Social media offers businesses a platform to market their products and services at a low cost. Millions of people spend hours on social media every day. Successful business owners in the current digital world realize the importance of building their presence on social media. After reading many success stories, you start thinking of launching a social media campaign almost immediately. Entrepreneurs and consultants make advertising on social platforms look so simple and straightforward. The truth is that many social media campaigns fail. The campaigns go beyond posting a banner or marketing message on all your accounts. Here is a guide to help you set up your first social media campaign successfully.
1. Start with Clear Goals and Objectives
Some marketing rules cut across all advertising platforms. Every successful campaign begins with clear-cut goals and objectives. Determine what you want to achieve during the campaign. Otherwise, it will be hard to determine if the campaign was successful or not. Remember to set specific, measurable, time-bound, and realistic goals. For instance, determine the number of retweets, shares, or comments you want to achieve with each post.
2. Audit and Improve Your Accounts
Before starting your campaign, determine the state of your social media accounts. Have you been active on all platforms? How many followers do you have in each account? Do you need to add more followers before running the campaign? An audit of the accounts helps you to pick the right platform to run your campaign. The audit also helps you to categorize your followers. For instance, you may have hundreds of fake accounts that share your posts. An audit will help you to determine the language to use in your campaign. Delete unnecessary posts and unfollow spam accounts that may affect your campaign results.
3. Develop a Strategy
Having set clear goals and objectives, you need an effective strategy to achieve them. Your strategy should include the number of posts to share every day or week, the type of content or marketing messages you will be publishing, and promotion strategies. Since social media platforms function differently, it is advisable to develop a strategy for each platform so that you can target each demographic individually. Allocate tasks to your marketing personnel to ensure that each strategy is implemented in the correct way, and consider scheduling posts ahead of time if you are able.
4. Test and Evaluate the Strategy
Your strategy may look good on paper, but you have to implement it to determine if it is effective or not. In this piece about Tai Lopez, the author emphasizes the need to test strategies in entrepreneurship. Tai Lopez advises business owners to repeat strategies that prove effective after testing. The same applies to social media campaigns. If your strategy proves useful, repeat it in your future campaigns. If not, find ways to improve it until it works.
5. Learn from Others
The easiest way to learn is by watching others do what you intend to accomplish. How are leaders in your industry engaging their users on social media? Follow market leaders and learn from their marketing strategies. The secret here is to identify strategies that can work for your business. There are plenty of tools out there that will allow you to monitor how, where, and when your competition is reaching its core base. Use those to your advantage and emulate their efforts.
It’s also a good idea to use some form of analytics software. This will be able to tell you which pages on your website are drawing the largest amount of customers, and which keywords are being used to find them. You can also use analytics software to analyze your marketing campaigns and see which ones perform the best.
Conclusion
Your first social media campaign can be successful if you use the right strategy. Before starting the campaign, you need to have a clear picture of what you want to achieve. Set realistic goals and develop strategies to achieve these aims. Try out the strategies in a pilot campaign to determine if the strategies require any adjustments. Once you identify the strategies that work for your business, use them to set up new campaigns in the future.