Picture this.
Your business has got something to shout about – perhaps a new product, an exciting event, or a big piece of news.
You’ve spent ages putting the pieces together and you’ve worked on the perfect social media campaign to spread the word. You’ve created great design assets, your content is ready, your ads are scheduled… it’s time for your social media campaign to go live. You kick back, relax, and wait for the excited customers to roll in.
Except they don’t. You check your social media platforms. Not a peep. No engagement. No spike in web traffic. No sales. Nothing. What went wrong?
Your social media campaign totally tanking is every business’ nightmare. It’s quite hard to gauge exactly how your audience might respond before you launch, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid an all-out social campaign. There’s just a few simple things you need to do before and during your campaign to make sure that your campaign is a huge success next time. Here’s how to make sure your social media campaign doesn’t tank.
Be clear on your objectives – and make sure your campaign aligns with them
Social media gives you plenty of opportunities to get creative and try exciting things, but you shouldn’t let this make you lose sight of your overall objectives. These should be front and centre of every decision you make so if an idea you have doesn’t support your business’s goals, it might be best to chuck it for bank it for later, even if it is really, really cool. Sorry.
So how do you make sure that your campaign aligns with your objectives? First, you’ll need to identify what they are and how social media can help you. For example, if you want to increase your numbers of new customers, simply posting content to your page and relying on your existing customers to share with others might not be enough. Instead, consider how you could use a well targeted, paid social ad to appeal to people who aren’t yet in your ecosystem. You might want to encourage them to take a specific action, such as signing up to a mailing list, to ensure that you can market to them specifically with an offer for their first purchase, for example.
Don’t assume anything
You might think that your audience wants discounts on your products or services, but how can you be sure? Perhaps what they actually want from you is useful information. Or maybe it’s simply convenient access to your business’ customer service team in the event they need support. Whatever it is, your campaign not only needs to be aligned with what you want, but what your audience wants too.
When you’re launching a social media campaign, it’s important to keep a close eye on how your audience responds. That way, if you notice that it’s not quite going the way you planned, you’re able to do something about it before it’s too late. Here’s a few things you can do to make sure that your campaign delivers exactly what your audience wants it to:
- Do your research – spend time finding out exactly what your audience needs. When planning a campaign, you could survey your customers to find out what they’re interested in, or use a tool like answer the public to find out your audience’s needs.
- Check your timings – don’t just assume that it’s best to post something at 1pm when everyone is on their lunch break. Chances are, your content will just get lost amongst everyone else’s if you do. Instead, use analytics to see when most of your audience is active and the times you get the most engagement.
- Find out what kinds of content your audience will prefer – you might have heard that video is the most important and engaging type of content you can share, but is it right to just follow the crowd? Take a look at what kinds of posts have done down best before?For example, if you’re aiming to appeal to a photographers, a technically good image might draw their attention more than a video.
Monitor, measure, and makes changes!
Even if you set the right objectives and do research to inform your campaign ideas, perhaps the most important thing you can do to make sure your social media campaign doesn’t tank is to test and measure. No matter how much planning has gone into your campaign, you must be prepared to be flexible and make changes along the way if you want it to be a success. So if you don’t want your campaign to be a flop, make sure you:
- Have the right measurement tools in place. This can vary depending on your objectives – if you want to achieve web traffic or sales, you’ll want to make sure you’re using Google Analytics, but if you want to increase engagement then you might just want to rely on your social channel’s built-in analytics tool.
- Test and test again. There’s so many ways to test what’s going to work best for your campaign. Start by simply sharing varied content (different images, different messages, different content types) and keep track of what works best so you can do more of it. When you’re testing paid social, it pays to be a little bit more strategic so you get the most out of your money. We’d suggest A/B testing and just changing one thing at a time, such as a different type of ad or a different CTA. That way you’ll know exactly what change gave you the best results.
- Learn from your results. Whether you create a report of the different results from different tests, or a simply note that next time you should build on a specific idea because it performed best, don’t perfect your campaign only to forget it next time – that way your next campaign won’t tank either!
