Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing Campaigns in 2023

With billions of active users on social media, brands are finding it harder than ever to break through the noise to engage with the right audience. In order to compete with other brands and viral influencers, crafting a social media marketing campaign is like the perfect game plan to effectively promote your brand, execute strategy, and interpret your results. From TikTok hashtag challenges to seasonal holiday promotions, social media marketing campaigns are the bread and butter of a successful social media strategy. 

So what is a social media campaign? A social media campaign is a form of promotion that reinforces a message about a specific brand, product, or service on at least one social media channel. Successful social media campaigns are strategically focused and have measurable goals. This form of social media advertising is one the most creative and effective ways to consistently promote your unique brand messaging to a target audience on multiple channels. 

This guide will cover the four steps to creating a social media campaign and how to promote and track its performance.

How To Create a Successful Social Media Campaign

Social media campaigns require more than just posting content. To ensure your social media campaign is effective and achieves your goals, planning and preparation are essential. These four steps will help you create a social media campaign that delivers on your goals and generates business growth.

Step 1: Set Campaign Goals

The first step in creating a social media campaign is defining your campaign goals and aligning them with your brand’s needs. Increasing sales, improving brand awareness, reaching new audiences, and boosting website traffic are all examples of goals to consider for your next campaign. 

Using the SMART method to define your goals more clearly can help outline exactly what’s needed for the campaign to be successful and the goals to be achievable.

Step 2: Establish Target Audience

The next essential step to creating a campaign is establishing your target audience. When looking at your social media analytics, consider your audience’s age, gender, location, income, and interests to better understand who you’re trying to reach. Understanding what your audience likes, what influences them to action, and their interests will help inform your content strategy. Creating content that appeals to your target audience is crucial to a successful campaign, or you would risk users simply scrolling through your post that took you so much time and effort to make — Google analytics for social media is a great way to pull in the most relevant audience data for your social accounts and website.

Step 3: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Next, conduct a competitive analysis to determine your competitors strengths and weaknesses. This template will depend on the metrics and content factors that matter most to your brand and strategy, but it's a helpful way to analyze competitor's social profiles, video content, feed posts, and any other factor relevant to your social campaign. This also ensures you don't miss out on any content opportunities once your campaign is underway.

Step 4: Determine Social Channels

Now that you know your audience, you should have determined which social media channels they most frequently use. It’s important to meet your audience where they are, especially if they are using the channel looking for solutions to a problem your campaign can solve. According to the New York Times, Gen Z prefers to use TikTok as a search engine over Google. If Gen Z is your target audience, you might want to prioritize TikTok over Google or any other channel. 

Each channel serves a specific purpose and content cannot be repurposed across all of them. Consider character limits, content formats, and even the culture of the channel in order to run the most effective campaign. Run a social media channel analysis with tools like Dash Hudson to help you deliver content that truly resonates with your audience by channel.

Step 5: Content Creation

After completing the upfront work of defining your goals, audience, and channels, you can now start planning your content. Analyze your best-performing content for patterns of your target audience's likes and dislikes. 

Content segmentation helps teams plan the best quality content with the data and insights to support their creative decisions. Segmenting content can also uncover types of content you might need to utilize more, like UGC. For example, if your social media campaign is focused on a new lipstick product launch, segmenting content can inform you that your audience loves close-up lipstick swatches or a makeup tutorial from a specific influencer. 

Determine the formats and types of content you need to create or source for your campaign, then start creating! Collaborate with your team, designers, photographers, and content creators to build a robust strategy.

Step 6: Schedule Content

Scheduling upcoming posts and arranging them in a calendar is helpful to visualize when and where different steps of your social campaign will take place — it also gives you plenty of lead time to reschedule posts as needed, reflect on content issues, and generally make posting more proactive. Dash Hudson's Social Scheduler function gives you a calendar overview, allows you to schedule posts, and can even tell you when your brand's best times to post are.

Step 7: Measure Campaign Results

Finally, it's important to report on the success of your social media campaigns. Refer to those goals you set-up in step one throughout your campaign, and most importantly when it ends — just because it's over, doesn't mean there aren't valuable learnings for social and marketing teams. For social teams, this will likely require sharing relevant KPIs and metrics with your wider team, whether you reached your social campaign goals, and how these goals contributed to your brand's needs. This is also a great time to share what went well, what didn't, and what lessons you can leverage in future social campaigns.

How to Run a Social Media Campaign

Great content can take your campaign far, but strategic promotion can take it to the next level. Successful social media campaigns require key tactics to deliver the best results effectively.

Keep Message Consistent

The best social media marketing campaigns deliver one key message throughout multiple channels. Keeping it strong, concise, and consistent makes your campaign easy to understand and easy for your audience to retain your key message, while repetition within your campaign helps to build familiarity and trust.

Don't Pressure Your Audience

Though repetition is good within your campaign, continue to post non-promotional content too. While you want your audience to become familiar with your campaign, you want to avoid pressuring them into becoming customers. Strike a balance between promotional and non-promotional content that your audience finds engaging. 

Engage With Your Audience

Social media is a two-way street. You can’t expect to receive engagements without also giving back to your audience by interacting with them. Be sure to connect with your followers who are taking the time to comment, like, and share your posts. One of the most rewarding parts of working in social media is engaging with your audience, and these moments of connection between your brand and your followers can help you build brand loyalty and a sense of community. 

Learn more about building a social community by reading our article on 5 Creative Ways to Build a Social Media Community.

Create a Unique Hashtag for Your Campaign

Like your key message, a hashtag can tie your campaign across multiple social channels with little effort. A unique and memorable hashtag is a great way to keep track of your campaign and can be used as an opportunity for your audience to participate with you. 

One of the most notable hashtag moments on social media in recent years is Calvin Klein’s #mycalvins campaign. The collaborative campaign that started with celebrities quickly grew organically on a global scale. By celebrating individuality and self-expression, fans joined in to share their own creative and unique perspectives. #mycalvins has over 800,000 posts on Instagram.

Schedule Your Campaign Releases

Automate your campaign promotion and give yourself more time to engage with your audience and create great content. Use a tool like Dash Hudson to schedule social media posts ahead of time to create a consistent posting schedule and ensure that other non-promotional posts balance out your campaign.

Track Your Social Media Campaign’s Performance With Dash Hudson

It is essential to track your campaign’s performance to optimize your content strategy and make any necessary changes for your campaign’s success. Competitive Insights let you know where your biggest wins and opportunities against your competitors are — which allows you to save time, remain agile, and set industry benchmarks. By using UTMs and connecting your Google Analytics to Dash Hudson’s cross-channel campaigns tool, you can understand how your channels drive social commerce results and ROI. Dash Hudson’s Campaigns tool creates holistic reports to track your key insights, inform your creative strategy, and optimize for future campaigns in a comprehensive and streamlined view.

FAQs

What are examples of social media campaigns?

The most common social media campaigns for brands revolve around launching a new product or a big promotion like Black Friday. But campaigns can also highlight a brand’s values, like promoting a sustainability initiative or participating in an awareness campaign for a specific cause.

What are the best social media campaigns?

Some examples of the best social media campaigns include Calvin Klein’s #mycalvins campaign, that celebrated inclusivity, and self-expression. Another good example is e.l.f. Cosmetics’ #eyeslipsface campaign that helped launch their TikTok virality. 

Why is it important to have a social media campaign?

Your social media campaign should deliver a clear message and call to action to your target audience. By clearly defining goals, types of content to create, target audience, and ways to track performance, a social media campaign can provide the direction your team can work towards to succeed.