What Is the First Step in a Social Media Marketing Campaign?
Effectively utilizing social media in your marketing is a finicky thing. The internet has seen plenty of campaigns fail right out of the gate. The secret to running a good social media marketing campaign isn’t complicated. It all comes down to the first step of setting your goals.
Every good social media marketing goal should account for three things:
- A clear objective
- A specific audience
- Metrics for success
The experts at InnoVision, a social media marketing agency in San Diego, have put together some tips on how you can capture all three.
Detailing Your Goals
What Do You Want People to Do?
For every social media agency, in San Diego or otherwise, this is the big picture of a campaign. How do you want people to engage with what you’re promoting? What action do you want them to take? Sometimes, this answer is straightforward. If you’re trying to sell a new product, you want your campaign to convince someone to go to your website and buy that product. Other times, it’s more nebulous.
Maybe you want to build more brand awareness, growing your customer’s emotional investment in your company to further engrain their loyalty. Maybe you just want to drive traffic to a particular event or promotion or get more people to follow you or sign up for a newsletter.
Of course, the specifics will change from campaign to campaign, but start with the broad strokes and then get more granular.
Think S.M.A.R.T.
Just because you know what you hope to achieve, that doesn’t mean you’re ready to launch your campaign. For your goals to be successful, they can’t be vague. Instead, turn your broad goal into a S.M.A.R.T. goal:
- Specific: There is a clear definition of success.
- Measurable: There is a quantifiable method to track your progress.
- Attainable: Your goal is reasonable, not a pie-in-the-sky dream.
- Relevant: It’s pertinent to what’s happening within your business or industry.
- Time-Bound: There is a clear endpoint for the campaign.
By thinking with this methodology, you can launch your campaign with a much clearer plan of action.
Defining Your Audience
Get an Idea of Your Ideal Customer
Never forget, your audience is made up of real people. It might sound silly to stress that, but when working with data, it’s easy to view them as a faceless mass. When imagining your ideal customer, it’s helpful to build a profile of them. That way, you can better target your campaigns towards them.
This profile should cover details like:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Career
Of course, this is by no means a complete list. Luckily, channels like Facebook and Google give you ample tools to understand your ideal customer. You can use these audience analytics to build out your profile, learning who is likely to engage with your campaign. You should be doing everything in your power to know and understand who your followers and customers are. All that data will help you better focus and target your campaigns to your target customers.
Meet Them Where They Are
Once you have a better understanding of who your ideal audience is, don’t wait for them to come to you. Plenty of social media agencies make the mistake of treating each platform the same way, but you’ll be wasting time and money if you do. You need to find the platform they’re most likely to be on, then focus your efforts there.
For example, if your audience skews older, you can launch your campaign on Facebook. If they skew younger, Instagram and TikTok are your best bets. For the professional crowd, LinkedIn is where you’ll want to be. Remember, you want to make it easy for your audience to find you. You can’t do that by spending your time and energy advertising places where they aren’t present.
Determining Your Metrics of Success
Using Your Tools
As mentioned previously, social media channels are able to provide you with a bevy of information on your audience. They can also provide you with information on your posts, giving you valuable insights into how your campaign is performing.
In addition to the native tools for each social media channel, you can also set UTM parameters to track traffic from social posts back to your website. These operate independently of each channel, helping you track web traffic from any source.
Tracking Success
With the tools available, determine what information will be the best way to track your success. A few of the most common metrics used are:
- Engagement: This varies from site to site but can include likes, comments, shares, and in some cases video views. Engagement can be useful in determining if you’re reaching your audience.
- Followers: Self-explanatory, this tells you how many people you have following your accounts. It’s useful for tracking how large of a presence your brand has on a particular channel.
- Actions Taken on Site: This can help you see how often a post leads someone back to your site, ideally to take an action like making a purchase or signing up for an account.
Once you launch a campaign, you’ll have a lot of data to sift through. If you need help, a social media agency in San Diego can be a great ally in interpreting everything. Make sure you’re focusing your attention on the metrics that are most useful for measuring your campaign performance.
Reevaluate, Adjust, and Keep Testing
You have your comprehensive goal in mind, so now you just need to put together the graphics, set up the schedule, send it off into the world, and sit back and let it work its magic, right? Wrong.
As a social media agency, a large part of our job here at InnoVision is building, testing, and adjusting campaigns. Take another look at your analytics and see what’s working. Is there a certain time of day when your posts are getting more engagement? Is there a type of post (text, video, picture) that’s over- or underperforming?
In social media marketing, you can get hard data on what parts of your campaign are succeeding or failing. You also have the flexibility to, if need be, pivot. Never be afraid to test something new, to try out a new strategy. No campaign is ever truly perfect, so use that freedom to experiment until you can reach your goal.
