Know These 7 Things Before Starting Social Media Marketing Campaign

• Updated on: 2021-07-13
• Read original article here

Is social media marketing required? Well, we all know the obvious answer- YES. Be it a company, a small business, a personal brand, or a social organization, none can ignore social media if they want to reach the masses and their desired audience.

But, before you get started, there are some aspects you need to know. I am sharing a few of them with you for a hassle-free and productive launch of your social media marketing campaign.

“Marketing” is the keyword when talking about social media marketing. You cannot initiate any marketing campaign until the goals are defined. The best way to define a purpose is to ask, why would you use social media for your brand? Is it to generate sales or get leads or make people visit your location? Or is it a brand awareness exercise where you want to make your brand, products, and services reach your target audience? For a brand, social media can be the most significant link between the brand and its customers for solving customer problems and earning their loyalty. In addition, social media can act as a bridge between individuals like artists, entrepreneurs, speakers, bloggers, vloggers, reviewers, and their enthusiasts.

After defining your goal, you need to decide with whom you will speak through your social media channels. It would be best if you build a persona about your prospects. Make various customer profiles depending upon their likes and dislikes, buying pattern, social status, income groups, region, education, etc. Once you have these things at your end, your social media marketing campaign can be directed towards them. It not just secures you from wasteful expenditure but also saves your time. Depending on that, you can run targeting and retargeting ad campaigns. You can design your content strategy that allures your audience.

Now that you have set your goals and you know whom to address, you’ll need a meticulous content strategy to make your target audience engage with it. Suppose the target audience are college students or teenagers; it’s advisable to make infotainment video quantity. If you’re targeting entrepreneurs, scholars, and so on, they are more likely to engage with detailed, informative content, such as videos or blogs. Apart from that, you need to understand what colors, tonality, choice of words, and keywords appeal to your target audience the most. A great social media marketing idea executed with poor content can be anything but productive.

While it’s essential to have appealing and robust content, it is equally important to understand when to upload. Social media tools and market search data will make you understand when your target audience appears online and how much time they spent on social media. An exemplary message conveyed at the wrong time won’t make it reach anywhere. A social media marketing campaign needs scheduling of posts so that you appear on your audience’s timelines when they’re online. It helps you keep consistency and saves you from missing important events to reach your audience.

When it comes to marketing, possessing good knowledge of competitor’s marketing strategies gives you an edge. And, social media marketing campaigns are no exception. Analysing competitor’s marketing plans will help you decide where to focus and make you use your resources wisely. Such analysis gives you a picture of market potential and how customers react to a specific marketing campaign. This gives you a brief SWOT analysis and saves you from making the same mistakes as your competitor. There are multiple tools like Facebook Audience Insights, Social Blade, Sprout Social, etc., to give you an overview of competitor’s social media campaigns.

This is the most crucial and technical (to some extent) aspect. You would surely need some reliable tools to plan, execute and monitor your social media marketing campaigns. First, you need a tool to plan your posts, where your market analysis and competitor analysis will play a significant role. Apart from that, tools like Buzzsumo will help you find out what type of content will do better and which to avoid. Hootsuite helps in managing multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. It also allows you to schedule posts, see analytics and much more. Platforms like Mentions can be very effective if you want to take on your competitors on social media. There are many premium services available for social media advertising, but Facebook Ad Manager or Google Ads should do the job for you at no extra charge. If you want to take a deep dive into your social media analytics, Keyhole can be the one tool to go for.

We discussed things you should do at the initial stage of the social media marketing campaign. Now let us have a brief look at what you need to avoid. While we give importance to the competitor analysis, at no point we want to copy them. While we learn from their success, we do not want to recite their failure. Every business has a different nature. What worked for them might not work for you and vice-versa. Secondly, you shouldn’t jump on social media unprepared. Make sure you have your plan, content, and all the vital resources in place before you start your first social media marketing campaign. Lastly, it is vital to be realistic. Social media marketing doesn’t generate results overnight. It’s a long game that needs patience and consistency. If you have both, you’ll see the potential of the virtual world, or you’ll be disappointed in a brief span.

I hope this comprehensive read would help when making your decision about your social media marketing campaign. We will cover one more exciting and essential subject in our next blog. Till then, have a great day!