Social media marketing campaigns are among the most cost efficient and effective ways to market your business these days. To date, there are 2.23 billion active users on Facebook alone, and 66% of those users log in at least once a day. That’s a major audience ready for you to share your brand’s story.
While social media may seem easy, launching a successful social media marketing campaign takes some degree of planning and effort. Don’t just jump in and see how things go and hope for the best. Instead, consider these factors before you make any major moves. This will help you maximize your efforts as much as possible.
You Need a Strategy and Goals
This does not just mean determine what you want or how much money you want to return. Your social media marketing strategy should also include detailed customer targeting through your business buyer personas. You should be able to have your goals completely detailed.
A well crafted strategy will help you determine exactly what platforms you should use and how you should run your campaign. For example, if you want to reach a specific audience, make sure you’re using the platform that they use most and speaking in a way that engages them. This will help you make sure the right messages are going to the right people.
How Much Time Will You Commit?
Just checking your social media regularly can make a big difference for your business and your campaign, even if you just dedicate a little bit of time to it. According to Digital Doughnut, 91% of digital marketers claimed that spending a few hours a week drastically increased their brand awareness, visibility, and user experience.
While you do not need to spend all day everyday checking social media, you should never just set it and forget it. If you are going to be launching a social media marketing campaign, make sure that you have time carved out to check on your metrics and engage with your audience.
Do Your Research First
Social media is constantly changing, and so is the way that people interact with one another. What may have been popular last year could be long gone by this time, and replaced with another trending topic, hashtag, or other type of new fad.
Stay on top of the times and make sure you understand what your audience is talking about and responding to at this current moment. Keeping your content relevant and timely will be the best bet at driving engagement and interaction with your campaign.
Check Out and Set up Your Social Media Toolkit
Lastly, one of the first things you should do when planning your social media marketing campaign is to make sure that all of the tools you’ll be using are set up and ready to go.
If you’re running a campaign based on a series of posts and on different platforms, you will want to use a social media scheduling program. Some of the more popular platforms include HootSuite and Buffer. This will allow you to organize your posts and make sure that your posts are all aligned with your strategy and goals.
You will also want to set up a tracking system and a social monitoring tool to check your analytics. This will help you keep track of how your campaign is doing and whether you need to tweak anything along the way. Make sure you have these set up before you launch so that you can be ready to track all data from the very beginning.
