Set up a Social Media Campaign in 5 steps

Symbol for failing social media: with overcapacity on Twitter you get to see the Failwhale.

Campaigning on social media: it immediately sounds decisive and even a bit guerilla-marketing-like. But the title immediately indicates the major flaw: the focus is on the means and not on the goal. Social media is a business asset, just like a business card, a link on a site or a large sticker on the company car. Social Media is not everything. Setting up a social media campaign mainly consists of asking a lot of questions; and social media is sometimes an answer.

1. SMART Social Media

Before setting up your social media campaign, first ask yourself the following questions: what do you want to achieve, how do you keep it up, with which means, in which way and within what time? SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic (or Relevant) and Time. SMART is a way to smartly determine your goals. This is how you get the critical W questions:

• What do you want to achieve? With whom?
• Where do we achieve that?
• When are we going to do this?
• Why do we want to do this?
• What is important?

In this way you get a clear link between the activities and the set objective.

A SMART objective can be:

"100 more Facebook likes after 2 weeks by setting up a giveaway through the website, newsletter and a press release."

How SMART is your campaign?

2. Measuring is knowing

Measure every step that you can measure. In this way you can easily calculate back to exactly what you want to achieve and in which way. An example: the objective is 1000 new subscriptions for the newsletter. For this you use a fill-in competition where you give the free choice to subscribe to the newsletter. You know from a previous promotion that 30-40% is registering. With 30% entries you need 3334 entries for the competition. You also know that 90% of the unique visitors is participating on the competition page; the other 10% views the page and drops out. Your promotion page then needs 3705 unique visitors. Then you look at the means with which you will achieve this goal. Will it actually be a social media campaign?

3. Process

The next step is to look at the process. What is the landing page? Where does it happen? Through which channels does the target group come here? How do you attract their attention and how do you extend that landing page? It helps to draw this out for yourself on paper. See which people are involved in which part of the process, what they need to know and what they should do. Another example: an accounting firm wants to come into contact with 50 potential customers. On the landing page, customers can sign up for a free financial check. There is also a telephone number for people who prefer to call. How do you inform receptionists?

What resources will you use to start your online campaign?

4. Choose your means

With the focus on your objectives, you can more easily compare the available resources. For example, social media is good for image building and binding, but less good for direct sales. You mainly get online revenue with online resources such as Google Ads, affiliate marketing and your own newsletter. You quickly receive registrations for your newsletter with competitions and giveaways. Giveaways work better on Facebook than on Linkedin. If you use and track multiple resources, you can see through which channel you get the best results at the lowest costs.

5. Evaluate

A good evaluation looks at 3 points:

• Product: what did the final product look like? So the landing page, banners, the expressions via social media, profile photos, the newsletter ... the individual resources.
• Process: how did the process go? How was the campaign set up? And the campaign itself? What went awkward and what could be better?
• Effect: to what extent have the objectives been achieved? What went well and what went less well?

For the impact assessment, the question is: how are you going to measure the results? With Google Analytics you can easily measure the number of unique visitors, traffic sources and social traffic. A URL shortener such as Bit.ly gives you insight into how often a specific link has been clicked. (Twitter has been here recently analytics.twitter.com before, but Bit.ly provides insights for all social media channels) A good CMS (or a plugin) gives you clear insight into the entries for a competition form.

With SMART objectives, good measurement, determining the desired process, the right resources and a good evaluation, your campaign will certainly be a great success.

Source photo Toolbox: Per Erik Strandberg