How To Hit The Mark With Your Next Social Media Campaign

Are you a business owner looking to make the most of your social media marketing campaigns? Are you hesitating to take the plunge because you don’t know where to start? Well, now’s your time!

With the right guidance and planning, launching a successful social media campaign is well within your reach. You won’t have to be an expert in digital marketing or jump through hoops of complicated metrics to reach your business goals — here are the basics.

What’s a Social Media Campaign?

Let’s start slow by defining a social media campaign: a series of posts promoting a specific message, product, or service on different social media platforms.

The goal of a social media campaign is to engage with the target audience, increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and ultimately achieve desired business objectives. These

campaigns involve creating and publishing content, like text, images, videos, podcasts, and infographics, on social media platforms (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube).

Social media content needs to resonate with the target audience and encourage them to engage with the brand by liking, sharing, commenting, or clicking through to your website. Campaign ideas can be contests, giveaways, quizzes, polls, influencer collaborations, incentives, or sponsored ads. Run them for however long you need to, especially during a holiday or product launch.

Have a Social Media Strategy

Question: if you don’t have a goal, how can you achieve it?

You need to have a clear objective in mind before creating any campaign. It should be something that can be measured and tracked, as well as something that will drive traffic back toward your business or product. Once you know what this is, think about how social media channels can help achieve it by using the tools available on each (e.g., Twitter’s hashtags).

Successful social media campaigns require careful planning, execution, and monitoring. It’s well worth the time to sit down and make a content calendar to organize which type of content to publish each day — and keep it consistent.

Don’t limit yourself to only one social network — the internet has become too big for just one site. You’re a small fish in the internet pond. Different demographics of social media users are on different social platforms; which is why you’ll have to do some research on who your audience is, and where you can find them.

Understand Your Audience and Their Needs

Pop quiz: How can you craft a campaign that speaks to your audience if you don’t know who’s in it?

Answer: Define your audience.

The first step in creating a successful social media campaign (or any marketing effort) is understanding the people consuming it (a.k.a. defining the demographics of your target audience and understanding their needs and pain points). For example, if we were targeting teenagers or young adults aged 18-24 years old with disposable income, we’d want to know things like:

What kind of content do they typically consume? Which platforms do they use most often (Instagram vs. Snapchat)? Are there any events coming up (prom or graduation) that will influence their purchasing decisions?
What are their biggest challenges right now when it comes to money management (student debt) or financial planning (saving for retirement)?

Define and Measure Success

You need to define your goals clearly and measure success. Think through all of these questions:

What are your social media goals?
How will you measure the success of each campaign?
What does success look like for your business?

Great Social Media Campaigns

Memorable campaigns have engaging content. Sometimes, this is from user-generated content (UGC). This is when users do the work for you! Sometimes brands use influencer marketing for this reason, but other UGC can just be from fans of your product or service that want to spread the word. The following are successful social media campaign examples.

- In another blog, we talked about the insane hooplah Starbucks stirred up on social channels with their Unicorn Frappucino (the same as the buzz Spotify created with Wrapped).
- Apple’s #ShotOniPhone social media campaign is – you guessed it – pictures shot on iPhones. They posed a challenge for users to tweet and make Instagram posts using specific hashtags to track the social media post submissions.

You know you have a successful social media campaign when the engagement, likes, and shares hit your campaign goals.

Plan Ahead

Planning is important.

Planning your next social media campaign can be done using tools like Google Sheets or a content calendar. You can use programs to map out all of your content, including hashtags, photos, and videos.

There are templates and marketing tools available online to help you make the most of your time, like MailChimp. When you get deeper into your social media marketing strategy, you can call us for top-of-the-line social media management (if we do say so ourselves).

No Plan = Wasted Time

Social media presence helps boost your business’s success, but if you don’t have a plan in place, it could all go to waste. A social media campaign is only as good as its execution. If you’re looking to start one up right now and get results fast, here are some tips for how to hit the

How are you defining success? Is it engagement rates or conversions (e-commerce sales)? Knowing where these numbers stand before launch will allow them time to adjust course if needed when results come back later down the line.

Your Social Media Strategist Friends at Lift Marketing

Sure, we just gave you a quick rundown of what your social media campaign should include. Whether you don’t want to worry about posting to Instagram Stories or you want more help launching a new product, give Lift Marketing a call. We’re the social media advertising professionals who can help elevate your next campaign.