Creating a great social media campaign may seem daunting and expensive - but trust us, it shouldn’t be. I'm sure you are all aware of the many successful social media campaigns created by large companies that spend a fortune on creating assets and pushing the campaign forward. It's not surprising that they do so well with such a big budget - but in reality, this isn’t necessary for small businesses. The truth is, gaining success with social media campaigns isn't just for the big players, it's available to all, you just need to make sure your strategy is on point.

Common Mistakes...

Most people overlook the key factors that make for an effective social media campaign; the first being the compelling copy. It shouldn't be overly "salesy" but it still needs to reflect your business and main principles. And with budgets being on everyone’s mind, it’s now important to ensure that you get the outcomes you’re looking for from your campaigns.

The only thing you need to get started on creating a solid and successful social media campaign is a plan. And that’s where we come in. We’ve listed EVERYTHING you need to know on how to create a social campaign that can compete with all the other businesses out there. And we'll show you how to track the impact that your campaign is having. Our guide also shows you how to make sure that your campaign is optimised for success.

Before We Jump In…

  • There are 4.57 billion people around the world now using the internet.
  • Of those users, 346 million new users have made it online within the last 12 months (July 2020).

These statistics are huge and show that there is a great opportunity to reach your target audience with a few clicks of a button. But getting the eyes on your brand is just the first step...

Once you’ve reached your target audience, you’ll then be able to engage with current and potential customers, create brand loyalty, increase website traffic, and drive more sales than ever before. Marketing on social is a powerful technique that can really accelerate your business's growth and digital presence.

Let’s Get Started...

There are 7 fundamental steps you need to follow to increase your reach and conversion rates. These make the difference between seeing a positive ROI from your social media marketing activity, or not. Most businesses that fail to see a decent result (for the pound) aren’t considering these steps when formulating their strategy and executing their campaign.

The following breakdown will show you exactly what you need to create an effective campaign plan, from the research to the creative graphics and ad copy and everything in between.

So, let’s start and begin exploring how to plan a successful paid social media campaign in 7 easy steps...

What’s your Budget?

Reasons Why Your Social Media Campaign Could Be Failing... And How To Fix Them

Often, one of the biggest hurdles is getting budget allocation for your paid activity. Once you have a budget to work with, you’ll need to decide how you want to administer the budget…

We’d suggest going with a flexible budget. This is where you set aside 1/3rd of the funds, in case you need to adjust bid levels to maintain competitiveness throughout the life of the campaign. This will also allow you to move budget around through the lifespan, adding more budget to areas that are performing better than others.

You’ll want to funnel your approach into 3 aspects:

Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

If you’re new to running social media campaigns, we’d suggest splitting your budget as follows:

  • Awareness (50%)
  • Consideration (30%)
  • Conversion 20%)

However, if you’ve already been running awareness campaigns for a few weeks and have a lot of data (site visitors) then we’d suggest you alter your budget and put emphasis on the consideration and conversions ads: Awareness (20%), Consideration (30%) and Conversion (40%).

What’s the Objective?

When you’re setting up your social media campaigns, you need to have a clear idea of what your objectives are. Are you looking to increase brand awareness or reach? Are you looking to drive traffic to your website? Or are you looking for sales?

If you’re looking to drive more sales, then you’ll want to create different ads to take users through a digital ‘journey’. As mentioned in the budget section, you’ll first need to raise awareness of your brand and its offerings. Then you’ll want to run consideration ads that provide users with more information - helping them to make informed decisions. Then finally, when users have all the information they need, you’ll want to start running your conversion ads that direct users to product or service pages.

It’s fundamental that you determine your objectives before you start creating a plan, as depending on the objective, your ad copy and creatives will differ significantly - along with the ad set up.

Who are you Targeting?

Reasons Why Your Social Media Campaign Could Be Failing... And How To Fix Them

When it comes to getting results with social media, one of the most important considerations is targeting the right audience. Otherwise, you could be throwing money away.

You want your ads to be seen by people that will be interested in your product or service. They are likely united by some common characteristics, like demographics and behaviours.

As you develop your target audience, don’t be afraid to get highly specific. You can start with broad interests like skincare. But thorough research will allow you to get into much finer detail and will likely result in fewer website visits, but higher conversion rates overall - which is what we should be striving for.

Here’s what you need to do…

Ask yourself, who would benefit from my product or service? Are they male, female, or both? What age range would this product or service be most suitable for? And finally, what would their interests or professional status be? If you’re selling Digital Marketing Services, then you’ll be targeting business owners or decision-makers.

How Long Do You Want The Campaign To Run For?

Reasons Why Your Social Media Campaign Could Be Failing... And How To Fix Them

If you have an on-going budget that will be reviewed monthly, we’d suggest running your campaigns for the entire month. Then depending on their performance you can go ahead and refresh the creatives/ad copy, on a monthly basis.

It’s Time To Create Your Campaign…

Your campaign should be broken up into 3 sections: campaigns, ad sets and ads. We’ll walk you through the set up now, ensuring you know exactly what to do to get the results you’re looking for.

Campaigns

This is the top-level view of your campaign as a whole, where you will allocate your budget and the overall aim of your campaign. You’ll also be able to add budget optimisation in at this point - this feature will allow you to distribute your budget across ad sets to get more results depending on your delivery optimisation choices and bid strategy. You can control spending on each ad set.

ADS SETS

Ad sets are groups of ads that share settings for how, when and where to run your ad. When you create an ad set, the choices you make at the ad set level automatically apply to all of the ads within the ad set.

In this section, you'll use ad set level options to choose audience characteristics such as location, gender and age. You’ll also be able to clearly outline your target audience, based on their interests via detailed targeting. You will also be able to create a custom audience. This could be site visitors from the last 30 days, for example (plus much more!).

Ideally, if your budget is big enough, we’d suggest segmenting your targeting out to multiple ad sets - that way you’ll be able to monitor which audience is converting and which aren't. This will inform future activity along with giving you the option to turn off some ad sets while keeping the ones that are performing live.

ADS

Reasons Why Your Social Media Campaign Could Be Failing... And How To Fix Them

We can’t stress enough the importance of having well-designed creatives, while static images can look great, we’re seeing more companies using VIDEO as a way of capturing their audience’s attention. Even simple animations like gifs can be much more eye-catching than still images on a small mobile screen. However, while video is great, you should also test static images too - to determine which resonate with your audience more. Many studies show that campaigns that combine static images and video achieve a 17% higher rate of conversion than static-only campaigns.

Video creation doesn't have to be difficult or expensive. You can often create powerful animations on a phone using simple apps. You only need 1-2 elements in motion to bring your creative design to life.

There are 4 different types of Motion:

  • Basic Motion is about adding 1-2 moving elements within the first three seconds.
  • Brand in Motion is about adding movement to the logo within the first three seconds.
  • Benefit in Motion is about animating the benefit or primary message in the first three seconds.
  • Demo in Motion is about educating the customer on how the product or orderingprocess works.

In order to determine the impact of the creative, we recommend using each of these four techniques, then testing each with the same audience and ad objective. This can be done through the A/B test features.

Take Off

Hooray! It’s finally time to launch your campaign which is super exciting. Your ad will take a little while to get itself approved, and once approved will go through an initial ‘learning’ phase. This is where the campaign will serve your ads to people at volume and determine the best audience group, ad set, or creative to use to gain the best results.

Keep An Eye Out

Reasons Why Your Social Media Campaign Could Be Failing... And How To Fix Them

Continue to manage and measure results. This is one of the most important aspects that you need to take seriously. It’s crucial that you continue to manage and measure the success of your campaign as frequently as possible, with huge-scale campaigns requiring daily check-ins.

For example, you might notice that a particular ad isn’t performing well, so might decide to turn that particular ad off to focus your budget solely on the best-performing ad placement.

You can also make tweaks to the ad copy/creatives. One thing to note here is the importance of documenting any changes you make throughout the lifespan of the campaign. It’s really important to know what impact your changes are having on the success of the campaign, allowing you to take learnings that can influence future activity.

Do You Have What It Takes?

Now that you’re aware of the steps needed, it’s time to put everything into practice. Fear not, if you need any assistance or would like a free consultation then don’t hesitate, and contact us today. You can also start following us on socials (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn) to stay up to date with what is going on within the World of Digital Marketing.


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