5 Key Steps For Creating a Social Media Campaign

Most clubs are trying to accomplish three primary objectives: acquire new members and customers, retain your members and customers, and increase the amount that your members and customers spend with you annually.  If you have a clearly defined strategy for each of these primary objectives, you’re typically in a pretty comfortable and confident position.  When defining the strategy for these three objectives, there isn’t a lot of crossover in terms of activities that touch all three objectives.  One of those exceptions is social media. 

As you might already know, marketing and social media must be an essential part of your revenue generation efforts. When used correctly, social media is a very powerful tool not only to communicate with your existing followers, but to put your communications in front of existing and prospective members and customers.  From a lead generation perspective, social media has become one of the primary methods of delivering a worthwhile and significant ROI.

According to Databox, 62% of marketers find Facebook to be the most important social media channel for their business–yet content organically posted to Facebook Pages only reach about 16% of fans.  This is why so many brands advertise on Facebook. Not only to reach more of their following but to reach the larger market, too.

As a matter of fact, every month there are more than 2 billion active users on Facebook, 1 billion on Instagram and approximately 365 million on Twitter worldwide. In the U.S. alone, 77% of the population has a social media account of some kind, this means that more likely the majority of your members are using social media to connect with friends, read news, or network with other professionals. Knowing that social media plays an important role in your members daily routine, we would like to provide you with five key steps for creating a successful social media campaign.

Step 1: Set objectives

To start, all of the social ad platforms require you to name your campaign. Avoid vague names like “Campaign 1 March 2020”. Name your campaign something you or your team will easily recognize and understand.

 We recommend detailed names which will give you an overview of what are you posting. For example, you could name a campaign “Membership Trial- Summer Promo – June 2021 – Lead Gen”. The previous example gives you a quick overview about WHAT you are promoting, WHEN are you promoting it, and WHY. Once you have named your campaign, the first step in designing an effective one is to set your objectives. It’s important to set clear and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) objectives.

For social media we recommend to use the following types objectives:

• Brand Awareness generation
• Drive traffic to your website
• Lead generation
• Brand affinity

The SMART goals that are tied to these objectives are listed below.

Step 2: Define audience

Every campaign should have a clearly defined target audience. Knowing your audience is very important to produce the most appealing message and imagery. We recommend to create target “personas” to establish what are the channels your audience is using and which type of content they prefer (video, text, photo, audio podcasts, etc.). In a nutshell, a target persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This is not a real customer, but a fictional person who embodies the characteristics of your best potential club member or customer. To create a target persona, you can start writing their interests, location, gender, and age. Think about the websites they visit and how are other brands communicating with them. More importantly, understand how they like to receive and digest communications. 

To maintain an efficient audience targeting using social media ads, you should install remarketing tags or pixels on your website. This will allow you to show paid ads to users who have visited your website in the past, or audiences with similar traits to your past visitors. Additionally, you can target multiple audiences per campaign. To do this, you have to create “Ad sets”. Each Ad Set will have its own audience, creative and message. This is ideal if you would like to promote different messages to different audiences at the same time.

Step 3: Set KPIs

Once you know the main objectives and the audience for your social media campaigns, the third step is to set KPIs – or Key Performance Indicators – to measure the campaign performance. It is very important to understand that social media campaigns have the most impact at the start of your buyer's journey. This means, right at the top of your sales funnel in the awareness and interest stages.

Therefore, we recommend you to measure the success of your social campaigns by the number of users you reach and how much awareness you are generating. Social SHOULDN’T be measured with direct sales from social channels. Its main focus is to drive awareness, website traffic, assist in driving sales, and conversions.

What is the importance of KPIs?

KPI’s are the metrics you will track to understand whether or not your campaign is meeting your business goals.

• Awareness KPI’s: reach and impressions, social engagements, follower growth, views, and likes.
• Website traffic KPI’s: measured by number of clicks to the website and overall Google Analytics data.
• Brand affinity KPI’s: measured by number of social engagements, follower growth, content views.
• Lead generation KPI’s: measured by number of signups and webform conversions.

Step 4: Set budgets and campaign dates

The next step is to decide how much you’re going to spend on each social channel or campaign. And decide how long you want your campaign to run.

To keep in mind: At the beginning of your campaign is normal to have a high CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand), because the social channels you are using are “learning” about the campaign and its performance. Therefore, it is very important to analyze the results on a regular basis (daily or weekly) to find areas of improvement. With time, you will be able to understand if there is a specific time when you are getting the best results, or if the message you are using is resonating or not with your audience. Once you start understanding your own campaign results, you will be able to decrease the CPC and increase your ROI.

Step 5: Design creative content

The final step is to design your creative content. You should design it in a way that aligns with each channel theme. For example, in Twitter you should post short and relevant written content. Facebook should be used to share blog posts, videos, and images. However, since the attention span in Facebook is very short, you should aim at creating visually appealing content and/or video. Usually, video related content performs very well in this channel.

Regardless of the channel you are using to post your content, it all should look and feel the same. This will increase brand recognition and affinity. Also, keep in mind that users spend most of their time on their phones, therefore you should create content that is mobile-friendly.

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About Total e Integrated

Total e Integrated is a leading provider of end-to-end business management solutions for recreation, retail, hospitality and community organizations. For over 20 years Total e Integrated has helped organizations to integrate departments, automate marketing, streamline operations and boost revenues with our innovative solutions and expert consulting services team.

Lance Merrihew
707-779-2592

Lance@totaleintegrated.com

www.totaleintegrated.com