Inevitably, social media blankets the digitized world of today, making it the optimum platform for engaging with your audience as a brand. Consumers have notably contributed to the growth of a business through various social media interactions, enhancing the positive interactions for companies across the globe.
In line with the following, we are going to explore some proven processes on creating social media campaigns which are known to generate results. And yet, prior to the same, it is important to consider why, as a business, you should utilize social media to propel business growth.
Why Should Businesses Make the Most of Social Media?
As per the above statistics, it is evidently recognizable why social media should be an integral aspect of your marketing strategy as a business, startup, or company. The reasons for leveraging social media are many.
Presence of your Audience
3.6 billion, undoubtedly a staggering amount, of users are already accessing social media on a daily basis.
That’s close to half the population of the world today. It is notable for businesses to consider the presence of a considerable audience, who dominate these platforms, and are simply waiting for brands to appeal to them.
Social Media has Revolutionized Marketing
Traditional marketing methods, though still useful, are mostly prevalent practices of the past now. Earlier, marketing methods utilized by businesses lacked engagement, and were known to implement one-sided approaches by a brand. Businesses would simply overwhelm potential consumers with insights regarding their products, and services, whilst hoping a purchase would be made.
However, today, social media marketing has enabled consumers to express themselves, leading various brands to adopt a more considerate approach. They’d pause to listen. Inevitably, two-way communication between a consumer, and a business, has aided brands in recognizing the requirements of their audiences in a meaningful manner. Alongside building brand loyalty, this further helps a brand construct its personalized brand awareness.
How to Best Utilise Social Media to Design a Successful Campaign?
1. Set Goals in Order to Acquire the Best Results
Before working on the intricacies of a social media campaign, it is important for a business to set goals which are relevant, timely, attainable, and specific. As such, as a business, you need to ensure you’re:
Aware of who your audience is,
What that particular audience desires,
What demographics will you be appealing to,
Why you’d be appealing to these specific regions
Moreover, businesses must further ensure these goals are measurable in order to monitor your own progress, and optimize your performance when needed. In fact, when setting goals for your business, being realistic in your expectations, and monitoring the outcome rather than your activities, is highly essential.
By proceeding with a calculated strategy, you’re allowing yourself to measure your success as a business, coupled with your Return on Investment (ROI). Therefore, rather than focusing on metrics such as a follower count, it is essential to consider more important factors such as generating engaging content, and campaigns, which lead to a growth in your following.
2: Familiarise Yourself with Everything About your Audience
As a business, you might initially question why it’s important to understand your audience before proceeding with a social media campaign. This is because, in order to enact an informed decision, it is integral to possess data regarding different audiences on different social media networks. Knowing your audience is critical to the success of any campaign.
By being aware of the wants and likes of your audience, you’ll be able to create content which is more receptive to engagement, and the overall growth of your business. In fact, when an audience comes across content they are able to resonate with, businesses are more likely to enjoy:
More Likes
Comments
Shares
Conversions
However, in order to attain the same, it is important for a business to be aware of an audience’s:
Ages
Locations
Interests
Incomes
Other information which can be useful to a brand
Despite acquiring this information, you might be wondering how best to utilize it. That would undoubtedly be by creating buyer personas; a buyer persona refers to a highly detailed description of individuals who represent the entirety of your target audience. It isn’t a real person, but essentially embodies characteristics of your most real, and most active, customers within your specific target audience. Moreover, a buyer persona is where details mentioned above, such as location, age, and income, are factored in.
Alongside these details, businesses must also monitor the behavioral traits of their buyer persona, in order to gain a detailed understanding of the purchasing habits of their audience. In fact, for larger businesses who appeal to several different audiences, you might have to create more than one buyer persona, with each representing a separate target audience.
3: Competitor Analysis
In order to build a successful campaign for social media, you can learn a lot from your competitors by monitoring what they’re doing on social media. This is best done by conducting a competitor analysis to find out what works best for your competitors, alongside what isn’t seeming to work at all.
By being members of the same industry, you’re likely to share the same audiences with your competitors, which is why what generates results for them could very well prove beneficial to your business as well. In fact, by observing your competitors intensely, you might be able to identify excellent opportunities which your competitors haven’t utilized yet, or simply missed entirely. This would allow you to capitalize the same for your own social media campaign.
A few notable observations made by a business, of their competitors, could include:
What sort of posts are gaining the most engagement?
What kind of captions seem to work the best?
Are there certain types of content which are being shared the most?
Which of my competitors content, and what aspects of their content, are most populating my feed?
It is essential to monitor these factors across various social media platforms, rather than just one or two. This is because your competitors may be more engaged with your target audience on one platform, perhaps Facebook, but not so much on another, namely Instagram. By being aware of the same, you could captivate a larger audience on a platform your competitors aren’t prevalently active on as well.
4: Pick the Right Channels for your Campaign
It is critical to select social media platforms which are best suited to advertising for your campaign. In order to do so, you would first need to decide whether the channel aligns with the campaign. A few important questions to determine the following are as follows:
Are my services, or products, inherently utilising visual marketing? If this is the case, social media channels such as Instagram, or Facebook, may be right for you
Is my company one that is B2B or B2C? If the former answers your question, LinkedIn is best suited for your business in order to connect with other companies
In addition, it is also important to determine whether a social media channel suits your present capabilities, as a business. You can now ask yourself these questions:
Will my business be able to create content for several channels?
Do I, realistically, have the time to spare in order to create this content?
Would I need to hire someone to create the content needed, or do I possess the relevant expertise?
Am I able to spare the amount needed for the following, or is my budget unsubstantial?
After contemplating the same, you’ll be able to recognize which platform is best suited to your campaign.
5: Develop Themes for your Social Media Content
After following the above steps and gathering all the relevant information, you can now proceed with focusing on a plan for creating the content itself. One of the foremost aspects of your plan must undoubtedly focus on creating a list of topics for content you’ll focus on; these should revolve around what you can share information about which brings value to your audience.
Perhaps the easiest way you can go about this is by breaking down your expertise into three primary categories:
What should your audience should do in order to achieve their goals, or get rid of their problems
How should they do the things required to fulfill their goals or resolve their issues
And Why must they initially focus on these aspects at all
Once you’ve generated a list abiding by the same, you can now reinvent your content themes into more definite content by selecting a particular type of content. This is typically inclusive of tutorials, tips, quotes, and infographics, amongst several others.
6: Creating Engaging Content
Rather than directly proceeding to create content as soon as you’ve set up a social media account, it is far more useful to understand various guidelines for video sizing, and images, before doing so. This is because it would prove highly beneficial in the creation of high resolution, top quality content, which is specifically optimized for each channel respectively.
Earlier on, we were able to identify who our audience was and learned particular details about them. Content creation is where these imperative details can now be put to use. Businesses must always keep their audiences in mind since content which provides no value to an audience fails to improve connections, and engagement, for a brand.
Establish Connections by Sharing Positives:
A notable strategy to do so is to abide by sharing statistics, and news, which are always positive. Users enjoy content of this kind, whilst positive statistics are known to build trust
between a brand and an audience. In fact, if your business resonates with social causes, posting about your strong values as a brand can prove highly noteworthy. Simultaneously, this could also highlight your brand as an ambassador for social issues.
Appeal to Audience’s Emotions:
Regardless of the content you’re creating, is it mandatory for a brand to appeal to their audience’s emotions, whilst communicating their mission as a business. Content which lacks in details, appealing visuals, and personalized information provides no value to an audience, which more or less ensures its failure. Simply put, you cannot generalize your content.
7. Adjust your Strategy and Monitor Analytics
It is vital to incessantly make changes to your current strategy, whilst simultaneously monitoring your analytics, in order to keep up with changes across several social media platforms. As such, as a business, you cannot grow accustomed to a singular strategy made at the beginning of your marketing plan, and expect it to prove fruitful forever.
Moreover, aside from making the occasional changes in line with ongoing trends, it is also necessary to make changes to your social media marketing strategy if it isn’t providing you with optimal results. In order to improve your performance, you’d have to monitor your performance metrics.
Analytics are a great way to determine why certain content is doing better than others, whilst observing different strategies in order to determine why some seem to prove more effective. In doing so, your business will focus on a data driven approach which incessantly optimises your marketing strategy. This would allow you to garner better results, and outperform competitors across the industry.
How to Measure the Effectiveness, and the Results, of your Social Media Campaign
If you aren’t already evaluating your social media marketing campaign, in order to gauge the effectiveness of your present strategy, you’ll never further out where you’re underperforming. Going forward, you’re likely to make the same mistakes as well. Therefore, determining which metrics are the optimum choice to measure effectiveness is critical.
This can be done by closely monitoring the following:
Reactions to your posts
By evaluating an audience’s reaction to posts on social media, you can best determine what your audience finds the most interesting. Inbuilt analytics provided by every social media platform, particularly Instagram, Facebook, and linked, allow businesses to analyze users’ reactions through various metrics.
Determine your Reach
This refers to the overall number of people your campaign has been able to reach, both including, and excluding, your audience. A positive reach is a great indicator of how well your campaign is being received.
Referral Traffic
Gauging your referral traffic, as a business, by utilising social media is an important metric to make use of. It provides a distinctive picture of how well your marketing campaign has resonated with audiences, whilst evaluating your overall performance through an initial target which was set by a business, alongside the target which was actually achieved.
By observing such details, businesses can decide whether certain social media are an adequate place for advertising their campaigns. This is because sometimes, certain social media platforms do not resonate which particular businesses, which is why a business would be better off when not wasting their efforts on said channel.
Examine the Click Through Rate
The Click through rate (CTR) is associated with conversions made directly. It helps businesses discover whether a marketing campaign is fulfilling its purposes, or not. A higher CTR undoubtedly points to the effectiveness of a campy, whilst a low CTR indicates the need for readjustment. You can best utilize CTRs as a part of a link situated on a landing page, or as a part of a campaign which consists of a PPC ad.
So what are we left with?
In conclusion, businesses should leverage social media as much as they possibly can, given the way it has revolutionized marketing as we know it, alongside the presence of an eager audience.
Moreover, it is essential to utilize an amalgamation of the most optimum practices when designing a successful social media campaign. These are inclusive of factors such as setting realistic goals, indulging in competitor analysis, familiarizing yourself with your audience, and utilising the right channels for your brand (amongst others).
Lastly, by thoroughly monitoring your brand’s CTR, referral traffic and determining your reach, you’ll be able to adequately measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign as well.
All in all, after thoroughly introducing you to some of the best practices which have proven highly useful for social media campaigns, you can now proceed with beginning your own advertising journey. Make sure to follow the distinctive directions, alongside the important metrics stated, in order to effectively popularize your brand across various social media channels.