Building a social media campaign is difficult enough, but when you’re trying to target a very specific niche, it will require a comprehensive plan. You’ll need to choose the social media channels you’ll target to achieve your goals.
Social media campaigns require more than simply posting company and blog updates on your various channels.
You’ll need three main things to find success:
- Time
- Resources
- Expertise
Expertise is very important because you need to provide substance to your audience. If you lack substance, you’re just sharing updates that are not nurturing potential leads and making them customers.
Step 1: Identify Your Audience
Who is your audience? If you don’t know who your audience is, you’re not able to focus your campaign around them. Every audience has challenges and needs. You need to:
- Develop customer personas
- Determine the customer’s interests
- Determine the customer’s pain points
Target market research allows you to approach your social media campaign with precision. Once you know who to target, it’s time to develop campaign goals and objectives.
Step 2: Develop Goals and Objectives for Your Campaign
Every campaign needs goals and objectives as a way to determine how successful the campaign has been. You can’t analyze the success of a social media campaign if you don’t know what you would like to achieve.
Some common goals that your brand may have are:
- Build brand authority
- Generate new leads
- Drive traffic to a website
- Make sales
- Engage customers
There are campaigns built all around awareness, and this doesn’t mean that the campaign is meant to generate sales. Instead, the campaign may be to engage customers, start a conversation and build authority.
Reservations.com has created content, which is shared on social media channels, that helps parents book their next hotel reservations by finding the right hotel for their special needs children.
And there’s a purpose behind each content and post shared on social media.
SMART goals are ideal, and this means:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time bound
When goals follow SMART rules, you’re setting your campaign up for success.
Step 3: Tactics for Success on Each Channel
Social media channels have different audiences, and you’ll need to be able to cater to your target audience’s needs on each channel. For example, you may decide to do the following:
- Live stream a Q&A on Facebook
- Create a video series on YouTube
- Engage with users on Twitter
- Use a series of pictures to promote awareness on Instagram
Don’t discount paid advertisements and promotions either. You may be able to better reach your audience, especially in the initial stages of a campaign, through promotion rather than organic opportunities.
Over time, you’ll want to also engage your audience and build relationships through organic content.
Once you have the first three steps completed, it’s time to create a content calendar. The calendar will allow you to promote content across all social media channels.
What type of content will be included in your calendar? It depends on your campaign, but a good place to start is:
- Blogs
- Text posts
- Images
- Videos
- eBooks
If you plan on driving traffic to your offers, you can do so through landing pages that ask the user for a specific action, such as purchasing a product or entering their e-mail address to receive an eBook.
Finally, you’ll want to start promoting content for your campaign and monitor your success along the way. Tweak your strategies as you go along to ensure success.
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