Congratulations, you are about to launch your social media campaign! When crafted right, this marketing effort is one of the most effective instruments a company may take to bring its overall social media marketing strategy to the next level, stand out among competitors, and win customers’ hearts.
Killer digital marketing campaigns don’t just grab people’s attention for a while. They create a much longer-lasting effect and get unmistakably associated with certain brands, events, or holidays.
The power of social media platforms is hard to underestimate. Over the last few years, their role has increased dramatically due to numerous public health precautionary measures and economic upheavals.
Social media posts spark debates and set trends. They can even polarize or unite people. Social media trends influence our decisions and purchasing patterns without asking any permission.
Thus, marketing teams are constantly wracking their brains to understand what types of content are winning people’s hearts and what things are going unnoticed.
If you manage to find a valuable message and share it through the right social channels, a social media campaign starts living separately from other company activities and becomes an independent source of brand awareness generating new leads and income.
Social Media Campaigns VS Ongoing Marketing Activities
Social media campaigns differ from ongoing marketing activities. Various types of content get produced almost daily to help companies stay visible to users and clients. Blog posts, videos, interviews, publications, and ads appear regularly to ensure brand awareness.
Ongoing affiliate marketing programs may be less exciting because specialists have to conduct research, search engine optimization, and work on periodical newsletters.
Developing strategic partnerships, brainstorming different types of content, evaluating social channels, and defining the target audience may look more like routine tasks. Social media marketing campaigns are rare and dedicated to extraordinary events, thus exciting customers and specialists.
Marketing teams don’t necessarily need to apply completely new instruments, approaches, or platforms while running a social media campaign. However, its goals vary from those long-term marketing strategies entail.
To summarize, here’re the main differences between social media campaigns and daily marketing tasks:
#1 Terms
- Social media marketing campaigns are short-term projects mostly dedicated to specific occasions or dates. It can be anything, starting from holidays and company anniversaries to history-shaping social events. Marketing teams regularly plan social media campaigns based on the calendar.
- However, quite often, certain unexpected events require situative marketing activities. For example, hot debates on one of the social channels may inspire a company to create something dedicated to the discussion. Another,
#2 Purposes
While ongoing marketing activities focus on building sustainable relationships with the target audience, social media marketing campaigns have way more specific goals and outcome expectations. Usually, marketing teams produce various types of content for these purposes. However, repurposing content is also a common practice.
Sure, everything specialists do is either about raising brand awareness, boosting sales, or collecting feedback. Yet, campaigns are more distinct and usually focus on one goal at a time.
For instance, popular streaming platforms often create anticipation for the new seasons and encourage users to binge-watch previous episodes and share their expectations on various social channels. Marketing teams often offer users challenges to accept.
Alternatively, companies adapt the current social media trends and invite customers to join them using brand promotions.
- Marketing teams generally use ongoing marketing activities to keep a consistent and close relationship with their clients. They may also influence the target audience that hasn’t joined the community yet.
- Social media campaigns aim to show that the company is working on something new, maybe unexpected for the loyal audience.
In general, they mark certain transformational processes. For example, a product launch or transition to a new business model.
Over the last few years, companies have started investing more time and energy in socially impactful events and responding to people’s requests.
As a result, some social media marketing campaigns may focus solely on problems a company wants to highlight and address.
#3 Brand Voice Difference
- Ongoing marketing activities are constant and predictable because potential and existing customers must get used to a certain brand voice and distinguish it from thousands of other offers. It is one of the initial steps to build customer loyalty. Colors, slogans, music, all these elements get thought-through to create some stable associations with the company activity.
- However, even the best ideas become boring eventually. To add variety, marketing teams launch social media campaigns that may dramatically differ from everything customers knew about the brand before. Going off the beaten path helps understand what the target audience needs and how it perceives the company.
- Running a separate bold social media marketing campaign is cheaper and faster than conducting ongoing marketing activities. You don’t need to change the whole marketing workflow for the sake of an experiment. Although tremendous brand voice change risks may be quite high, they’re still more manageable than full-scale marketing fails.
- To raise awareness about complicated problems, companies may sometimes put their voice in serious mode. This dramatic image change rarely stays unnoticed. One of the most effective ways to get users’ attention is to launch a serious campaign on entertaining social channels. The contrast will make people pay attention to what your brand is going to say and increase your brand awareness.
Successfully Implementing a Social Media Marketing Campaign. Obvious and Non-Mainstream Tips
Let’s start with some basic but noteworthy tips. If these factors slip your marketing team’s attention, any following steps won’t be successful.
Define Clear Goals
Before launching a campaign, it’s essential that you define what success looks like for your company.
- What do you want to achieve?
- What kind of results would make this campaign successful? Set realistic, measurable goals to help you determine whether the effort was successful.
Whatever your aim is (testing new types of content, broadening the target audience, trying a new financial model), think through how the positive ultimate result will look to you. If the marketing team is trying the new social media platforms, conduct research to understand how success and appreciation look there.
Know Your Target Audience
- Start by figuring out your target audience for the specific campaign and where these people spend their time and money. If you plan something unusual and bold, there is no point in repeating old tricks.
- Rethink the content representation. What social media platforms are on the rising tide and what seem to be losing popularity?
Your potential customers may be interested in live communication or process gamification. The more trustworthy they find some social media platforms, the more activities people will engage in.
Or, the other way around, users might perceive something brand new with reservation. Thus, overwhelming them with info and interaction will just make things worse.
To understand the target audience, go through their pain points and worries. What would prevent people from doing some actions? How could specialists solve these issues for users?
Social media platforms are competing for people’s time and attention. Therefore, to stand out, you need to offer users valuable and helpful messages.
Once you know who you’re targeting and your goals pursuing, crafting messages that resonate with people and attract more followers will be easier.
Experiment With Channels
Different social media platforms have different characteristics and audiences so pick the ones where most of your potential customers hang out at – there’s no need to waste energy on networks where no one is interested in hearing about your product or service!
Sure, the number of channels is limited. The competition is getting more intense every year. Yet, there are still some websites whose capabilities are underestimated. Have you ever considered social media marketing campaigns on Reddit, Quora, or LinkedIn? The list of options is longer than you may think.
There are several social media trends marketing teams have been observing over the last few years.
- The number of specific social channels rises because people want to spend less time searching for relevant content. They need to meet up with like-minded users faster.
- Social media platforms have shifted towards authenticity. Users are gradually getting tired of perfect lives and perfect pictures. They need quick answers to the questions and a sense of reality.
Get Off the Beaten Path
- That is where such social channels as Quora or Reddit come in. Although these websites are popular and have millions of users monthly, they don’t cross our minds the second after we decide to work on social media marketing campaigns.
The social channels we have mentioned above offer various types of content. Finding a target audience there won’t be a problem. Every day users publish new inquiries on things that matter to them.
One of the most common examples is technology-related issues, people can’t solve. Be there to offer the fastest solutions. If the user has an issue with their trackpad not working, share a video tutorial on how to fix this problem.
Explain the need to check system preferences, disable a force click, or reset the trackpad. Offer solutions now and promotional content later.
- How about BeReal? This platform advocates for a more realistic approach to sharing photos online without excessive filters or decorations. The powerful message behind BeReal could be a good fit for your next social media marketing campaign. Indeed, everything marketers do is not for the company profits, it is for real people.
- What if your company can make Club House great again? Short-form videos or pictures taken at any time of day can be stressful for some people.
In a world where we avoid talking on the phone and receiving audio messages at all costs, getting back to the idea of chatting can bring variety into your social media positioning.
- Have you ever heard of Ello? It is a platform where artists can gather, show their works, exchange thoughts, and broaden their fanbase. Original content and a rising number of active users make this social channel attractive and promising for specialists.
If your social media campaign is tightly connected to people from the artistic world, this platform can be an excellent choice.
There are many more non-mainstream websites where your potential customers like to spend their time. If you manage to find the key to their heart, it will increase the success of your social media campaign.
If you haven’t found a complete guide on how to conduct a social media marketing strategy on these platforms, don’t hesitate to be the pioneer of the process. Many marketing plans exclude non-mainstream platforms so take your chances and will in the niche.
Train You Creativity
A key element of any social media campaign is its ability to stand out from other related posts or ads on users’ news feeds – try different approaches until you find something that works best for you!
- For instance, try creating interactive visuals such as polls or quizzes, sharing user-generated content, running giveaways or competitions, etc.
- Follow your competitors and industry leaders to see how else your marketing team can grab customers’ attention.
- Test various thoughts of inspiration to offer people an interesting journey, not another boring ads campaign that doesn’t spark any interest. How? By asking them directly, offering various types of content, and testing their reaction. All campaigns are run for users and customers. Listen to what people tell about your brand.
- Be provocative and call your users to express what they would like to improve in the product. It is the shortest way to create a lot of engaging content.
- Try collaborations. Sometimes, the shortest way to get a lot of social proof is by offering users the types of content they expected the least from you. Thus, you can kill two birds with one stone: to increase an engagement rate by getting a wider audience and show your ability to impress loyal customers.
No doubt that this part of the process is the hardest. You need to be smart, witty, and creative and also feel the zeitgeist. People like things they can relate to. On top, social media trends change daily, and it’s hard to follow them all.
If the team seems to struggle with creative tasks, don’t hesitate to outsource them. There are many people whose fresh and unexpected ideas will be just the right fit for your campaign.
Train your creativity to strike the delicate balance between keeping up with trends and being yourself.
Automatization of a Process Is a Must for Any Successful Social Media Campaign
As we see, creating and conducting a separate social media campaign is a demanding and long-lasting process. Therefore, you need to free up as much time for research and creativity brainstorming as possible. To achieve this task, automate routine tasks.
- Yes, we can’t but mention AI-powered tools that can come up with noteworthy ideas and speed up the creation process. They won’t substitute real-time specialists. However, many AI tools are good at summarizing social media trends;
- Facilitate cross-department collaboration. Sometimes, challenges you have been puzzling over are already successfully solved by the other team;
- Conduct surveys among users. Thus, you will always have updated info on the product. Users share what latest social media trends spotted their attention and give hints on what types of content they would like to see more. No social media tool can bring you as much insight into people’s reactions and people themselves.
- Update the contact list and do the cold outreach thoughtfully. Check out a Postcards email builder to make your letters look fresh, exciting, and professional. Users perceive well-crafted email templates much better. Thus, people see you care for their time and resources.
- Make sure that email workflows run smoothly. One of the most crucial tasks any marketer has is ensuring customers get heard and listened to. You will always get plenty of insights when the communication streamline is well-tuned.
This piece of advice is relevant for cross-command interaction as well. If all people have access to instruments and reports, understand general business goals, and know who works on different types of content, their performance will improve.
It is a good idea to run short-term social media marketing campaigns periodically. You should do this after you have planned your long-term goals, strategies, and tactics.
This will ensure that your campaign is based on strategy, not impulse or vanity. Short-term campaigns can be done every two or three months and last for around two weeks.
Social media marketing campaigns are designed to get people to become aware of a specific piece of content. The obvious benefit is it will also include that all-important call to action, compelling them to take more than a passing glance at what you have created in the hope they will act on that.
Social media trends are changeable and difficult to catch. However, if you listen to your customers and choose the right social channels, your campaign will be successful.
Ongoing marketing activities can be long-term strategies or seasonal tactics and are designed to target your chosen audience over time.
Conclusion
In this article, we explained how you can start your social media campaigns faster and more effectively. By implementing the tips we discussed, you can guarantee a flawless campaign.
So start today and shine like a star in the world of social media marketing!
