Social media is a wave, which is growing at a warp speed, and there is no stopping anytime soon. No matter what is the genre of your business; including social media in your online marketing strategy is of utmost importance. With about 2.46 Billion active users on social media worldwide, every business today needs to leverage proper social media channels in the best possible way to connect with their potential customers.
Did you know that social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing? Amazing, right? Through social media, you just don’t generate more business but it also gives your brand more visibility, engagement, connection with your customer and serve them better. It makes your Internet marketing easier. For an effective outcome through social media, an effective social media marketing strategy is very important and we will discuss below how to run an effective social media campaign:
-Know your goals:
Social Media networks can be used to achieve different goals. When you have goals, and you know what you are doing, you achieve more. Wandering aimlessly is not recommended in any business. It is very important to set your objectives and goals before running a campaign to meet desired expectations. The main goals which can be achieved through social media are as follows:
-Brand Awareness
-More traffic on the website
-Improve Search engine ranking
-Lead Generation
-Improving brand loyalty
-Improving Customer satisfaction
-Brand authority
-Building Customer relationship
-Know where your customers are:
There are different social media platforms, which behave in a different way for different businesses. You need to know which social media your target audience is using and how it is working.
-Competitor’s research:
This is also an important factor to be considered before running a campaign. You need to research and know your competitors’ activities and tactics and see how effective their social media campaigns are. This way you can analyze and apply their best tactics to your social media strategy.
-Create a Content Marketing Plan:
Competitors research can give you a good idea that which content gathers more engagement and attention from customers. Never compromise on the quality of the content because that is the main reason, which makes your customer engage and ultimately relate to your brand, so ensure it is engaging and interesting. The more consistent you are with your posts, the more you tend to grab people’s attention. Have your content make your brand appear as a person, not an organization.
-Create a killer tagline or Hashtag
It is very important to attach your campaign to certain Hashtag or a tagline because it can attract the audience even outside your network and make them want to learn more. Hashtag really works best on social media for people to find posts related to a particular topic (and make it easier to see all the posts relating to your campaign).
-Social Media Content Calendar
Plan the time and consistency that when and how often you are going to post on social media. Consistency is very important for your page to appear in your target audience’s feed to get noticed. Create the calendar and then schedule your posts in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day. This will help in maintaining consistency with good content without fail,
-Run Pilot Campaign:
Before you start with a full-fledged campaign, start with a pilot campaign for a few days to understand how different ads are responding. Try it with different ad copies, different demographics, and different time and analyze the insights so that it becomes easy to optimize when you run the main campaign.
-Make your campaign targeted:
Social media gives you an option to target your campaigns on the basis of age, location, gender, interests, recent activities and many other parameters to make use of all these to target your campaigns more precisely to your potential customers and get higher ROI at a lower cost.
-Create a campaign landing page:
Creating a tailored landing page with a clear call to action for the particular campaign is very important if your objective is driving traffic on your website This comforts visitors because they know they are at the correct place right away. It also assists in tracking how your audience is engaging with your campaign content, rather than just sending them to the homepage.
–Engage and respond to customers:
It is very important to engage and reply to questions and queries of the audience.
Even to a negative response, be polite and positive. Do not automate things, be casual and let your audience know there is a human behind.
–Measure and evaluate
Measure your campaign analytics to track the results. It will let you know how successful your campaign has been. To best measure your campaign’s results you will need the right tools to determine your campaign’s effectiveness and, ultimately, its ROI. Social media platform are inbuilt with the analytics tool so it makes the job easier.
-Add contacts to CRM tool:
Add the leads to CRM tool and tag them with the campaign name to know which client was attracted to business through which campaign. Lead Generation campaigns should also be followed back with a “Thank You” mail to the entire campaign participant and it also gives you a reasonable excuse for another touch point with these users/prospects.
Now when you know how to create an effective social media campaign, there are few things that you need to avoid during the same. Let’s go.
-No strategy
A social media campaign with no objectives and no goals is a waste of your efforts, time and money. You need to understand the main goal that you want to achieve with those campaigns. Keep a plan, maintain a social media policy, measurable goals and then implement a well-planned campaign strategy.
-Spamming with too many posts
Do not spam your customers with too many posts. Make sure to post relevant content with a good time interval between the posts. Too many posts can repel them rather than attracting them.
-Content as per the social platform
Each platform work in a different manner so post contents as per the content model of that particular platform to gain more. Research and consider your demographics and then invest in the platform that can really benefit your brand. You do not necessarily have to be active on all platforms but yes, choose a platform that can benefit your business better than other platforms.
-Too much of self-promotion
Your audience wants some engaging and interesting content rather than only self-promotion posts. It will eventually start boring your audience and might alienate them.
-Not engaging with your audience
Not engaging with your audience can make them lose interest. Make sure you engage with your audience and respond to their comments and feedbacks. Establish yourself as a thought leader- express a clear opinion, and engage users.
-Buying fake likes and followers
Buying followers and likes may increase your follower’s count and likes for some time but it is not going to help you to get conversions or brand awareness. Try to engage a genuine audience rather than buying them. Try to grow your audience organically for more engagement and conversions.
Now we hope that this post gave you some insight and you know all the key factors, which can help you to start an effective social media campaign. So wish you all the best for your next campaign.
