Effective Social Media Campaign Strategies For Small Businesses [7 Simple Steps]

Social media is one of the most effective lead generation tools for boosting businesses. But most businesses still don’t know how to run effective social media campaign strategies to generate leads for their businesses, and worst of all, don’t know how to start and close a successful social media campaign to boost business growth and lead conversion.

First of all, you need to know that the use of social media around the world is steadily rising.

According to Wearesocia, 49% of the world’s population is active on social media. This is 3.80 Billion people from the total population of 7.75 Billion people. This is a 9.2% increase, or an extra 321 million people, compared to January 2019.

Now, this is a mind-blowing fact. Out of the 3.80 billion active users, your business niche might be occupying about 10% of this number. Meaning that with social media, you can reach your potential customers.

But how do you reach your potential customers using the most result-driven social media campaign strategies and convert them into paying customers?

This is what we will be detailing in this blog post for you.

Right now, you might be starting out fresh on social media campaigns. Your monthly breakdown might have these embarrassing reports:

• an embarrassing figure of 0.1% monthly conversion from your campaigns
• low quality leads joining your email lists
• poor branding
• 2% reach every month

This could be depressing especially when you need to promote your business and get results.

But this doesn’t mean that you can’t convert more of your potential reach to paying customers. In some paragraphs away, you will learn how to set up a successful social media campaign and convert more than 30% of quality leads for your business.

Before we look at the effective strategies in using social media campaigns for your business, let’s look at what a social media campaign means.

What Is Social Media campaign Strategy?

Social Media Campaign is a combined marketing effort carried out on social media to assist with achieving a business goal which could be to either promote your products, or your services. These campaigns are not the usual everyday social media posts because they are designed and targeted to achieve a particular result.

There are no doubts that some organizations are making frank efforts to ensure that they effectively utilize the various opportunities embedded in social media.

As a business owner, you know the importance of social media as a way to make a connection between your business and customers. Social media has become an effective tool as far as digital marketing is concerned.

For instance, whenever potential clients are looking for a new product or service, they generally start their search on a search engine before going to social media, not only to learn more about your brand but also to see what others are saying about a brand or business.

For instance, Quora, Medium, LinkedIn, etc., are arms of social media that also form forums where people share their thoughts about a brand or a product.

While more companies are creating social media strategies in their marketing, not every strategy is effective. Your ability to encourage any of these actions comes from your brand’s authority and one of the best ways to build that is through the savvy use of social media.

A huge percentage of businesses and organizations are already planning to invest more heavily in social media so as to reach new followers and build a brand reputation.

Whether you want to sell products, gain subscribers, persuade followers to a point or sway the hearts and minds of readers to your brand, they’ve got to know who you are in the first place.

However, the truth of the whole thing is that tapping the audience of social media is a low-cost way to transform your brand into the global arena. Building your brand using social media allows you to develop new and strengthen existing relationships, which often leads to everything from brand awareness to loyalty.

The truth is having an expert on social media is going to save you a lot of headaches; this is because social media platforms are always changing and transforming specific things all the time.

Having a personal account is not the same thing as understanding the scope of what Facebook ads and Twitter-promoted posts can do. However, it helps to have someone whose job it is to stay up to date on what’s going on.

How To Create a Social Media Campaign

Step 1. Choose the social media platforms that best suit your brand

For you to choose the social media platforms that best suit your brand you need to understand the identity of your brand. Also, you have to consider a lot of factor such as the social media network your audience are most occupying.

This is very important because if 80% of your audience is spread across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it will do your business no good to invest your resources on Pinterest for instance.

Here are known strategies on how to find out the social media network your audience uses the most.

Find out the social media networks your competitors are using

Let’s say, for instance, you’re in the business of ice cream sales, and your first 5 competitors are actively using Instagram in reaching their audience and have encouraging engagements on their posts, then this is a good place to start.

Apart from finding out the social media networks they use, you should also find out if their posts get engagements as this is very important to know if their audience actively engages with their posts.

Here is an image that shows how well people engaged in a post by Coldstone creamery.

–Facebook is apparently the best social media platform used by most companies in promoting brand awareness. It is a great platform for promoting virtually any brand, due to its very heterogeneous user base.

It’s rare to find a set of audiences who are not using Facebook as their go-to social media platform. Though you have to do your findings to make sure your audience is on Facebook.
–Instagram: This is one of the fast-growing social media platforms in the world. It is particularly effective for reaching young adults, Hispanics, and African Americans. And is a great option for brands that rely heavily on images, such as clothing companies and retailers.
–LinkedIn: This is another strong social media platform. For instance, if you operate a business-to-business company, LinkedIn is likely to be a stronger choice for promoting business-related content.

Do a survey to know your audience most-preferred social media

Let’s assume you have a base of existing customers, while planning to expand your marketing channel to social media, you can do a survey and request that your current customers give you a list of their topmost used social media platforms, this shows that other similar audience can as well be found there.

For instance, if you’re into consulting business, and your existing clients list LinkedIn as their most preferred audience, you might find out that using a survey, they will list out other networks like Quora, Twitter, Facebook, Medium.

These are other networks that can provide them with forums to discuss topics relating to consulting.

Step 2. Use social campaigns to promote content.

One of the social media campaign strategies you can use to grow your business is to use social campaigns to promote content. While social media is one of the most powerful ways to reach new leads, it’s easy to waste time or alienate people if you don’t use it appropriately.

That’s what makes having a sound social media strategy in place so important.

Campaigns that promote content are usually for some of the generic business goals like brand awareness, to promote a festival, to connect with your audience, etc.

If you want to build your brand on social media you really have to use social campaigns to promote your content.

For instance, Coldstone is using its audience and a strong and effective social media marketing strategy to promote its content which tells a story with Bstrong.

Coldstone’s social media campaign strategy with Bstrong

To take advantage of this effect, provide your audience with values that would encourage user participation, and make sure that your campaigns offer value to all participants.

Here, the value used is the emotional sense of assisting people in need. And this single value seen in this campaign will drive users to engage with this post and take action.

Step 3. Develop content and leverage influencers

Developing good content worth sharing is very important. It helps to speak about your brand but dependent on the circulation rate.

You will create a much stronger brand reputation if you focus on creating useful content that viewers will want to share, rather than cranking out content to meet arbitrary publishing calendars or that covers subjects only you would want to read.

By so doing, when you create good content, your content has a value that is worth sharing.

Also, a much faster approach is to leverage the audiences existing influencers in your industry have already built over the years. Mention their names or cite their websites in your content pieces. Influencers with Google Alerts or other notifications set up on their names will see your content after it’s published.

Email influencers after you’ve published your content to let them know they’ve been referenced in your work. Tag any influencers you’ve referenced when sharing content on your social media profiles.

Step 4. Use current trends and relevant hashtags

Social media campaign strategies aren’t complete without the true meaning of “social” in it.

As social media are places where people connect with friends and loved ones, using trends and social-like elements such as hashtags, etc., will give your campaign more life.

Brands like Coca-Cola makes use of this strategy a lot, jumping on relevant trends that will connect their audience to their brands.

Also, hashtags are easy ways to join certain discussions. Invest in using hashtags to explode your reach and join connections in the areas that align with your brand’s goal and objective.

Step 5. Use story-telling method as your social media campaign strategies

Story-telling strategies to build connections with your audience are a great way to secure your audience’s attention for a really long time, and these are some of the stories you can tell with your campaign strategies.

• Behind the scenes of your most memorable moments
• in-house moments of the team
• etc.

These stories can form a collection of campaigns that your audience would want to learn about.

Food vendors now use all the behind-the-scene moments to create sharable content on social media as part of their brand awareness campaign strategies. For your brand, you just have to find what your audience would love to be a part of.

Step 6: Manage your campaign

Once your social media campaign is live, it’s essential to actively manage and monitor its performance. you have to keep a close eye on some  of the key metrics like engagement, reach, and conversions to gauge its effectiveness.

You should respond promptly to comments, messages, and feedback from your audience to maintain engagement and address any concerns. This will let them connect with the brand more.

Finally, for every campaign there must be a goal that the company what to achieve, make sure you review your campaign’s progress regularly against your goals and make adjustments as needed to optimize its performance.

Stay flexible and be ready to adapt your strategy based on real-time data and insights to ensure your campaign continues to drive results.

Step 7: Analyze the Results

This is the stage where you dive into the numbers. You can take a closer look at how your campaign performed. Check out things like how many people saw your posts, how many liked or shared them, and if you got any new followers.

You can look for patterns and trends. Did certain types of posts do better than others? Use all this info to learn what worked well and what didn’t. Then, you can tweak your future campaigns to be even more awesome!

Remember, analyzing the results is like your campaign’s report card – it tells you what you’re doing right and where you can improve. So this make it easy to come up with a strategy to achieve your goals.

5 factors the most successful social media campaigns have in common

When using social media to achieve a goal, there are some factors to consider to achieve a successful social media campaign:

1. Goal Setting

Establishing clear and specific goals for the campaign, such as brand awareness, lead generation, or increasing sales This is crucial for guiding the strategy and measuring the success of your campaign effectively.

2. Audience Awareness

Understanding the target audience’s demographics, behaviors, needs, and interests is essential for crafting tailored and engaging content that resonates with them. This will allow you to solve any problems they might be having and provide solution to it.

3. Content Development

Creating compelling and engaging content that is relevant to the target audience and optimized for each social media platform is key to driving audience engagement and campaign success. Depenging on the platform, you need to understand the content format that fits the platform and use it to that for your communication.

4. Messaging

Crafting a clear and impactful message that differentiates the brand, resonates with the audience, and prompts action is crucial for capturing attention and driving desired responses from social media users. Share informative and educative content about the audience pain point and give out information on how they can solve it too.

5. Social Media Audits

Conducting regular audits of social media channels will help you to assess the performance of your campaign. It will also help you to identify how successful the campaigns is, review some of the benchmarks that was set maybe it was achieve. after reviewing the campaign, it will help you to make a decision either to set a new goals or make an adjustment to the previous goals to achieve success.

Finally

To get practical knowledge about how to successfully run a social media campaigns either as a business owner or as an individual who wants to get business from social media plaform, register for our practical digital marketing course to get started today.

FAQs

What is the most effective social media strategy?

There is no one-size-fits-all “most effective” social media strategy, as the optimal approach depends on the specific goals, target audience, and resources of the business.

However, some common elements of an effective social media strategy include:

• Clearly defining goals and aligning them with overall business objectives
• Thoroughly understanding the target audience and their preferences
• Developing a content plan that provides value and engages the audience
• Maintaining consistency in posting and messaging across platforms
• Leveraging paid advertising and influencer marketing to amplify organic efforts
• Continuously analyzing performance and optimizing the strategy based on data

The key is to create a comprehensive, data-driven strategy that caters to the unique needs and characteristics of the business and its target audience.

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