Social media can be a powerful tool if you know how to use it to benefit your business. It can help you raise awareness for your brand, reach out to a wider audience, and convert all your engagement into sales. But that’s only if you can harness and maximize its potential to become a driver of success for your business.
Fortunately, here’s a five-step plan that you can use to launch a successful marketing campaign on social media every single time:
Put Together a Team for the Campaign
With all the social media users becoming famous overnight because of their viral videos, one may think that it’s easy to achieve that kind of popularity and reach without putting in the effort. But while those who went viral were exceptions to the rule, it actually takes a lot of time and hard work to dominate social media.
Plus, you have to remember that everything on the internet is fleeting. The topic that everyone is talking about today will be long forgotten tomorrow because someone or something else has already replaced it. And that’s why businesses everywhere are fighting tooth and nail to stay relevant on social media.
This means that you can’t just assign someone to create a last-minute publicity material to upload on Facebook and expect it to blow up; launching social media campaigns take time. That’s why you need a team of hard workers whose sole focus is on your campaign. You can partner up with industry experts from a reliable PR and marketing firm so that you can strengthen your strategies even more.
Identify Your Goals and Make a Timeline
Setting goals is necessary to measure the effectiveness and success of what you’re trying to do for your business. Just like how you set goals for the entire company’s growth, you’ll also need to identify your goals for the social media campaign so you can strategize how you’re going to achieve them.
Once you’ve narrowed down your goals, the next step will be to create a timeline of events, beginning from the initial planning stage up until the launch date. This will allow you to map out everything you have to accomplish for the launch without sacrificing the quality of your outputs, especially if you don’t leave enough wiggle room for unexpected circumstances.
Select the Right Social Media Platforms
No two social media platforms are the same, even if there are a few similarities here and there. That’s why it’s important to know who your audiences are and where they frequent in the digital landscape because you don’t go to a college campus to market a product made for senior citizens.
Selecting the right platforms is key to ensuring the success of your social media campaign. You may think that launching on all social media platforms would be better because you’ll have a wider audience reach. However, it can make you spread yourself out too thin and lose focus in the long run. So, instead of trying to juggle multiple platforms at the same time, only choose two or three that would be best for your campaign.
Create Your Campaign Collateral
In digital marketing, the term collateral refers to all the materials that you use to disseminate information to the public. It includes posters, videos, photos, infographics, and other forms of digital media that you upload on your social media pages. To launch a campaign, you’ll need these collateral materials.
Now that you know what your specific goals for the campaign are and where you’re going to post your collateral, it will be easier to create the right materials. For instance, if you were making a campaign about a new line of sneakers and are targeting Gen Z consumers, in that case, you’re better off creating short videos on TikTok because doing so can lead to more customer engagement.
Of course, the marketing collateral that you create for your campaign will vary, but you have to make sure that it’s designed to attract your target demographic. The entire point of launching a campaign is to reach a wider audience and market your products or services, which means that everything is banking on your collateral.
Launch Your Social Media Campaign
Getting to your launch date doesn’t mean that your work is over; in fact, it’s just the beginning. Once you launch the campaign, the next step would be to track your progress on social media and make sure that your target audience is engaging with your collateral because otherwise, all your efforts would have been for nothing.
This would be the best time to analyze your performance and note where you could still improve. Continue using the strategies that work and forego those that don’t, especially if your campaign is long enough to make some adjustments without affecting the overall brand image.
When it comes to social media, it’s all about having the perfect timing. But to achieve the kind of reach and engagement that can be beneficial to your business, you have to know your customers. Learn about who they are and what they want, so you can create a campaign that’s made specifically for them.