4 Parts Of The Best Social Media Campaigns

Social Media is proving to be one of the best marketing strategies. The marketing industry has seen an increase in clever and effective social media campaigns.
These top campaigns on all the top sites are very different, yet have certain things in common that I wanted to share.  Many people are just so excited with their products and with the Internet that they want to just dumped their links on every Social site.
If your business is considering a social media campaign, use these four main components to achieve your desired results and boost the impact to your bottom line:

1. A Carefully Developed Plan

The best social media campaigns start with a carefully developed plan. This plan should be specific to your campaign, but it should also fit into your overall social media strategy — meaning that your goals should not conflict, and the campaign should be a good continuation of your brand’s existing social voice and style.

For example when I began to post on social media, I had to plan, so I use every site as a dumpsite for each post I wrote in my blog.  I was like a annoying fly on a wall.  My blogs about movies were in areas that had no reason for being there.
Over time I realized that each site was different. I still wrote about anything I wanted, yet I no longer posted everything everywhere.  On LinkedIn, I now only shared my posted that I wrote about Marketing, self-building, and topics like entrepreneurship.  On my Facebook, I posted my blogs about world topics, video games, recipes, and other topics.  I mostly use LinkedIn, and Facebook. I am just now understanding Pinterest.  According to Google, I have never had anyone visit my site through MySpace, so I use it for fun.

My plan was now to reach the people of the day.  My goal was to get leads.  So, if I could think of a topic that day, I would use Google Trends, and find the biggest topic of the day.  That might be my topic, yet I was careful where to post it.

At a minimum, you’ll want to assign roles for messaging, design and promotion. If your social media campaign will be promoted across channels, make sure you’ve selected the right team members in departments to be responsible for your campaign. I do all this myself through my blogging.
The last part of your social media campaign plan should be to identify the metrics you’ll use to measure the success and ROI of your campaign. In order to do that, you’ll need to define your campaign’s goals — which is the next component of a great campaign.

2. Clearly Defined Goals

Before starting any marketing campaign, you need to clearly define your goals. Deciding on what you want to achieve at the beginning of a campaign makes it easier to measure and analyze your results.

Your social media campaign can have multiple goals, where each piece of your strategy serves a different objective. Each goal you select should be personalized for your business’ needs, but here are a few common ones most campaigns address:

• Increase Brand Awareness. If your business is relatively new (or new to social media), or if you need to distinguish your business from others in the same space, some part of your campaign should aim to increase brand awareness. If prospects and customers are unable to recognize your brand, your campaign will have little effect.

Incorporating a sharing aspect to your campaign is a great way to increase your brand awareness and online influence. To measure your brand’s social influence, benchmark key metrics, such as total number of likes or followers, total brand mentions/retweets, influencer brand mentions and site entrances or app downloads driven by social media.

• Drive More Website Traffic. I know what you’re thinking: Who doesn’t want more visits to their website or blog? It’s a natural goal for most marketing campaigns, but it also plays into your social presence. The more visitors your website receives, the more opportunities they have to share your site or content on social media and follow your accounts on their favorite networks.

To drive more traffic, direct users to a landing page on your site where they can take the next action. I use Google Analytics to benchmark key metrics like total Web visits, my site’s bounce rate, visits driven by social media, time on site and overall engagement of social users.

• Drive Visitor Loyalty. Do you want to increase your website visitor loyalty? Driving more website traffic is a short-term goal, but you can aim to increase the amount of time spent on your website and the frequency of return visits for the long term.

If visitor loyalty is one of your goals, consider a social media campaign that requires users to visit your website several times to enter or find information. To measure visitor loyalty, benchmark metrics like pages per session, average session duration and the percent of new sessions to your site.
When I began sorting my blogs in the social sites where they belong, my returning visitors increased.

• Improve Conversion Rates. If your business is well-known and already receives a lot of Web visitors, your campaign should focus on improving your website/app conversion rates. Whether your business considers a conversion a product purchase or an account sign-up or anything in between, you can align an aspect of your social media campaign with website conversions.

Even, though I  have conversions on the topics I write in my blogs, most people leave them on the social site that I post link on, instead of my blog itself. So, here, I am asking you for a suggestion how to keep conversation on my page.  Could you leave a suggestion below?

3. Cross-Channel Promotion

Unless you have millions of loyal followers, your social media campaign needs help from other marketers to achieve your desired results. The best social media campaigns are part of an integrated marketing campaign where your efforts on social media are supported on a number of other channels.

The benefits of promoting your social media campaign across additional channels are twofold: Those you reach from social media are reminded through other communications, and those who aren’t as active on social media are informed.

Your followers are already familiar with your brand, so they’re the most likely to see your campaign on social media, so they will be more likely to participate after being reminded through a different route.

You can catch those who don’t follow you on social media or are less active via email, search or on-site content and ad units.

Reaching different people at varying times across many marketing channels increases the likelihood that your campaign will be successful. Just be careful with your segmentation and timing. You don’t want to overwhelm existing customers or bother potential ones with too much at the same time.

Gentle reminders across a number of your target audience will deliver better results than a social media campaign that’s only promoted on your social network of choice.  AWeber and GetRespone are email follow-up systems that can do this.

4. Thorough Analysis

Now ask yourself how your campaign did? Was your social media program successful in reaching the goals you set for yourself?

When it comes to analyzing the success of your campaign, you’ll be thankful you identified the key metrics associated with your goals ahead of time. It’s easy to benchmark your progress against your initial starting point.

In the time you been marketing online, evaluate whether or not you saw a difference in account logins, customer lifetime value or other engagement metrics specific to your business.  This is again where Google Analytics comes in.

This can also be trial and error. Over time with my blog, I notice I was not getting any traffic except on days when I was personally posting each time I posting.  I was confused.  After a long period of time, I never realized, I had forgotten to activate my SEO Keywords. So, my blogs where not sorted into any of the main search engines.  Once this hit me, I began to fix the problem, my traffic began to rise dramatically.  This traffic was no yet returning traffic, but if I had never studied that graph and traffic, I would have never changed it.

So whatever site you have, study your traffic, and learn from it.