How to Create Powerful

Social Media Marketing

Campaigns

The 2016 Guide

Social Media Marketing CampaignsIt’s safe to say that the antiquated thought process that social media is where brain cells go

to die is well behind us. For many businesses, social media is a powerful channel for

generating leads and building your brand. If your business hasn’t acquired new leads and

customers through strategic social media marketing, it’s almost certain that a company in

your circle has.

In fact, when it comes to social media marketing:

• 83 percent of marketers indicate that it is important for their business

• The majority of those marketers (59%) use social media for 6 or more hours per week

• It has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing

So, if you want to get started building effective social media marketing campaigns for your

business, you’re in the right place. Below, we share strategies and tips that will show you

how to create a powerful social media campaign and execute it to success.

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How to Create a Powerful Social

Media Campaign: 7 Expert Strategies

Determine Your Campaign GoalJust like any great marketing campaign, you shouldn’t begin to build out your social media

campaign without first understanding what you’re looking to get out of it.

Do you want to increase public awareness of your brand? Great! Are you looking to

generate new contacts to add to your lead nurturing campaigns? That’s great too. Want to

drive traffic to a new piece of content you’re hosting on your site? Awesome!

Social media marketing campaigns can help you reach all of these goals. However, knowing

the specific end result you’re looking to achieve helps you better align your social media

marketing strategies to get you there. Before building out your next social media campaign,

write your campaign goal down on a whiteboard or prominently-placed sticky note to keep

it at the top of your mind.

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Choosing Your Platform(s)

Choosing Your Platform(s)

When it comes to creating powerful social media marketing campaigns, one of the most

important decisions you’ll make is choosing which platform (or platforms) to use. For

businesses who are in the beginning stages of strengthening their social presence and

growing their followers, we recommend sticking to a single platform that you know you can

rock. In this section, we’ll share strategies that will help you choose the most effective

social media platform for targeting your unique audience.

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1. Know Your Target Audience Inside and OutBefore you can choose the social media platform through which to reach and engage your

target audience, first you have to understand who they are. What kind of information

interests them the most? What are their shopping preferences? How do they prefer to be

spoken to by businesses? This is the kind of valuable information that can help propel your

social media marketing campaigns to even greater success.

How do you figure these things out? By creating buyer personas. Buyer personas are

fictional and generalized representations of your ideal customers created by interviewing

and surveying a variety of people related to your business. These include customers,

prospects, and even members of your target audience outside of your list of contacts.

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A buyer persona template from HubSpot

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2. Find Where They Are on SocialOnce you understand your audience’s likes, dislikes, motivations, and behaviors, you can

more easily determine the best platform for targeting them. There are platforms through

which to create and execute social media marketing campaigns, but it’s a good idea to start

with one of the most populated, such as:

• Facebook: Facebook is the social media market leader with the largest number of

monthly active users at 59 billion. If your audience consists of adults and especially if

you have sentiment-inducing content to promote, Facebook is a no-brainer.

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn’s 414 million-person audience is comprised of professionals who are

interested in connecting with others in and outside of their industry. If you have content

or offers to promote that speak to business decision makers and executives, this might

be the best channel for you. For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is an especially effective social

media platform for lead generation.

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2. Find Where They Are on Social• Twitter: Twitter is a microblogging platform that averages about 320 million monthly

active users. If you’ve got content and offers to promote that you can pare down into

140 characters, Twitter is a great platform choice. (Tip!: Twitter is also a great channel to

utilize for cross-promotion purposes.)

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3. Optimize Your Presence on Your Chosen Platform(s)Once you’ve chosen the platform you want to

campaign across, you need to develop a strong

presence there. twitterHow do you begin? With

your profile!

No matter which platform you’re using, you’ll need

at least the following three elements:

1. Your company name

2. A profile picture & cover photo

3. A built-out company bio

Here is an image of our Twitter profile as an

example:

In our Twitter profile—which is limited to 160

characters—you can see we’ve hit on all three of

the necessary elements:

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3. Optimize Your Presence on Your Chosen Platform(s)1. Company name: Our company name is featured, and our Twitter handle is also a

variation of our name.

2. Profile picture & cover photo: We use our logo as our profile picture, and our un-

pictured cover photo is highly-visual and unique to our company.

3. Company bio: Not only does our bio explain who we are, what we do, and where we are

located in a concise manner, it’s also riddled with relevant hashtags that make us more

easily searchable on Twitter.

Making sure you’ve optimized each of these elements is a great starting point for your

business’s social media profile, but you’ll want to take it a step further once you’ve honed

your social media voice and audience. We also recommend taking a look at your

competitors’ profiles or those of companies you admire to see what you can replicate on

your own.

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3. Optimize Your Presence on Your Chosen Platform(s)Before moving on to the next phase of your social media campaign—set up and execution—

spend some time building a following or increasing the following you already have. Growing

your audience will improve your future campaign results, and taking the time to do so can

give you valuable insight into what content your followers respond to best.

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Setting Up and Executing Your

Campaign

So you’ve chosen the best platform or platforms for your social media

campaign and you’re ready to get going. Next, check out these top

strategies for set up and execution:

4. Develop the Content Your Audience Wants to SeeOnce you have optimized your presence on your

platform of choice (and ideally have spent time

developing a following) you can begin to build the

content that will comprise your campaign. At this

point, it’s time to refer back to your original goal—

what is the purpose of your social media marketing

campaign? This will help inform everything from the

type of content you post to how you craft your

messages.

While effective social media marketing campaigns will

promote a variety of content types, what’s most

important is to ensure that with each message your

copy, creatives, and content are aligned. Consider a

tweet from our own Twitter social media marketing

campaign:

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4. Develop the Content Your Audience Wants to SeeThis tweet includes a link to a blog post we shared on “Finding and Targeting Your Audience

on Social Media”. To entice clicks from our audience, we included an image featuring a quote

from a marketing expert pulled from the blog post. In our tweet itself we included a short

message, along with the Twitter handle of the influencer we quoted and relevant hashtags.

Whether you’re promoting a specific piece of content or just sharing a news item with your

followers, it’s important that your message be engaging and highly visual. Consider including

these types of updates in your social media marketing campaign:

• Company or industry news

• Tips and tricks relevant to your target audience’s pain points and challenges

• Fun posts relating to current or trending events

• Engaging videos, images, and other media

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5. Organize Your Content with a CalendarIf you are wondering how to create a social media campaign, then the natural next question

is: how on earth do you organize one? To effectively organize and manage your social media

marketing campaigns, you’ll need a content calendar and publisher.

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5. Organize Your Content with a CalendarThe image above slide is a screenshot of our Hootsuite content calendar, showing the

tweets we scheduled for automated publishing through the site in February 2016. We

certainly wouldn’t be able to keep track of the 8+ tweets we publish each day without our

content calendar, and it’s a great way to keep everyone on the team in-the-know.

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Ongoing Campaign Management

Your social media marketing efforts don’t stop once your campaign

starts. In fact, it’s only the beginning. When it comes to ongoing social

media marketing campaign management, here are your need-to-know

strategies:

6. Get Everyone Involved

Once your campaign is up and running, share your strategies across teams besides your own.

Most of the employees in your company have their own social media accounts, and many

use them in part to build themselves up professionally. Leverage this engagement and ask

that employees share posts from your campaign amongst their own networks

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7. Monitor Your Analytics

To make sure your social media marketing campaigns are constantly seeing results, it’s

important to set up analytics processes to track your progress. As an example, we use our

content calendar dashboard (pictured below) to track conversations that other social media

users are having around our brand and content, see how many users our sharing our posts,

and source potential opportunities for engagement.

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7. Monitor Your Analytics

When assessing data and measuring success we also refer to our Twitter and LinkedIn

analytics pages. For more information on how to creation social media campaign analytics

processes that work for your business, check out this great post from Kissmetrics.

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How to Create a Powerful Social Media Marketing Campaign:

A Summary

How to Create a Powerful Social Media Marketing Campaign: A Summary

So, how do you create a powerful social media marketing campaign? First, take the time to

better understand who it is you’re targeting buy developing buyer personas. Then, find

where it is your target audience spends their time online and strengthen your presence

there. Next, start developing the content your target audience is most likely to respond to

and organize it using a content calendar. Finally, get other people from your company

involved in sharing and engaging with your social media campaign content and refer to your

analytics to make sure you’re on track to reach your goals.

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Website: www.sevenatoms.com | Phone: 415.513.0435 | Email: info@sevenatoms.com

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