Social Media Marketing Basics
Many businesses, especially smaller ones and startups, often try to do social media marketing for the business, but they tend to be unfocused in all their efforts, as they haven’t defined the brand’s campaign.
Without a clearly defined social media marketing campaign, these businesses will never know if the campaign was successful, if it reached the right people, or if it achieved any of the goals, big or small, that the company had for growth.
Without a goal in mind, businesses won’t know whether their social media marketing campaigns hit their targets. Some of the most common goals for social media marketing campaigns include creating interest for a specific product or a service, increasing brand awareness, creating user-generated content, or attracting more followers.
As long as none of the goals are mutually exclusive, a campaign can have multiple goals – for example, building up the follower base as well as driving more traffic to a specific page on the company website. To clearly define the goals of a campaign, the business has to know which social media platforms will be used for the marketing campaign, the type of content that’s going to be promoted to the public, and track and assess the results of the campaign.
After the business has decided about what the goals of the social media marketing campaign are going to be, it’s time to break out a calendar and plan out the entire year. For instance, some campaigns are best launched during a specific season or around a specific holiday.
For businesses that sell products to consumers, when it’s possible to connect the products to a specific holiday, it’s important to think about the lead time ahead of the holiday itself, to prepare the audience for it, and get everyone excited. If the holiday is, for example, Valentine’s Day, in the week leading up to the holiday, all of the promoted content should center around the products themselves and the holiday. Waiting until the last minute often means the business will be left out in the dark in terms of their social media marketing campaign.
If the social media marketing campaign’s goal was to generate interest in a specific service or product, perhaps the company could track the amount of traffic the campaign drives to the product web page. If the business has a decent number of followers, but these people aren’t interacting with the business as much as it’s referred, there are plenty of analytic tools that can help in figuring out which types of content performs best with the audience and gets the most shares and engagements. Finally, businesses can also try building out the entire annual social media marketing campaign around a specific theme that can be captured in a hashtag that people can participate in and create a contest around their participation.
