Introduction
Social media is one of the best ways to connect with your audience and build your brand. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram are where people go to find out about new products and services, so it’s important for businesses to have a presence there. But creating an effective social media marketing campaign requires more than just signing up for an account. You need to know how to use each platform effectively—and that means understanding its strengths and weaknesses as well as knowing what makes your audience tick.
The guide will detail what your organisation needs to do when setting up social media marketing campaigns;
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Build a Solid Foundation
The first step to setting up a successful social media campaign is building a solid foundation. That means creating a social media policy for your business, setting up accounts on all major platforms and integrating them with each other, installing monitoring tools to track mentions of your brand (and competitors), and selecting analytics software that will help you keep track of everything over time.
Here’s what we recommend:
Create a Social Media Policy
This should include guidelines such as when it’s appropriate to post on behalf of the company, what kind of content you’re willing to share or repost online, how often you’ll update those channels, who will be responsible for posting content in different situations (e.g., during off-hours), etc. This basically covers anything related to managing the accounts.
Set Up an Account on Each Major Platform
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn are good places to start—then make sure they’re linked together so that all updates go out simultaneously across all channels. You can set this up by connecting each channel directly through its native application or by using third-party apps like Hootsuite; this option works well but may require some customisation depending on the size/complexity of your company’s social presence.
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Define your Goals and KPIs
The first step in planning a social media campaign is to define your goals and KPIs. What are you hoping to achieve? What do you want to measure? Do you want more followers, or do you want more conversions? Do you have a specific number of leads that need to be generated per month, or would it be better for sales if traffic increased steadily over time?
If possible, try not to include too many KPIs at once—if there are too many objectives and measures, it can be difficult for anyone involved in the campaign to know which ones are most important. Instead, select two or three primary KPIs that best align with what’s most important for your business.
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Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
The key to a successful social media marketing campaign is a strategy. A social media marketing strategy is a plan for how you’ll use each platform and what the expected outcome of your efforts will be. You should create your social media marketing strategy before diving into the process so that you can make sure your efforts lead to results. Check out more on how to create a social media marketing strategy here.
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Set Up Social Monitoring and Listening
Social monitoring and listening is a crucial part of any social media campaign. It’s important to set up alerts so that you can respond quickly to the conversations happening around your brand, especially if something negative comes up.
Set up a Google Alert on your brand name and any other keywords that come up in relation to your business. This will help you track mentions of your brand online and keep an eye on what people are saying about it across different channels.
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Measure your Results
Once your campaign has been running for a while, it’s time to take a look at the analytics and see how things are going. This is where tracking tools come in handy—you can get an overall view of how much traffic your campaign is generating, how many conversions it’s driving, and so on.
Here are some metrics you should be tracking:
- Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks divided by the number of times the ad was viewed. A high click-through rate signals that people found something interesting about your ad and clicked through to learn more about it or take action on it.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who complete the desired action after clicking on an ad (e.g., signing up for a newsletter).
- Cost per conversion: Total expenses divided by total conversions from that channel over time
Conclusion
We hope this guide has been useful in helping you understand what’s important to a social media marketing campaign for your business. The process of creating compelling content, setting up monitoring tools, and measuring results might seem daunting at first—and it can be! But by taking these steps one at a time and starting with what’s most important to you right now, we promise that social media marketing will become second nature before long.
If you would like a helping hand with social media marketing, leave it up to the experts. We help brands manage social media and see success through communicating online. Contact us today and we will happily discuss your needs.
