Are you hoping to use social media to your marketing advantage? Here are some great ways to make a successful social media marketing campaign.

There are now 3.96 billion social media users in the world; that’s half of the world’s population! As such, the marketing landscape has shifted toward putting great emphasis on social media.

Although social media has been around for about two decades now, however, not all brands are utilizing the potential of social media to reach their audience, connect with them, and boost their value, sales, and conversion rates.

Granted, social media is a tough cookie to crack as there are a lot of elements to put together. Nevertheless, you’ll soon be able to understand more of it with our social media marketing tips. Read on to learn what makes a campaign successful.

The Basics of Marketing With Social Media

The core of social media marketing is visibility. Each campaign aims to reach as many people as possible. It isn’t the only metric to watch out for, though.

Depending on the goals of the campaign, some will need more than visibility. Still, it all boils down gaining traction on your target audience.

Some campaigns will go viral, in which they spread through the general public aside from the brand’s target audience. Social media is the main avenue for going viral, but media sites help.

Does every campaign need to go viral? While it will help, you need to focus on your goals instead.

1. Setting Campaign Goals

Your goals will be the basis for every move you make going forward. It will dictate the type of content you make to fit not only your goals but your audience, as well.

You can create a campaign for brand awareness, boosting sales, product launch, and more. These must be well-articulated in the content.

Then, you have to make sure you know what metrics to measure. This will allow you to see the effectiveness of your campaign.

2. Knowing Your Audience

You then need to find out what type of content resonates with your audience. To achieve this, you have to get to know who your audience is. Even what seems to be the best strategy in the world will fail because of targeting the wrong audience.

Create a buyer persona — the ideal customer. The more specific you are, the more successful your campaign will be. Determine the age, job, gender, location, and such.

By knowing who your buyer is, you’ll also know which social media platform they use. If your ideal customer is a teen, for instance, then you’ll likely find them on Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram.

3. Choosing the Social Media Platform

Speaking of, you need to choose the right social media platform for your campaign. Different platforms focus on different types of media. And, they have different ad formats, too.

First off, determine where your audience is. Remember that they can be on more than one platform, and there’s no harm in involving multiple platforms in your strategy. The ads might differ a bit, though.

On Facebook and Instagram, for example, you need a video for ads. On Twitter, a short message with an image will work. On TikTok, challenges have the highest potential to go viral.

You have to take into account the culture in each site or app before you create a strategy. Your audience, although the same people, will have different behavior on different social media platforms.

4. Creating Content

The type of content you have to make also depends on what platform you’re in. Vertical videos are in for Snapchat, TikTok, and even Instagram Stories. However, not all these options have the same advantages.

On Snapchat and Instagram, vertical videos disappear after 24 hours. Although you can use these for brand awareness and CTAs, you don’t have much interaction with your customers this way.

People don’t expect well-polished content in Stories. As such, you can use these to show behind-the-scenes, sneak peeks, and whatnots.

On TikTok, vertical videos are regular posts. They’re not well-polished posts, either, but they’re fun and creative. The content is about the entertainment value on this platform.

Again, it all depends on the culture of the social media platform.

5. Creating a Social Media Strategy

Next, here comes the social media strategy. Will you be posting ads or do you want to grow your follower count? Is content the way to your customer’s hearts?

Your strategy will depend on your goals. You can, for example, do influencer marketing instead. This capitalizes on the followers or the already-established users on the platform.

These users or influencers would have thousands of followers. When they market your brand, you gain access to their follower base. But, not all influencer marketing strategies are the same.

Make Influencer Marketing Work for You

Influencer marketing is the use of influencers, with varying numbers of followers, to market your product.

They can promote your product with crafted posts or they can make a video that uses your product. The video can be a review of your product or it can be an organic video with them wearing your brand.

There are plenty of ways you can work with an influencer, but the choice of influencer is important, too. Not everyone who has a large following can help you with your goal.

You might not even need one with hundreds of thousands of followers. Niche influencers have a smaller follower base, but they have a highly-targeted audience. You can take advantage of this and only target the audience who matters to your brand.

If you’re a big brand who wants to boost your brand awareness, then mega influencers with over 1 million followers might instead be the better choice.

Their content must also match your brand’s image, personality, advocacy, and such. For example, a sustainable brand might want an eco-influencer to endorse their products. They have the same goals and target audience.

Level up Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

Social media marketing isn’t as easy as launching an ad and then calling it a day. You need to analyze data, test, experiment, measure the right metrics, and then go through the road that you think best leads to your goals, which might still be a hit and miss.

Many times, this road is influencer marketing. Contact us today and let’s chat about how we can work with your brand to achieve your goals.