By 2021, the number of worldwide monthly social media users is expected to reach over 3 billion. There is no surprise that social media is an integral part of marketing and public relations efforts. However, social media campaigns are likely to fall flat without a well designed, cohesive plan. To ensure a healthy return on your social media efforts, follow these simple steps when developing your next campaign.
Define Goals
Like any other marketing initiative, a successful social media campaign must have clear and concise goals. Whether your goal is to build brand awareness or if it’s to drive conversions, you will need to have a different approach for each. Focusing on clear goals will give your social media campaign direction and will help avoid wasted time and money.
Insightful Research
Conduct extensive research and intently review your brand, market, competition and target audience. Find out what works well for your competition and what they may not be utilizing. Take this opportunity as a way to differentiate your brand from others.
You also need to understand who you want to target. Build a consumer profile of your target audience and what tactics work best to reach them. Understand how the dynamics of their daily lives impact their use of social media and build your plan accordingly.
A Tailored Message
Make sure to adhere to the nuances of each digital platform (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr) and engage with the target audience appropriately. Each of these platforms requires a different approach while maintaining consistent branding, messaging, tone and voice.
For example, Twitter’s core principle is commentary; a place where people share their opinions about current events. This would be the perfect place to refine your brand’s personality and voice while cultivating your audience’s interest. Conversely, Instagram is visually-compelling and becoming increasingly integrated with e-commerce. Here, you want to display your product attributes and make use of the easy path to conversion.
Make it Interactive
Social media is one of the few mediums where you can directly engage with an audience. This interactive element is arguably one of its greatest strengths and needs to be leveraged well to ensure a successful campaign.
Engaging with followers through post comments helps build a stronger connection with the brand while providing you with insight into your audience and giving you a more robust profile to use moving forward.
In addition, make sure to utilize other interactive content elements such as polls, surveys, questions and other tools at your disposal to differentiate your brand across platforms. Keep in mind this should be done in a way that aligns with your target audience and your goal.
Sound like too much to handle on your own? That’s why we are here.
Let our social media expertise help your brand be heard in the ever-evolving world of marketing. Contact or stay social with us! We’re just one call, like, follow, retweet and DM away