.
Serve the right content, to the right audiences, at the right time, to maximize the returns on your social media campaigns.
Finally, you need to be very consistent with your publishing schedule, so don’t hesitate to leverage a scheduling tool to do this for you.
Following these steps, you can easily plan and execute your future social media campaigns.
Statistical Refernces:
[i] DataReportal
[ii] Forbes
[iii] GlobalReach