How to Get Maximum Results from Your Social Media Campaigns

A social media campaign is a systemized marketing effort aimed at achieving a business goal on one or more social media platforms. It is different from the usual management of social media profiles.  In contrast, a social media campaign is built for a specific purpose. Examples of these purposes include the launch of a new product or the update of a previous feature. Social media campaigns have limited time frames within which they must yield targeted results. 

Below are some tips for marketers to plan, create and execute social media marketing campaigns that yield maximum results.

Understanding a campaign’s goals is the first and one of the most important steps in building a successful media campaign. This involves your brand asking questions such as ‘why are we running this campaign?’  The answer to this and other questions will help in determining the next step and ultimate campaign goal. Some of the general goals of social media campaigns include:

• Raising brand awareness 
• Lead generation 
• Attracting new customers
• Building an online community
• Improving sales
• Effective customer service
• Increasing engagement 
• Driving website traffic 
• Increasing mentions in the press. 

• Follower counts
• Reach of social media posts
• Likes, mentions, shares and, retweets
• Website traffic

Before launching any successful social media campaign, it is essential to make findings about competing brands. However, many social media marketers forget to do this.  Investigating the competitors can give an insight as to what worked and didn’t work for them. Hence, you can use the insights from such investigations to improve your campaign. Below are some vital questions to answer while studying the competition:

• Have they ever or recently run a similar campaign to what you’re planning? 
• How did said campaign turn out?
• What platform and content did they utilize?
• What were the audience’s reactions and engagement with the campaign?
• What activities were executed? Did they host giveaways and polls? Or do they share tutorials and host Q & A sessions?
• What times did they upload their content and how regular was it?

Choosing the right platform, content type, and format is critical to creating a successful social media campaign. The platform(s) to use for a campaign depends on the motive for the campaign and the target audience.  For instance, it is not advisable to run a campaign on YouTube when your target audience is accountants. The ideal platform to use would be LinkedIn. Another factor to consider when choosing the platform for your next campaign is your web analytics’ past results. Figure out what platform brought more traffic and use it to your advantage. Also, if you are choosing Facebook as your platform, you can use a Facebook post scheduler to schedule content. The next step is selecting the content type and format for the campaign. Does the campaign goal favor influencers or user-generated content? Will short in-house videos or images perform better?  To effectively select the best content type and format, consider the reason for the campaign and how the target audience behaves. Then, go with the type and format that would generate the most engagement.

Your target audience will be skeptical about patronizing your brand if all you throw in their face is sponsored ads. Although sponsored content is important, it is necessary to strike a balance between it and non-sponsored posts. This balance would help boost organic engagement on your posts.  Sponsored and organic contents have their advantages. Organic campaigns have the following advantages:

• It establishes and boosts your brand’s presence
• It nurtures your relationship with your target audience
• It helps with customer retention and lead conversion

• Reach a larger audience 
• Target the ideal client for the campaign 
• Reach the campaign goals faster

A call to action or CTA is a written charge used in a social media campaign or other marketing efforts. It encourages clients and leads to take the desired action. ‘Shop now’ and ‘Buy now’ are examples of a call to action.  Using the correct call to action for your campaign can positively impact the campaign in terms of results. It is essential that whatever CTA you decide to use creates a sense of urgency in the minds of your leads.  If the target audience is not taking action, the best you’re accomplishing is creating brand awareness. Brand awareness is valuable in itself, but it’s not always the only goal. A successful call to action is simple and easy to follow. Below are some tips for writing an effective CTA

• Use strong action words e.g. buy, order, shop, donate, commit, etc.
• Provoke emotions and enthusiasm.
• Try to come up with your own CTA sometimes. You don’t need to use the cliche CTAs all the time. 

Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, is a natural language processing (NLP) method used to determine if a particular data is negative, neutral, or positive. In simpler terms, it reveals the emotions behind a message. Sentiment analysis can be applied to a range of data including replies, user experience, product reviews, etc.  A brand can also use sentiment analysis for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and a host of other social media platforms. Below are some advantages of using sentiment analysis for your social media campaign 

• Sentiment analysis can help determine how your brand or campaign would be perceived online. 
• It can recognize segments in your customer base and help boost marketing targets. You can also create segments based on online behaviors to create more targeted campaigns. 
• Sentiment analysis can help to discover potential problems with a product. 
• It can help identify loopholes in your brand’s customer service. 

Hashtags can massively contribute to a campaign’s success. They are powerful features, especially on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Hashtags, when utilized correctly, can bring several benefits.  They can be used to, among other things, bring your product in front of a larger audience, raise brand awareness, target a very specific set of individuals, improve SEO, and take advantage of popular trends and themes. Hashtags ensure your content is easily discoverable. They also allow social media users to find and engage with content related to common interests and themes.  Below are some ways to effectively use hashtags in your social media campaign 

• Keep it simple and relevant
• Create branded hashtags 
• Join trending topics
• Avoid overusing a hashtag 
• Search the hashtag before using it 
• Hold contests and giveaways with the hashtag
• Build an online community around the hashtag 

Social media analysis is the process of organizing the most vital data from your social media campaigns and drawing actionable conclusions. Creating the perfect social media campaign and running them is most of the work, but not all of it. Now that the campaign is live, you must regularly analyze its success as it progresses.  The regular analysis provides insight into what part of the campaign performed well and those that didn’t. You’ll need social media analytics tools from the beginning of your campaign. After determining your KPIs (key performance indicators), use them to track your campaign’s progress.  Social media analysis will assist you in creating the most effective social media campaign possible. Thus, your campaign will target the correct audience, at the right time, and through the appropriate channels.

An effective social media campaign has many benefits for e-commerce brands. It yields results like increased traffic, better SEO, improved brand loyalty, healthier customer satisfaction, etc. It also helps a brand stay ahead of its competitors. This article explores some ways to get maximum results from a social media campaign.

Lydia Iseh is a writer with years of experience in writing SEO content that provides value to the reader. As someone who believes in the power of SEO to transform businesses, she enjoys being part of the process that helps websites rank high on search engines.