For marketers, crafting a top-performing social media campaign can be challenging. However, a well-defined social media campaign strategy is the key to success. Learning how to use the right features and tools could ease your work.
Would it help you to have a social media campaign strategy template?
Then carry on reading to learn what it takes to develop and implement a social media campaign strategy that will get your brand in the spotlight.
Social Media Campaign Strategy - Tips & Examples
1. What is a social media campaign strategy?
A social media campaign strategy is the plan you make when you want to take over the world of social media.
On a more serious note, a social media campaign strategy is a blueprint for all your planned activities across social media channels for the duration of a campaign.
Your strategy should let everyone know that you exist as a brand and you have something important to say.
A set of innovative ideas, honest but well-written content, that shows slices of life without filters will always draw people’s attention. Pictures and words that trigger a sense of familiarity in users will always win.
That is why you should take your time when designing your social media campaign strategy to make sure you deliver content that meets their expectations.
The important thing about creating your marketing strategy is to keep it real. It’s okay to be ambitious, but try to not exaggerate the outcomes you want to reach.
Otherwise you will be disappointed and walk away feeling like your social media campaign strategy was a failure.
Look at the data and see what you have accomplished so far, by checking analytics on all your social media platforms.
Put together a report, track the patterns and try to learn more about your audience to see what makes their hearts twinkle and their thumbs stop scrolling.
The purpose of a social media campaign is to increase brand awareness, develop a loyal community, boost sales and track your evolution in time.
2. How to create a social media campaign strategy
When designing a social media campaign strategy, the first challenges you might come across are finding a hard-working team, using social media as a business growth tool and increasing ROI.
The following step-by-step guide is meant to help lift some of the weight off your shoulders, offering you the structure you need for your future social media campaign strategy.
1. Establish your social media campaign goals
First things first! Grab a pen and some paper. I’m just kidding. Excel rules and no one wants to write by hand anymore.
When developing a marketing plan for a long-term or short-term campaign, you need to establish what goals you want to reach and what’s your main focus.
While some brands want to generate more sales, others want to generate leads, increase traffic and grow their community. Your own goals will help you shape your strategy.
If you coordinate a long-term social media campaign, then you can set bolder goals to attain. In case you plan a marketing campaign for the release of a new product, then you will see the results sooner.
2. Get to know your audience
You cannot get started on your social media campaign plan without knowing your audience. Likewise, you cannot attract new followers if you don’t know what type of posts they like and what makes them engage.
Making assumptions about your community will not help you have a successful campaign.
You need to gather data about your audience and for this you should use a third-party analytics tool like Socialinsider.
This way, you will see what types of posts have higher engagement, higher reach, gather more interactions, what is the best posting time and in what industry they are interested in.
3. Find out more about your competition
While you are at it, go ahead and analyze your competitors' performance using an analytics tool.
On Socialinsider, Benchmarks comparisons are a breeze. You can easily track your competitors’ most popular posts, their engagement and their follower growth.
You should focus your effort on social media platforms where your industry’s community is underserved.
These are key metrics you need to assess, while also looking at the content. The quality of their content can really be a game-changer. That is why your own brand messaging should always be creative, authentic and on-point.
Besides performing an analytics review of your brand, you should also consider social listening. This process can really help you learn more about the community's priorities and expectations.
Via social listening, you will be able to build stronger connections with your audience, answering their queries and improving customer support.
4. Perform a social media audit
Once in a while, preferably every quarter or at the end of every year, it's important to conduct a social media audit.
This will help you look at your brand’s evolution across all social media platforms. A social media audit tool could come in handy, helping you find the answers to the most important questions.
Think about what is working and what needs improvement, where is your audience more active, and what’s your competition doing. This way, you will know if your campaign strategy needs adjustments.
5. Find inspiration
When developing content for your campaigns on social media, you are not always inspired. Inspiration and creativity ebb and flow, so you can’t always expect them to work for you when you need them to.
Take some steps back to see the bigger picture. Maybe this will help you come up with a useful idea for your social media campaign.
As long as you work hard enough, the efforts will eventually pay off. In the meantime, in-depth research will put your mind at work.
Inspiration might find you when browsing on social media platforms. Contrary to popular belieft, scrolling through stories or posts can also fuel your creativity.
6. Develop eye-candy content
Finally, when everything else is set into place, you can start writing content for your social media campaign.
Think about the right words and craft your texts. Then, you can schedule your posts depending on how long your campaign is going to take.
Keep in mind the fact that your content needs to align with your brand’s mission and values.
Another important thing is to not post the same content on every social media platform, as repurposed content is not always so well received. Tailor your texts and match the images and videos to the appropriate sizes for every social channel.
7. Evaluate your social media campaign’s performance
A few weeks into the campaign or after your social media campaign is over, it's time to assess your brand’s performance.
This way, you will see if your strategy worked. The most important social media metrics you have to look at are engagement, reach, impressions, followers’ growth, gained followers and video views.
In case your metrics indicate lower values than before, maybe you should consider changing your social media campaign strategy.
3. Examples of successful social media campaigns strategies
Starbucks - #PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte)
We all know Starbucks and we probably all enjoyed at least one coffee from this coffee shop. Well, their marketing strategy is on point and we can all admit that they know how to sell their coffee.
They have a designated campaign for every season of the year and when autumn hits, even before the first crisp leaves fall, it’s Pumpkin Spice Latte all over again.
This fall drink appeared on Starbucks’ menu starting in 2003. This beverage is now available in over 50 countries and generates more than $100 million in revenue every autumn.
Their fall campaign is focused on offering customers a taste of the cool season coming. The Pumpkin Spice Latte is just right for a windy autumn day, a sweater kind of weather.
Starting from this, Starbucks also embraces all the customer-generated content.
Actually, they gain a lot of new customers due to really creative customer-generated content they take over from their clients.
Starbucks could brag about a really successful campaign when it comes to #PSL because all their customers tag them in their posts and use this hashtag.
Starbucks did not only empower sales through this social media campaign, but they also increased their audience, and metrics like engagement, interactions and impressions from their followers.
For this fall campaign, a few Q&A’s and posts with their baristas making coffee were enough to attract clients’ attention. And this is how we got to over 2 million posts with the #PSL hashtag.
Spotify - #SpotifyWrapped
Every year since 2016, on the first week of December, Spotify gives their users a peek into their musical year in review. The premise of this campaign is simple and the gains are colossal.
At the end of each year, the #spotifywrapped campaign delivers a highly personalized collection of videos based on every user’s activity on the app (aka what they listened to the most).
I love this day. #SpotifyWrapped pic.twitter.com/Dw7KiZrX21
— Bella Ramsey (@BellaRamsey) December 1, 2022
These videos are packed with exciting visuals, they’re easily shareable and allow everyone to discover what friends (or strangers) are listening to or even what their Music Listening personalities are.
Since its format lends itself perfectly to Instagram Stories, each year, the #spotifywrapped campaign brings in tons of engagement and a new wave of followers from that platform alone. Through that, it also helps increase brand awareness.
This campaign has become so popular that other brands decided to launch their own version of #wrapped.
Guinness #SpotifyWrapped
— Guinness GB (@GuinnessGB) December 2, 2022
🤝
A long wait pic.twitter.com/SAcyq7d7o9
Dove - #ReverseSelfie
Dove is encouraging women to give up on using filters and face apps, through their #ReverseSelfieCampaign.
Using their products, women should feel empowered and more confident when it comes to their natural beauty.
When little girls are inspired not to follow social media trends and instead be themselves, they grow into more confident women.
Dove highlighted that their goal is to determine little girls and women to feel more like themselves and forget about the society’s unwritten rules related to beauty standards.
Beauty relies on healthy skin and Dove emphasized that this is one of their brand’s values.
This Dove campaign has helped the brand gain a lot of followers and even converted part of them into leads.
The study developed by Dove revealed that 85% of girls who post on social media have already edited their photos by the age of 13 and 25% of girls don’t think they look good enough.
Some of the posts that performed best on their Instagram account were those with the hashtag #reverseselfie, getting over 200 k reactions from followers.
For the posts which are part of the social media campaign #ReverseSelfieCampaign, the impressions and interactions surpassed 1 million.
The content that performed best consists of photos, showing how real beauty and real skin should look like.
The beauty brand has increased brand awareness through its campaign, attracting more people who share their beliefs.
Final thoughts
Hopefully these social media marketing campaigns inspire you to refine your own strategy to make your brand stand out from the crowd.
Creating the best social media marketing campaign strategy can seem like a bumpy road, but if you are determined and ready to work on it, you will reach your goals.
The key to a successful social media campaign strategy is to practice what you preach and write quality content for your followers. This way, by being real, you will attract people drawn to the most important values in life.
You need a solid team and trustworthy people around you to make sure your business is set on the path to success.
