Is your social media campaign not achieving success? You may be able to fix it!
A social media campaign is a great way to build brand recognition and increase awareness. A perfect example that illustrates an effective social media campaign was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
Back in 2014, news feeds across various social media platforms were flooded with videos of people participating in the challenge. Raising money and awareness, the social media campaign was considered a huge success. Since then, business have experimented and attempted to launch a campaign that achieved the same level of success as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
Despite the overwhelming success of the Ice Bucket challenge and other social media campaigns, many businesses still doubt the power of social media. At Kraus Marketing, we have come to find that the reason businesses look down on social media is because they tried to launch a viral social media campaign that (unfortunately) failed to generate momentum.
Why do many social media campaigns fail? Lets take a look at what might be holding you back from achieving viral exposure.
Your Strategy
Many businesses foolishly think that gaining awareness on social media will be quick and easy: gain a few followers, publish a few pieces of content and soon everything will fall into place, right? Not exactly.
Behind every social media campaign is an excellent strategy. A good strategy is more than just deciding what content to publish and when. It includes:
- Your objectives and goals
- How you will measure these goals
- Who you’re trying to reach
- What content appeals to your audience
- What platforms your audience is on
- Budgeting & Time Management
A social media campaign is only as good as its execution. If you have do not have a detailed marketing plan, your social media campaign is doomed from the start.
Boring Content
When developing your strategy for a campaign, many marketers foolishly make the mistake of reinventing the wheel…so to speak. They take a look at content that other successful brands created and repurpose it for their own efforts. After all, it worked for them; it can surely work for you, right?
One reason that the ALS challenge was so successful was because it was fresh and new, which got people excited. There is nothing worse than something forgettable, so reinventing the wheel won’t cut it.
You’ll have to go deeper than just providing high-quality content; you’ll also have to put a creative twist to it. It may require some additional work and experimenting, but it’ll be worth it in the end.
Selling Instead of Engaging
Many people don’t understand the point of social media. While your main objective is to promote a product or service, you can’t do that all of the time. People will eventually tune you out if every post is a sales pitch.
Why is this? Because social media isn’t about sales! It’s about conversations, engagement and building an online community.
Again, think back to the Ice Bucket Challenge. Sure donations were accepted, but social media campaign encouraged everyone to get involved by making their own videos. This appealed to users because they felt involved and apart of something bigger than themselves.
If you are not attempting to interact with your audience and making them feel apart of your campaign feel, you are missing out on tremendous opportunities for engagement, which could lead to more reach.
Choosing The Right Social Media Platform
Some people still foolishly believe that all social media platforms were created equally. This could not be further from the truth. Whether you choose to accept it or not, some content simply does not translate well on certain platforms.
For example, LinkedIn is aimed more at professionals who are trying to network within their industry. Meanwhile, Facebook is usually used for reconnecting with friends and family members. In general, Facebook is more laid back than LinkedIn. So the content that may be successful on Facebook may not necessarily work with your audience on LinkedIn.
When developing the strategy for your social media campaign, it is important that you rethink your social media approach if you are not achieving the results that you desire.
You need to take a step back and reevaluate which social media platforms are right for your brand. Which social media platform aligns with your brand images and your goal objectives.
Did You Analyze Your Metrics?
Believe it or not, this is a common mistake that we have encountered over the years. People spend so much time developing content, schedules and other aspects that they sometimes overlook how they are going to measure their ROI.
This aspect of the campaign cannot be ignored! The best way of understanding if your campaign was successful or a dud is using the metric tools that many social media platforms provide. For example, Facebook Insights is a goldmine of information because it allows you to analyze all post related to the campaign.
It can tell you how many times your content was viewed, shared, liked and commented on. You can then compare this to your goals that you created at the beginning of the campaign.
This then allows you to determine which types of content performed the best. Perhaps Infographics and image-based posts resonated better with your audience? Or maybe your posts caught more attraction on a Monday morning rather than a Friday afternoon.
Using the information provided by these insights, you can integrate into your next campaign, which will hopefully be more successful.
Keep in mind, however, that you cannot just rely on shares and likes to determine the success of your social media campaign because it is merely one aspect of social media analytics. It is also important to use tools such as Google Analytics in order to keep track of conversions on your website.
How Can I Fix My Social Media Campaign?
With hard work and planning, you can develop a social media campaign that drives the same level of success as the ALS Ice Bucket challenge. But if you want those results, you need to implement things correctly.
Sometimes, it might be best to hire a professional digital agency to handle your social media campaign. New digital trends and updates are emerging almost daily, so most brands may feel overwhelmed to stay on top of these new trends. But professionals in social media are adept to these changes and may deliver the results that you seek.
At Kraus Marketing, we special in SEO, Web Design and other areas of Digital Marketing. If your last social media campaign was unsuccessful, we would be more than happy to help you. By working with us, we can analyze what went wrong and how to improve your marketing efforts moving forward. For more information, contact us at 973-998-5742 or visit us online at www.KrausMarketing.com.