Expand Your Reach! How to Run a Successful Social Media Campaign
Social media delivers consumer engagement with your business. In fact, about one in three social users turns to social media when they want to learn about a brand or product.
How your brand chooses to engage varies from company to company. But with the right strategies, you can attract new customers and fans to your business and improve consumer loyalty as well.
So how do you run a positive social media campaign using the right techniques?
Read on to discover our favorite strategies to run an effective social media campaign that expands your reach and delivers new customers.
1. Start with a Clear Strategy
Before you launch your social media campaign, outline your primary and secondary goals. What is it you hope to achieve?
With your goals in place, you must decide how you will measure your success. For instance, your goals may include lead generation or more direct sales which you can easily track. Or perhaps you want to increase brand awareness — for which analytics can provide proof.
Remember, your goal is to connect people with your brand. For example, a good strategy is to plan posts around company events. Write down what you can show from your events and determine how it lays out on a timeline. If it’s a one-day event, plan several posts over three to four days.
Strive to add company information and ways your products and services can improve the reader’s life.
2. Participate and Listen
The beauty of social media is that it uses two-way messaging. That means you can confirm if someone read your post and you can even talk with them. Engage with anyone that comments on your posts and have conversations.
When a post receives a lot of likes, consider it a sign to post more content like it. Take the opportunity to talk with commenters to learn what they are saying, the language they are using, and to build empathy.
As any good salesperson will attest, empathy is the key to sales. Once you can put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you can better assess their needs. The moment they think, “Hey, this person gets me” is the moment you have a sale.
3. Choose a Helpful Social App
Don’t let all the different social media platforms overwhelm you. With the right app, you can post to all of them directly from one social media dashboard that you can automate.
That means you can queue up thoughts or ideas through the day and post them to multiple social channels. Just set them in the queue and let the app do the work.
We recommend not posting the same message word-for-word on several different platforms at once. Often, they don’t translate well on a different outlet. For example, Facebook posts usually look very weird when formatted to Twitter.
4. Pay Attention to Social SEO
The keywords your company is trying to rank for on Google should also be used in your social media campaigns. Talk to your companies SEO person to discover the keyword phrases you should implement in your social media posts. This is more important than ever before because Google’s search results now include Tweets for some keyword terms.
Getting shares and mentions on posts with the right keywords sends social signals that affect your search engine ratings.
5. Give People a Reason to Pay Attention
Bust through social noise by giving readers a reason to pay attention to your brand. A few common but effective tactics are: social-media-only discounts, giveaways, sign-ups and contest that reward shares.
If you have active followers to your channel who consistently add to the conversation, promote them on your channel for a big win.
Add interesting and descriptive captions to your posts (this works really well on Instagram). Ask intriguing questions to get more engagement.
6. Work with Influencers
A social media influencer is an authoritative voice in a particular industry who has a large social following. Having the support of influencers is better than advertising, and they can catapult your campaign to new heights.
Make a list of influencers in your field who might be willing to help you get the word out about your campaign. Then visit the profiles of each of these influencers and select “Turn On Post Notifications.” You will be notified whenever they share new content.
Interact with each influencers channels. Share their informative posts and provide helpful comments and you’ll become one of their favorite brands.
7. Don’t Forget Your Call to Action
Do you want your followers and readers to do something? Maybe you want them to follow your channels, call you, or visit your website? An effective call to action (CTA) can help you achieve your goals.
And when you ask your readers to do something, like a retweet, reply or contact you, your content has a purpose.
Punch up your CTAs and don’t merely say “Click here.” Try to create intrigue as in, “Click here to join the revolution!”
All the copywriting rules apply to your CTA. To that end, add a sense of urgency whenever possible. For instance, you might say “Reserve your spot for my seminar right now before it fills up.”
8. Measure Your Campaign Success
During and after your campaign, carefully review your metrics to determine if you’re meeting your goals. What is working and where could you have done better?
Check out your social media analytics to see how many shares and retweets your campaign receives. Even more importantly, how many comments and mentions did your posts earn?
Which posts earned the most engagements? The answer to that may help you determine the kinds of posts you should focus on going forward.
Launch a Winning Social Media Campaign
Using the techniques above you can dramatically improve your companies reach and earn an influx of new fans, followers, and customers.
After your social media campaign, you will want to follow up with all the new contacts you’ve made. Building real and substantive relationships requires regular follow-up.
You can email or call new contacts, but we prefer having your sales or marketing team reach out through social media to warm the waters first.
If you found this article helpful, check out our social media trend predictions for 2019!
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