Five top tips for successful social media marketing campaigns

The biggest challenge facing businesses today, whether an international conglomerate or a small family-run company, is marketing effectively on social media. The rewards can be huge, but it can be a difficult medium to have a significant impact on.

Trends and tastes online change quickly, every company needs to take a flexible approach that is backed by tools and techniques that react right away and fold your strategy into the latest social trends. Here are five top tips for a successful social media campaign.

Every successful social media marketing campaign is built upon a solid foundation of planning and preparation. Before any marketing manager begins forming their strategy, they need to ensure that all the right tools are in place for them and their team.

Slogans and slick graphic design grab the most attention from both marketers and consumers, but without effective administrative hardware and software even the best designs and taglines will fail. To run a successful marketing campaign, and many more after it, every marketing department needs a suite of tools at their fingertips to help them organise and share information.

Keeping important documents centralised, uniform, and easily distributed can be a challenge. The many different document types are difficult to combine, but there are tools and apps that can help to keep information under control. You will be able to convert a JPG to a PDF with an online tool, helping you to send certain attachments. This helps to reduce the number of attachments in emails and documents on a shared data server.

With the right tools in place and some research done, a marketing campaign is already starting to form. The valuable consumer data that has been harvested from social media sites should inform the marketing strategy and even help to determine which products and services to promote.

Comb the data to identify consumer problems that the services and products the business offers can solve. Look for social media influences that can be utilised to promote products and exclusive deals. They are called influencers for a reason.

Just one influencer post on Instagram can lead to a huge influx of sales. Having a group of social media stars on hand, even if they only have follower counts in the low thousands, can be a very cost-effective way to market a business and grow the customer base.

Successful social media marketing campaigns require a combination of approaches. Short, quippy, and hopefully viral social media posts need to be underpinned by traditional online approaches like emails, blogs, and promotions on the company website.

Marketing on social media comes with a lot of advantages, and one of the biggest is the level of data that is available about consumers. Monitoring trends, hashtags, and search terms is just the beginning. There are gigabytes of consumer data waiting to be mined that can help supercharge any marketing campaign.

Scrolling through comments on posts and looking at which profiles are spreading relevant hashtags can help to identify important influencers. This also lets marketing managers ‘eavesdrop’ on conversations about products, services, and consumer opinions on the company. Using this simple technique can lead to important breakthroughs, like identifying niches in the market or gaps in consumer demand.

Many social media apps and websites have tool built-in that can provide vital insights into how consumers are receiving products and businesses. All those likes and shares add up to reams of valuable information that can be used to target specific demographics or user bases. It can also be utilised to reach out to new customers and create new social media engagements.

When businesses interact on social media, they are giving an image and a voice to their brand. It is important to handle social media posting responsibly. With one ill-timed or poorly worded tweet a lot of damage can be done to the business, and the campaign.

Balance quick-witted responses with socially conscious and customer-friendly language. Keep the brand away from controversial conversations online. Contentious issues can split the customer base in half and limit the opportunity for growth.

The followers you have across company social media profiles are the base on which the marketing campaign will be built upon.

Without a solid foundation of followers, built through trust and positive engagements, it will be difficult to execute a successful campaign. Before rolling out a new promotional push, increase the amount of engagement with existing followers.

They will need to grow accustomed to interacting with the accounts, and sharing and liking posts, if the campaign is going to reach new customers. Though it will take some management, regular posting on social media that is non-promotional, yet generates engagement and interaction with the company is worth investing time in.

Using these top tips should provide a social media marketing toolbox that can be used repeatedly. Having the workforce and software in place to react quickly to trends and execute structured marketing campaigns is the key to viral success and supercharged sales figures.