5 Steps for Building a Social Media Campaign

What’s one of the best ways to reach with your target market and interact with your existing consumer base? You guessed it. It’s social media marketing. Mainly because social media is such a diverse medium for combining different types of content to create a unique and compelling message.

A professional internet marketing company can guide you best when it comes to developing, launching, and optimizing a social media campaign, but there are a few basics we can breakdown. Right here, right now.

5 Steps for Building an Effective Social Media Campaign for Your Business

Step 1: Consider Your Target Market

Pretty much all digital marketing campaigns start this way: take a look at your target market and come up with specific goals for the campaign. Analyze demographics that your industry niche will most appeal to.

Many marketers advocate for the S.M.A.R.T. method:

• Specific – Be clear about the goals you want to set. Which social media platforms do you intend to use, and what outcomes are you looking to get? Subscribes, likes, follows, reposts? How many?
• Measurable – Concepts and ideas are good, but measurable data can actually help you optimize a campaign. Measure click-through rates, engagements, bounce rates, and more in order to keep track of your progress.
• Attainable – Make sure your goals are realistic. If you’ve just started your business, you’re not going to gain a million followers on Instagram overnight, or even in a month (unless you have an existing customer base that is very, very loyal and active on social media).
• Relevant – Your goals for a social media campaign should be relevant in how meeting those goals will help your business. Considering your target market will definitely help in this area too.
• Timely – Keep a timeframe with a list of milestone goals so you know when you’re hitting (or not hitting) each one.

Step 2: Evaluate Your Current Social Media Strategies

Take an inventory of what you’re currently doing in social media. What platforms are you using? Do they make sense for your industry?

Some of the most popular social media platforms are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Snapchat
• Reddit
• Pinterest
• Tumblr

And many, many more. But these are the ones most people are familiar with and use on a daily basis. The thing is, you don’t have to do it all. Certain platforms will make more sense for your business depending, again, on your target market and the demographic you’re trying to reach.

If you’re a clothing store with e-commerce and several products available, you would definitely do well on a platform like Instagram or Pinterest, which are both centered on sharing images and videos to generate followers and other engagements.

Step 3: Take a Look at the Competition

Many of the best ideas and trends are made by taking cues from competitors. Look at the competitors within your industry and see what they’re doing well in social media, and what you can borrow.

You’ll be able to start generating ideas and develop an editorial calendar to keep track of all the posts you intend to make for specific days, including seasonal themes and promotions you want to offer.

Step 4: Create Awesome Content

Once you have a plan for what kind of posts you want to create, start doing it! If you have an editorial calendar, follow that and bring your concepts to life with graphics, images, interactive content, polls, infographics, videos, quizzes, and more! Then you’re ready to schedule and run your social media posts.

Step 5: Track & Measure the Results

Like we mentioned back in Step 1, measurable data helps you continue to optimize a campaign after it’s been launched. A campaign can encompass a period of weeks or months, but a good test of your editorial calendar is about a month of posts (however many times a week you’re posting, and what platforms you’re using). Track the performance of each over time by how many visitors see the post, engage with it, and take further steps to reach out and interact with your business in the form of conversions, leads, and even sales.

Want to Build a Great Social Media Campaign?

You can build an effective social media campaign today with the help of an internet marketing company. A professional can not only help you organize your posts, but even create, run, and track their progress for you.