How To Plan Your Next Social Media Campaign

Creating and ensuring the success of a social media campaign may seem scary, but we certainly believe in that old saying “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. We have put together a few steps you can follow to help plan your next social media campaign.

Set out the goal for your campaign

The first thing you need to ask yourself before launching a new social media campaign is: What is the purpose of my campaign? This question will enable you to determine the goals.

Are you advertising a new product or service? Are you promoting an event to help generate new leads? Or do you just want to increase your brand awareness across social channels?

Before moving on to creating any content for your campaign you must understand the end goal and set realistic targets that you want to achieve.

Are you looking to increase your following on social media by 1,000 people in the next 3 months? Do you want to increase your website traffic on a certain product page?

You should use the SMART criteria to help set your goals ensuring they are, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. This helps to focus your targets and increases the chance of achievement. Setting unattainable goals may lead to disappointment. For example, setting your goal to increase your following on social media by 1,000 people in 3 months, when you currently only have a following of 100 that you have gained in a year is unrealistic. If you decreased the number of followers you wanted to gain in 3 months to another 100, this may seem more attainable. Or you could increase the time frame to larger your following by 1,000 in 2 years.

Following putting your targets in place, it’s vital to acknowledge the metrics you will use to measure this. We will look more into this when we talk through analysing the performance of your campaigns.

Form a content calendar

A content calendar is important to keep your content marketing well organised and on track. It allows you to visualise your strategy over a coming period. You may decide you only want to run your campaign for a couple of weeks, or you may decide your campaign may run over a few months. Whatever the time period, putting your content into a calendar will help you stay organised.

Furthermore, by brainstorming your content into a calendar ensures you can construct your marketing around any important industry dates in your calendar, allowing you to optimise any opportunities given to you. For example, you may have just launched a new food company and your goal is to create brand awareness. A day you might want to use to your advantage is Pancake Day which you may pick up on when brainstorming your content into a calendar.

Lastly, organising your marketing strategy into a calendar will ensure you are not being repetitive with the content you post to your customers. Giving them a variety of posts to interact with can help you analyse what type of posts your audience engage with and help determine future campaigns.

Analyse performance

You need social media tracking to be running from the start of your campaign to obtain realistic results. Insights and analytics on social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn should automatically be set up (and free) when you register with a business account.

Google Analytics is another tool I would consider setting up to track the performance of your campaigns. With Google Analytics you can see what proportion of your website traffic is coming from social channels and if your customers from social are converting. It can help you discover which social platform gives you the most website traffic, meaning you may want to invest more time into this channel above any others. Furthermore it allows you to see how many conversions your business gets from social media, which can help provide you with the ROI of your social media campaign and help you establish the success of your campaign against your set goals.

By using a combination of both tools (Google Analytics and Insights direct from each channel) you will be able to dictate what content your audience engages with the most. This can help you determine the content for your next social media campaign to ensure maximum engagement and success.

At Pinnacle, this is how we have planned all our social media campaigns, and by analysing each one have made improvements on future campaigns, we now hope we have given you the inspiration to plan your work and work your plan!