Social media marketing campaigns should be aimed at engagement with a target market, whether interaction, reaction or a call to action.
Human beings are by no means consistent in their behaviour and may be affected by events or influences entirely outside the scope of a campaign, so it would be foolish to expect l00% guaranteed success from any campaign even if all the basics have been done well.
However, too many campaigns fail to achieve even moderate success which should be defined at the outset in terms of a measurable level of engagement.
Improving the odds of success
Assuming your research has confirmed that there is a market and a demand for your product or service and you have a clear picture of your ideal client’s profile, or even created an avatar, what can you do to weight the odds of campaign success in your favour?
Firstly, there must be a clear and measurable goal for the campaign. This might be the number of people requesting more information, downloading Apps, follow up calls or meetings set up, or orders placed.
Secondly, it is crucial to understand the language from the keywords or phrases your target audience is likely to use when searching for your product and use the language and vocabulary that will resonate with them in your social media messages.
However, once interest has been aroused and desired response achieved, a campaign can still fail if the desired engagement does not follow.
Campaign success will be improved by having a clear, user-friendly landing page for a prospect to visit if you have invited them to find out more or to book an appointment or place an order. Here, too, language is important as well as visual appeal. The next steps you want people to take need to be as few and straightforward as possible. Do the messages reassure them that you can solve their problem or cater to their interests?
All of this needs to be integrated into an effective sales funnel that takes a potential client through a series of clear steps to the point of purchase.
Measurement is a continuous process
Monitoring a social media campaign, like any other form of marketing, means keeping track of how it is performing, so producing data is a must. Some social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, provide statistics on size of audience and interactions directly on their sites.
In addition to the social media monitoring data, it is necessary also to measure and monitor what happens after the successful engagement such as the outcome of a sales call or meeting. In this way, the sales funnel can be reviewed to compare the cost, effort and success of different marketing campaigns, whether social media or other.
Two advantages of social media marketing are that it is relatively straightforward to measure while it is running and it is also easy to change if it isn’t working.