The purpose of these billions of daily social media visits varies. Some people connect with friends and family members, others network for business purposes, while many of us just want to waste time watching funny videos.
Amid these diverse objectives and highly engaging content, it can be challenging to generate much attention to your brand. Picture a scenario where a marketer stands in Times Square on New Year’s Eve and tries to explain their business to passersby. Most people won’t hear the business pitch, others will catch a word or two before moving on, while a select few might make eye contact and listen for a moment.
Your goal is to generate these moments of eye contact via social media. And then you must deliver a message worth listening to. Accomplishing this requires an effective social media campaign. Stay tuned, and we’ll show you how to do just that.
A social media marketing campaign is a coordinated initiative using one or more platforms to reach a business objective. While the platforms and ad formats vary, each campaign focuses on a consistent strategy. Through market analysis, you can make your business stand out from the competition and reach a specific audience.
This distinct focus on strategy separates a social media campaign from the small-scale social media activity your team probably oversees daily already. Using key performance indicators (KPIs) as a guide, marketers track their social media ad campaigns to ensure they reach their targets.
Regardless of your industry and specialty, you can’t outperform your competition without strategic social media advertising campaigns. Social media provides unrivaled marketing opportunities in terms of cost and scale. So if you want to remain relevant in the eyes of your customers, you have to play in this arena.
What is a social media marketing campaign’s greatest strength? It’s the ability to reach target audiences. Social media marketing empowers you to connect the right message with the right people, whether you want to:
Engage potential customers.
Promote loyalty among your current customer base.
Drive more web traffic.
Build your sales numbers.
It’s this pinpointed targeting ability that ensures social media marketing is more than a trend—it's a business-building tool that will continue to gain prominence in the coming decades.
With a social media campaign, you’ll be able to connect with your followers in their preferred locations. If they gather on TikTok, you can engage with them while they watch videos. Or if they’re more business-minded, you can share valuable resources on LinkedIn. Nearly every place in cyberspace is reachable as long as you know what your audience cares about and where they spend their time.
Of course, your social media campaign will be more effective if you integrate it into your omnichannel strategies. For example, let’s say you have an email marketing campaign to promote a new technology product your company recently released. You could repurpose your highest-performing email into content for social media posts and promote your email newsletter on these platforms as well. This could help attract new subscribers who wouldn’t have otherwise seen your emails.
The point is that your social media marketing efforts should never have dead ends. Help your audience engage, but don’t stop there. Keep them moving to more brand touchpoints. Links from your social posts can take followers to your website. And outbound links on your website can direct your web traffic to your social accounts. This provides an optimal user experience and helps people stay closer to your brand.
That said, social media ad campaigns require consistent effort. If you post content and walk away, you won’t achieve the best results. Fortunately, the time requirement is low, so you’ll only need to dedicate a few hours weekly to keep the momentum moving forward.
You have many options when putting your social media tactics into action. While the most common brand awareness campaign categories include traffic-driving campaigns, engagement-building campaigns, and sales-boosting campaigns, executing these objectives comes in a wide array of options.
Let’s look at four types of social media campaigns:
1. Partnership campaigns
Joining forces with another organization is a powerful way to reach new audiences and build equity. Assess your own audience to identify partnerships that will resonate with them. On the flip side, you’ll also want to consider the potential partner’s audience, as their reaction to you will be key to the campaign’s success.
Influencer campaigns are among the most popular partner options because you gain instant access to an audience with shared interests. You’ll just need to confirm that the influencer’s following is authentic and engaged. As long as the price of collaborating is within your budget, having an influencer post about your brand can be a great way to reach your goals.
An elevated version of these campaigns makes the influencer an actual brand ambassador. This means that rather than just have them promote your brand, they become a face of it. It takes a lot of trust to establish someone as such a clear representative of your brand, so due diligence is essential. But as long as a brand ambassador aligns with your values and can engage your audience, it could be a good match.
One final type of partnership to consider is one with other brands. While competitors within the same industry rarely work together on social media, it may be advantageous to find complementary brands that’ll get your audience excited. Perhaps it’s a brand that has products or services that match well with your offerings. Or it might be a less obvious choice that merely attracts a similar demographic, meaning your followers and their followers will be happy to learn about each other’s brands.
2. Poll campaigns
While partnerships rely on followers’ excitement to elicit action, polls rely on getting people to engage with your content. As long as poll questions are relevant to your audience’s interests and provide benefits, you can expect high engagement.
For example, you could reveal to your customers a new product you’ve been developing and ask them which color or style is their favorite. Or you could announce that you’re going to offer a popular product at an exclusive discount to your social media followers. Then, ask them to vote on which of the five products they would most like to see get the discount.
Both of these examples highlight the need to attach a benefit to your poll. In the first case, your followers will feel like they have a vested interest if they can steer the development of your product, and they’ll be more excited to purchase it when it becomes available. In the second example, you incentivize followers to participate because they’ll have a chance to score a great price on one of their favorite products.
In addition to the benefit to your followers, you’ll get the enormous benefit of freely shared data. Thanks to the construct of the poll, followers will share their opinions and help you learn more about their motivations and preferences. You can then use this intel to build your demographic profiles and refine your strategies.
3. Giveaway campaigns
Speaking of benefits, one of the most direct ways to share the love with your social media followers is with a giveaway. Rather than offer one giant prize, you can increase engagement by offering a range of prizes that make the odds of winning more favorable. Just be sure to make the prizes high quality to motivate people to participate.
A popular method of driving engagement and building your followers is to require followers to tag their friends as part of the entry process. Whether you require followers to tag two friends for a one-time entry or unlimited tags for unlimited entries, your brand will gain crucial exposure as new people get included. Another option to achieve these same objectives is to offer extra entries when followers share the contest with their friends and these friends in turn enter.
Your social media giveaway will thrive when you employ an omnichannel approach. You could promote the contest through display ads and website banners or offer extra entries for those who enter through a link emailed to your newsletter followers.
4. Philanthropy campaigns
Many of your followers, particularly millennials, get motivated by opportunities to make a difference in the world. Even if this isn’t a typical aspect of your brand, find an authentic way to benefit deserving recipients through participation in your social media campaign.
For example, you could announce your partnership with a nonprofit agency relevant to your brand. In a series of posts, you could share heartwarming videos showcasing the good work this nonprofit does, then explain that you’ll donate a dollar to the agency for every time the posts get shared. Or you could announce that for a three-day period, you’ll donate a percentage of all sales to this nonprofit.
Whichever route you pursue, there are a couple of aspects that must be present. First, the nonprofit needs to be relevant to your followers, and the partnership must feel authentic. Otherwise, your campaign might feel opportunistic or manipulative.
Second, the nonprofit also needs to promote the campaign from its end. This two-way advertising will expose your brand to a new audience and ensure that your followers have confidence in the campaign after seeing the nonprofit endorse it on its official channels. As long as your contribution is substantial, the nonprofit will promote the campaign and help bring mutual success.
Now that you know more about your options, let’s discuss the creative process. Because as amazing as social media campaigns are, these still require a thoughtful and concerted effort to build and launch.
Creating a social media campaign is equal parts formula and customization. There are certain things that you must do, while others are more flexible. As you become more familiar with the process, you’ll discover some of the unique aspects that can help you tailor your campaign to your platform, campaign format, and industry.
1. Lay the foundation
Before you get bogged down in other details, your team needs to agree on what you want to accomplish. Seek input from teams throughout your organization so that you get fresh insights and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Ask questions such as:
What does our organization most want to accomplish?
Who is our target audience?
What is the main benefit we offer our target audience?
Is there a challenge we solve for our target audience?
What platforms are most relevant for these objectives?
What are some campaign elements that will most resonate with our target audience?
The answers to these questions will guide your early strategizing and serve as guiding lights as the campaign begins to take shape.
2. Seek outside insights
Too often, we tend to rely on our ideas and ignore the great sources outside our office walls. Start by listening to your target audience. Follow what they say on relevant social media platforms, send out a survey, or schedule a panel discussion. By getting ideas straight from your customers, you’ll have a better chance of engaging them once the campaign rolls out.
Another crucial source of ideas is what your competitors do. A competitive analysis can reveal your toughest competition, which can spur ideas for making your brand stand out. You never want to just copy what others do, but it’s difficult to create something noteworthy and distinct unless you know what others in your industry do.
3. Refine your strategy
Now that you know what you want to accomplish, what your target audience wants, and what your competitors do, you’re ready to refine your strategy.
Think about the customer journey and how this campaign will provide relevance and benefit to your target audience. Will you focus on being informative, or will this campaign be more about entertainment? What visuals will you use to catch attention and elevate your overall message?
This is an ideal time to consider dynamic elements, such as influencers and partnerships. Are there individuals or other organizations that can extend the reach of your campaign and lend credibility to what you do?
Also, think about additional ways to put your target audience front and center. For example, you could post user-generated content throughout the campaign to highlight the relationship your brand has with individual customers. Not only can this build trust among your target audience, but it can also spur more enthusiasm and engagement.
4. Identify your success metrics
You must outline your campaign’s unique goals and decide how you’ll track them. Social media platforms put a wealth of data at your fingertips, so tracking the success of the campaign is straightforward once you know what you want.
Many marketers look at metrics such as:
Overall campaign traffic
Number of new followers
Number of new conversions
Click-through rate
Number of likes
Number of shares
Knowing what success looks like enables you to track progress and refine your strategies accordingly. And it helps you organize your data so that it’s easier to launch successful campaigns in the future.
Take these four basic components and add whatever’s necessary to create a social media marketing campaign that highlights your brand and supports your growth goals. And remember that it’s a collaborative process that requires your entire team to share their insights and support the effort.
Social media is one of the most powerful channels for your advertising efforts. But individual channels won’t bring sustainable success on their own. You must incorporate an omnichannel marketing approach if you want to reach the largest number of people and deliver the best possible customer experience.
What other elements could you add to elevate your next social media campaign? Email marketing is a prime choice, as it brings high deliverability rates and allows you to reach followers not logged into their social accounts (or don’t have them at all).
Twilio SendGrid can help you put tools in place to power your campaigns through data and automation. We know how to run social media advertising campaigns that are the right blend of usability and intelligence.
