If you take a closer
look at some of the most successful social media campaigns on the market today,
you will notice one similarity between them: they are all planned and executed
with incredible precision. Through a better understanding of the target
audience and the social media platforms they use, crafting a successful social
media campaign is all about planning for that success.
Unfortunately,
planning is also the most challenging part of running a social media campaign.
There are a lot of elements to take into account and changes to anticipate
before you end up with a solid plan that is ready to be executed. With the five
tips and tricks we are about to discuss in this article, you can plan your
social media campaigns better.
1. Start from the Past
Before you begin
tackling other elements of your upcoming social media campaign, take a step
back and look at the results of your past activities on social media. There are
a lot of things to learn from existing activities; there are even more things
to learn from the mistakes you have made in the past.
The social media
landscape is constantly changing, but there is a pattern to the change. Even
when viewers shift from one social media platform to another – such as when
Instagram active users exceeded Facebook users among younger audiences – you
can still find trends and patterns worth looking into.
While looking at what
you have done so far, take the time to also review your
competitors and
how they are doing on social media sites. Learn about the campaigns they ran
and the results those campaigns produced. More importantly, learn about the
mistakes they made.
2. Define Clear Goals
With enough
information gathered, it is time to start setting expectations. What do you
want the campaign to achieve? What kind of target audience do you want to aim
for? More importantly, what are the KPIs for the campaign?
Remember those clear
goals need to be trackable and measurable. Goals must be translated into
tangible KPIs so that the social media campaign has solid targets to aim for.
At the same time, you need to define the target audience segments you want to
reach with the campaign.
This is where past
social media campaigns come in handy. With the information you’ve gathered
already, you can be more realistic when setting KPIs for future campaigns. You
also know how to actively track and measure those KPIs using suitable tools.
3. Lay It All Out
Project management is
a crucial component of any digital marketing campaign, mainly because there are
a lot of tasks that need to be executed perfectly for the campaign to work;
social media campaigns are no different. While planning for a campaign, it is a
good idea to layout the tasks in hand.
Kanban methodology
with its Kanban cards works well for this purpose. Kanbanize, a leading digital
Kanban platform, allows you to turn tasks into cards on a customizable board,
allowing for the entire social media campaign to be laid out visually.
Don’t be afraid to go
very detailed when defining tasks associated with the campaign. You can learn a
lot about how to plan
a project and
get the details right when you utilize Kanbanize to visualize your tasks.
Timing, work efficiency and budget are much easier to handle with this
approach.
4. Timing Is Everything
That actually brings
us to the next tip: timing is everything. A good social media campaign involves
a series of posts aimed at the audience to produce maximum impact. Those posts
need to be produced and posted at the right time; it is easy to see how a
campaign can be very complex very quickly.
Using Kanbanize to
organize tasks, you can set dependencies and be more careful with how you time
your social media posts. Even details such as ad placements and social media
promotions can be tied to tasks like content production and data collection
using analytic tools.
The digital Kanban
board lets you see potential bottlenecks early. When there is a delay in
copywriting, for instance, Kanbanize will not only issue a warning but also
make adjustments to all dependent tasks related to that copywriting work.
5. Know Your Resources
Last but certainly not
least, you need to make sure that the plan
suits the resources you have in hand; I’m talking about the marketing budget for the campaign.
You can make adjustments to the scope of the campaign or the KPIs that you want
to achieve in accordance with the number of resources you have in hand.
Everything else, from tool selection to execution, is easy to figure out at this point. With the five tips and tricks we covered in this article, no social media campaign is too complex to plan. Naturally, good planning leads to greater impacts, which means your future social media campaigns will produce a higher return on investment (ROI) consistently.
Author Bio
Isabella Goode is a young, passionate writer with extensive experience in business, blogging and all things technology. She understands the importance of introducing new solutions to any business to keep it ahead of the competition, so she creates engaging content on business management, leading teams and using technology to drive beneficial corporate change.