Social Media Campaign or Bust

So you want to run your social media campaign because you have become a wiz at this social media business huh? Well have no fear, I got you. I will keep it very simple and point you in the right direction so that you can make your own money moves.

The first thing that you need to do is set goals for the campaign that you have in mind. These goals are normally in line with what the organization wants to achieve like increasing sales, increasing leads, brand awareness, etc. Next up is to set targets for your campaign. These are the things the campaign definitely needs to achieve in within set parameters or constraints. This would be like getting a set number of leads, sales, likes or followers within two weeks or a month. But let's be realistic when setting goals so they are not out of your reach.

In order to properly plan your campaign, you must know how long you plan to run the campaign as well as how much money you have to do it with. This could mean the difference between a well put together low budget event that is well received or a high-end event that flops because you don’t have the proper resources to make it so (low budget uptown party). It can also mean that the targets you set before need to be modified because your client cannot afford to pay to boost the content, ads, etc to achieve the targets. In some cases, modification is necessary to set more realistic goals.

Now that we are on our way we now need to determine who the message will be pitched to, also known as our audiences. In order for your messages to reach the people you intended, you need to know who they are because packaging is very important. People receive messages in different ways and the manner in which something is said or shown will determine who pays interest or responds to it. This is where crafting comes into play as customising goes a long way to captivate your target. Similarly, the platforms they are likely to use is just as important. Based on the audiences, age, sex, etc. they might be more likely to use one platform compared to another. Implicit as well is the fact that different platforms have different ways of presenting contents as well as different sizes or format that are preferred. Instagram and Snapchat, for example, are biased towards short videos. Even comparing the two, Snaps disappear within 24-hours but on Instagram, you have that option as well as the ability to have it be apart of your permanent profile. Immediately you need to decide, are you going to do random short videos daily to keep your audience's attention or are you going to create meaningful content you want them to see anytime they want? Tumblr has animated GIFs, Facebook has a mix of everything and Twitter is for people that like to get engaged constantly and filled with trolls that could boost your popularity overnight if you get them properly motivated.

Now we are getting somewhere, so what about the competition? In order to establish a point of difference or to get it right, checking out the competition is an easy and very fast way to determine what you can do different or better to gain some traction. See what the competition does well you will try to do it better but injecting a twist or adding your own personality to it. What they don’t do so well you want to hit out of the ballpark and land those people because you have already determined that they cant reach those people and if you can then they aren’t really competition after all. But personality is very important as adding your own flavour and perspective can appeal to people that you sometimes didn’t even think would take notice.

Finally, you want to be able to tell the people hiring you and paying you the big bucks that their campaign was a huge success and they really should be happy they chose you to run their campaign because you gave them bang for their buck. This is difficult to do when you have no hard evidence and you have to battle with scepticism in relation to the huge success you will be claiming the campaign was. But because we are with the times we don’t roll like that. In order to know where you’re going, you need to know where you have been. To do this first you need to establish the metrics that you intend to measure that will be the evidence that you provide of the success or failure of your efforts. After those are established, you need to record baselines of all the platforms you intend to use and sometimes the main website as well (if it isn’t a platform to be used in the campaign itself) as it sometimes will get an uptick in traffic based on interest being generated from the campaign.

Once those are out of the way you just need to keep a good handle on running the campaign and collect the data on the metrics for the duration of the campaign. The data doesn’t lie! If the campaign is a success or failure it will be immediately evident from the data. This makes your job of establishing how good you were when you use the data to generate reports filled with pie charts, line and bar graphs to show how the performance over the period of the platforms and the effect the campaign had on them as is compared to the baselines you took at the start. With that, go make that money.