Read This Seven Point Checklist Before You Start A Social Media Campaign

Running a social media campaign doesn’t just start with your first Tweet or Facebook post, there is a lot that goes into this simple but technical process. Days or even weeks of strategic planning are required to get to actualization. The following are steps to take before you launch your campaign.

1. Set Goals

It’s a good idea to start with a plan that has goals and an organizing framework to always keep you on track. Before deciding to run a social media campaign, you must have an idea of what your brand needs, what you plan to achieve with your campaign and how it can help your brand get to that next level. The number of people you want to reach, what kind of content you want to create, what platforms you plan to use and realistic outcomes of your campaign are all things you must also consider. You should set strategic goals that are measurable in the course of the campaign and work towards them.

2. Carry Out Some Research

When thinking about running a campaign, you have an idea of what your target audience looks like in mind. What you need to do is create user profiles of who they are, where they come from, what they need and how you can deliver. Know the demography of your target audience. Every detail, from their age, marital status, gender to their occupation. You would be able to tailor your campaign the right way.

3. Create Campaign-Worthy Content

The quality of the content you put out determines what kind of audience you aim to engage and how long they will stay on your page. You may not be an all-round creative, so you may need to get good writers that will create content for you, to drive traffic and create the conversion you need. The content you create should not just be consistent, but also engaging conversations.

4. Choose Your Social Platforms

Carefully choose what social media platforms fit your campaign needs. It might be difficult to know which exact ones at first, so you can test a few at once and monitor the outcome to see which ones have the higher reach and conversion rate. Then with time, you would know which ones to drop or further fund.

5. Make a Schedule or Timeline

It would be quite inconvenient if you always have to be available to manually input your content whenever it should go out, so you can adopt the use of schedulers like Buffer, TweetDeck, Hubspot, Sprout Social etc. These tools give the advantage of being asleep while your content goes out. All you need to do is, compile your content, attach the URLs, schedule the days and different times you want your campaign to be in circulation, i.e. how long the campaign will run, when and frequency. Set the schedules and just watch while these tools do some of your work for you.

6. Focus on Output, not Numbers

It is easy to get carried away while trying to launch your campaign, focusing more on getting huge numbers of views and impressions, while forgetting that the quality of those numbers matters more i.e. the clicks and conversions that come from those impressions. For instance, if more people on Facebook gave views or impressions with your posts than on Twitter, you might assume that your focus should be placed on Facebook but it is very possible that the conversion rates from Twitter are higher than that of Facebook. More people on Facebook probably just opened and closed again without reading or clicking the CTA button, unlike the few impressions who actually went ahead to read.

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If you put in too much time, resources and energy into a social media strategy all at once, it may backfire. You want to make sure that Return On Investment (ROI) is worth it in the end. Otherwise, you’ll remain stuck and stagnant in your efforts. You need to be mindful of your expenses.

7. Analyse-Test-Repeat

Finding the best combination of elements that drive the highest click-through rates and engagement is a matter of trial and error, but finding the sweet spot can pay off exponentially. After all said and done, you need to see if the process actually works. Analyse your strategies, see which you should push or drop. Test them, see what works and what doesn’t, filter and restart the process. Running a campaign is not something you do, keep your fingers crossed hoping that the desired outcome will come because the times change rapidly and you need to always be up to date with trends, news and everything else your target audience consumes. Repeat this process every time while integrating your tactics, methods, and strategies.

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