Social media isn’t just for cat pictures and shots of your lunch anymore. Today, social media is a key part of many brands’ promotional strategies, from industry giants like Coca-Cola and Apple to small and medium-sized businesses.
Building a social media presence can benefit any brand. It’s an unprecedented opportunity to expand your reach, connect with customers, and grow your sales. But where do you start?
Use this guide to learn how to build a social media campaign from start to finish. Before long, you‘ll start seeing meaningful results for your business, whatever your goals may be.
What is a social media campaign?
A social media campaign is a brand’s coordinated marketing effort on a social media platform. For example, a brand might post a series of pictures on Instagram promoting its new product line.
Like any other type of marketing campaign, each social media campaign helps the brand achieve a specific goal. You can run your social media campaigns on any platform where you can connect with your target audience. Top platforms for social media marketing include:
- X (formerly Twitter)
- TikTok
- Snapchat
You can run isolated social media marketing campaigns, but an omnichannel strategy may yield better results. With an omnichannel strategy, you run connected marketing campaigns on other channels, like email or paid search advertising, to complement your social media campaign.
Paid vs organic social media marketing
Social media marketing is special because you can take an organic or paid approach (or both) to your campaigns. In organic social media marketing, you post your content for free on a social media platform and try to draw in an audience. With paid social media campaigns, you pay the platform to promote your content to a wider audience.
Both options have benefits and drawbacks. Luckily, you don’t have to choose one or the other. Keep both in mind while considering your social media marketing strategy.
Benefits of running a social media campaign
Over 90% of U.S. companies use some form of social media marketing to promote their products and services. They wouldn’t bother unless they could get a significant return on that investment.
No matter what your goals are, a social media campaign offers many benefits, including:
- Improved brand awareness: Social media campaigns can help more people learn about your brand and become interested in your products or services.
- Better audience engagement: On social media, your audience can interact with you and share their thoughts.
- Higher web traffic: Interested customers can easily visit your website by clicking links in your social media campaigns.
- Access to customer insights: Social media campaigns provide new insights about your audience that you can use to better understand your customers.
- Cost savings: Compared to other forms of advertising, social media campaigns can be very affordable and cost-effective.
- Enhanced customer trust: A strong presence on social media makes your brand seem more trustworthy.
How to build a social media campaign
So, you’ve decided to try a social media campaign. Now what? Building your campaign involves several crucial components, from setting goals to measuring results.
Selecting an audience, goal, and measurements
The first thing you need to do for your campaign is decide your goals. For example, are you more focused on driving traffic to your website or reaching new customers? These goals will shape the rest of your campaign decisions, so start here.
From there, you can decide how you’re going to measure your success toward your goals. If audience engagement is your goal, you might choose likes, comments, and shares on your posts as your measurements. The measurements need to be the things you can track using built-in tools on the social media platform or external analysis tools.
You also have to decide on your target audience. Who are you trying to reach with this campaign? Get as specific as possible. You’ll design your campaign with this audience in mind, so you need a clear understanding of who they are and what’s important to them.
Campaign themes
Social media campaigns often have clear themes to tie them together. You might have a winter holiday-themed campaign, for instance. Decide early on which theme you want to use so you can incorporate it into the rest of your campaign decisions.
Outlining your campaign
Your next step is outlining your campaign. Think about how many posts you want to include, what they might look like, and who will be responsible for each campaign task. To avoid complications down the line, make sure everyone knows what they have to do and when they have to do it.
Selecting channels
Choosing social media platforms is one of the most important steps in creating your campaign. Some brands run campaigns across several platforms simultaneously, while others focus on just one. To pick the right channels, consider your goals, budget, and the user base on each platform.
Brands trying to reach younger audiences might try TikTok, for example. You also need to decide whether you’re going to use an omnichannel strategy and coordinate your social media campaign with campaigns on other marketing channels. If so, now’s the time to choose those channels, too.
Copywriting and design
Arguably, the trickiest part of the campaign process is deciding on your post designs and copywriting. These are the bread and butter of your campaign. Choosing the right words, visuals, and other design elements will set your content up for success.
The good news is that you don’t have to be Shakespeare or a graphic design guru to create great social media posts. Free tools like Canva can help you easily design and edit posts until they match your vision. Then, you can import your Canva images into your Constant Contact library to use them in your social posts.
Scheduling
When all your posts are ready, you’ll probably be eager to get them out into the world. Don’t jump the gun, though. Spacing out your posts in a set schedule can improve your engagement and make your campaign more impactful.
Using scheduling tools like Hootsuite, you can decide exactly when you want to publish each post in advance. You fill in all the details through the tool, then sit back and wait for them to go out as scheduled.
If you use Constant Contact, you can access both Hootsuite and Canva with integrations via Zapier. That way, you can design, schedule, and publish your social media campaign posts from one convenient platform.
Start creating social media posts with Constant Contact today.
Analyzing results
After you publish your campaign posts, there’s still one more thing to do — analyze your results. The only way to know whether you reached your goals for the campaign is to track and analyze key metrics.
Most social media platforms include free dashboards to monitor your campaign’s performance. You may want to use an external social media marketing tool for a more detailed analysis.
Either way, dig deeper into these statistics about your campaign. Find out what worked well and what didn’t so you can make more informed decisions for your next campaign.
No one creates the perfect social media campaign right off the bat. It’s a learning process that involves trial and error until you find what works for your brand. Finding insights from the results of each campaign is vital.
Examples of great social media campaigns
As you’re getting the hang of social media marketing (SMM), take inspiration from what other brands are doing. Learn what works from great social media campaign examples like these.
Starbucks’ Red Cup contest
Starbucks launches red holiday cups in the winter to get into the holiday spirit. One of the brand’s most successful social media campaigns was a contest asking customers to share pictures of their red cups to win prizes. People already love taking pictures of Starbucks cups, so it’s no surprise the campaign did so well.
What you can learn: Running a contest is a great way to encourage customers to share user-generated content. If you can also tap into something users are already excited about, you’ll get even more engagement on your campaign.
Dove’s Real Beauty campaigns
Dove’s Real Beauty campaigns are all about highlighting diverse beauty and making people feel more confident. In 2018, the brand promised not to distort or retouch models’ bodies in their promotional images. Dove also launched Project #ShowUs to create a collection of thousands of unfiltered images “that offer a more inclusive vision of beauty for all media and advertisers to use.”
What you can learn: Create social media campaigns that speak to your audience’s values. If your content reflects what’s important to your audience, they’re much more likely to engage with and respond positively to your campaign. That’s true for beauty campaigns like Dove’s but also campaigns across all other industries.
Spotify’s Wrapped campaign
Every year, the audio streaming app Spotify gives users a personalized summary of what they listen to most. The roundup is easily shareable, and Spotify encourages users to post theirs on social media under the hashtag #SpotifyWrapped.
What you can learn: Creating content that your customers want to share and talk about will help boost your reach exponentially. Try experimenting with personalized content if it fits your brand.
Best practices for building a quality social media campaign
Creating a social media campaign is a bit different from any other marketing campaign. You have to learn what audiences respond to on social media and how to leverage the platforms effectively.
Try these social media marketing tips for a leg up on the competition:
- Stick to a content calendar: Posting regularly on social media is much more effective than sporadic posts, even if they’re excellent. Create and stick to a content calendar for your campaign to get better results.
- Collaborate with influencers: Influencers build audiences of interested, engaged users that you can tap into through collaboration. Consider working with influencers on your campaigns to grow your reach.
- Maintain a consistent brand identity: Each post in your campaigns, and even across different campaigns, should still clearly represent your brand identity. Make sure your branding stays consistent.
- Interact with users: One of the best things about social media is that it’s a two-way street. Users can respond to your posts, so interact with them to build deeper connections.
Other tools of the trade
All you need to create a basic campaign is a social media account and a phone. If you want to take your campaigns to the next level, though, try advanced tools like the following.
Social listening
Social listening is the process of tracking and analyzing what customers say about your brand, products, or competitors on social media. These conversations may not be on your pages or even directly address your brand — they include any relevant online talk.
Using social listening, you can learn more about your audience. Use these insights to improve your campaigns by making them more relevant or tailored to your customers.
AI
Artificial intelligence is all the rage lately in almost every industry, including social media. Try different social media AI tools, like AI writing assistants and AI photo editors, to help with your campaign process.
UTM
UTM codes are short text codes that you can add to the end of URLs to track the source of traffic to that website. Use them in your social media campaigns so you can see how much of your web traffic comes from your social media posts. Otherwise, you might see an increase in traffic to your website but not know for sure that your campaign was responsible.
UGC and influencer marketing
User-generated content (UGC) is social media content that real people create and publish. Customers often trust UGC or content from influencers more than the content brands produce because it seems more authentic. You can use that to your advantage.
Consider working with influencers or asking social media users to post UGC that you can repost to your official brand page. Many major brands, including Apple, have successfully leveraged UGC content to promote their products on social media.
Launch your social media campaigns
Now that you know all the basics, you can start designing and writing your social media campaign. Focus on understanding your audience, creating content consistent with your branding and goals, and analyzing your results.
Remember to leverage tools like Canva and Constant Contact to save time and boost effectiveness.
Next, download our social media guide!
