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5 Social Media Campaign Strategies to Rock Your Brand

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Do you want to create social media campaigns that will make your brand a sensation? Read these five strategies to grow your social media and blow your audiences’ mind.
Social media campaign is nothing but a series of coordinated activities aimed to promote your product or raise brand awareness in a community.

We all have fond memories of the melas that used to happen in our localities. Do you remember that it always had a theme? If it’s Diwali, then the mela used to be filled with people dressed in traditional and crackers and sweets could be seen everywhere. Apart from this there used to be people selling their items and did you ever notice something peculiar about them? They used to always be in tune with the theme of the fest. Now you must be asking what does this have to do with social media campaigns? The answer is simple, a social media marketing campaign is nothing but a fest for the audience digitally. 

Today I am going to answer why social media campaigns can boost your company’s reach and how you can plan the most effective social media campaigns.

Your company’s presence will inDo you want to create social media campaigns that will make your brand a sensation? Read these five strategies to grow your social media and blow your audiences’ mind. 

Social media campaign is nothing but a series of coordinated activities aimed to promote your product or raise brandcrease if you aim to build a loyalty around your brand. Look at companies like Rolex or Omega. They have such a loyal customer base that they have almost stopped advertising. Campaigns also help in increasing the users on your landing page and its quite important as you can have the best page globally, but it is of no use if it doesn’t show on the first page of Google, and we rarely look into pages 2 or 3 of Google. 

The best way to actually have an excellent social media campaign, requires you to have a unique content or else the social media algorithm might not promote your content extensively. So let’s get started!

Conduct extensive research

The most vital and essential step for any creative social media campaign is to do exhaustive research. This includes keeping a tab of any significant festivals, book launches, movies, series, etc., coming up. This is essential because social media, functions only on public emotion. To understand more about the relation between social media and society you can read my blog on the impact of media on society

Read about what is the impact of media on society?

You can use tools like Google trends, Google console and keyword planner in Google Ads to understand more about the current trends on social media.

Understanding the purpose of your campaign

Be it real life or social media, it’s always necessary to have a purpose. After all, we want to hit the bull’s eye. If you are conducting a campaign to reach out to new businesses, LinkedIn is the best platform. Instagram is the best when you are looking to reach youth. Do you have a product that might require a manual, and people want to know how to use the product aspect? Then YouTube is the best platform for you. This can be best achieved by asking yourself the following questions:

  1. Who is your customer?

  2. Why will they buy your product?

  3. How interested are they in your product?

Once you have the answers to these questions., the next step is to conduct an audit. You can either interact with people or carefully study the outcomes of your previous posts on social media. While researching old posts, I want you to introspect the following things – What went wrong, how can I improve the quality of posts, engagement, what went better than my competitors, etc. The obvious question is how do we track all this? Use the analytics that each social media platform gives, or you may use any other external analytics tool. 

Should I research the best timings to upload as well?

Yes, there are good timings to post on social media. It is one of the most crucial parts of any social media campaign. The timings of your post should be as accurate as Virat Kohli’s cover drive. 

The best time for each social media advertising platforms is given below 

  1. Instagram 
    1. 7 am – 9 am 
    2. 12 pm – 2 pm 
    3. 6 pm – 7 pm
    4. 9 pm – 10 pm 
  2. Facebook 
    1. If you target the youth, the best time is when they are in either metro or cab busy checking their news feed. 8 – 10 pm
    2. If your target is specifically the corporate bunch, you can also try lunch hours. 12–2 pm
    3. Morning peak hours when everyone is traveling to reach their workplace.
    4. You can experiment with these different timings to see which works best for your brand
  3. LinkedIn
    1. Wednesday at 3 pm
    2. Thursday between 9 am, and 10 am
    3. Fridays between 11 am and 12 pm

Think about this: what was the main factor that made you visit any stall at a fest? The product? I am sure it’s a no. Then what was it? The answer is the look of the stall. The same thing needs to be taken care of in any social media campaign. You need to create some great designs to create a good social media post. 

General tips to keep in mind while designing a poster.

  1. If you are an expert in designing then apps like Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator are the best for you in which you can use your creativity to the fullest.
  2. If you aren’t having many ideas regarding designing of posters, then you can use apps like Canva in which you can enter a few keywords and get recommendations on the poster to be used.

Now that we have the basic parameters all set, let us jump into the different types of social media campaigns:

Using brand ambassadors

Social media is filled with hundreds of influencers who have a huge fan following with them. If you are relatively new to digital marketing, then this can be an easy method to reach followers. Brand ambassadors are on an increasing demand because the company need not spend huge money on getting a customer base, rather they can target the existing fan base that a famous personality brings with him. It would be best if you made sure that such persons’ followers are not filled with inactive/fake/ spam accounts.

 This can be quickly done by checking their engagement. If its high then followers are genuine, if its low than it may be due to fake followers. This, however, has one drawback, which is it is costly. This campaign isn’t advisable for relatively new businesses because you might end up spending a large portion of your revenue on just one social media campaign. Never forget the old saying: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” However, if your company has a considerable amount of revenue being generated, you can even have a brand ambassador. Brand ambassadors can take your campaign to new heights. I am going to tell you about various ads and how we can learn from them.

  1. Ranbir Kapoor and Paresh Rawal’s Coco-Cola advertisement on Diwali. Social media campaign #sayitwithcoke aims to unite people through a universal passion that makes such moments more memorable and impactful. Using the actor’s popularity to reach a much larger audience has been a hit. Coco cola went on to use many variations of this ad in promoting their brand during Diwali. This gave us the learning that an effective social media campaign needs to have a good base creative and then you can produce variations of them.
  2. Tanishq- Riwazoon wali Diwali: Tanishq used this to promote its latest Diwali collection, and guess who was the brand ambassador? It was none other than Deepika Padukone. This Diwali social media campaign had gathered millions of views all over the social media platforms. This gave us the learning that targeting an audience that has some exposure to the products does wonders. Tanishq could have taken any other celebrity in Bollywood but they chose Deepika Padukone for a very specific reason. The reason is that Deepika Padukone was a part of many movies where she had played roles that required a lot of Jewelry and that resulted in her fan base already being accustomed to Jewelry.
  3. Charlie Sheen Effect- When the Hollywood actor Charlie Sheen was diagnosed with HIV, the spike in the search results of HIV rose overnight. He created and raised more awareness for HIV than the United States and the United Nations combined. This is the growth that brand ambassadors can bring to your product. The learning is that if your product aims to solve any social problem then its best to mimic the approach used by these celebrities to increase your awareness.

To know more about Influencers, you can read my blog – all you must know about influencer social media marketing. 

Read my blog on all you must know about influencer social media marketing

Using existing brand related channels 

What if you don’t want to use a brand ambassador. Worry not, we have an equally effective tool. It is tapping the infinite groups on many social media platforms. For example, you want to promote a product which is for teaching kids. One way would be to use Shahrukh Khan as Byju’s does, or you could look for groups to promote. You can search for groups by typing in a few keywords like schooling for children, teaching kids, and many more. Then join the group with a decent number of active members to make sure the group doesn’t have spam accounts or bots. This is equally effective for the following reasons:

  1. Celebrities bring their fan following who become your potential customers. In the same way, these accurately targeted groups become your potential customers.
  2. You get to solve the queries in these groups and pitch your product in a very subtle way. 
  3. You get to analyze your competitors.

However, before you start with your goals, it is always better to introduce first and interact with the group members before pitching in your products. You can run your social media campaign parallel to any upcoming activities in these groups. 

Usually, people aim for paid social media campaigns and its best to use paid services because for promoting your posts, the social media algorithm goes through your page followers, engagements and interactions to target the audience. The steps mentioned above make it very easy for the algorithm to target the people who are exclusively interested in your product or the concept of your product.

Contests and giveaways

This is one of the most popular and sure-shot methods of running a social media campaign. The main aim of this is to increase engagement with your customers and create more reach and followers on your page. This is one of the most popular ways of campaigning on Instagram. Now, why are the giveaways successful? The answer is straightforward: it makes us feel important and unique. Customers want to feel that they are a part of an elite club. Another essential aspect worthy of noting is that giveaways don’t require you to create much content. This is usually done by the users. Things that people use for the giveaway are:

  1. Netflix accounts for 2-3 months
  2. Your products
  3. Age-specific prizes. For a teen, it could be an in-game discount coupon. For a lady, it could be a gift voucher for a salon.

Once this is done, you must decide how many giveaways you will do and decide the giveaway’s duration. Studies have shown that two weeks is the maximum time you should allot to one giveaway campaign. After the duration, you must set the rules of the game. The rules generally used are:

  1. Tag 2-3 friends in the comment section below and follow our page. This is particularly useful for companies with fewer likes and interactions. This is mainly aimed at getting traffic straight to your social media page.
  2. Create a poster and share it in your story. Ask people to take a screenshot of it and tag your friends in it. For example, if your product specializes in online shopping, you can create a template for story and ask people to describe their worst shopping experience in 3-4 words and tag 2-3 friends. This way, with just one template, you can reach millions in just a few rounds of publicity.
  3. You collaborated with a popular page: Brands usually tie-up with any high following page for giveaway contests. This is particularly useful when your page is relatively new to social media. Make sure that the page with which you tie-up doesn’t have too many tie-ups; otherwise, it won’t be that effective.

Make sure that you use only two of the above rules. We don’t want to make our customers do a lot of work as after all customers are kings!! 

Now that your giveaway is done, it’s time for the rewards!! The best way to announce is to make a post stating that the winner will be announced on the XYZ platform at ABC time. This can be an excellent way to get all eyes on your page at a particular time, and you can use Instagram/ Facebook live video feature to announce the winner. You could even bring them on the live video. This will make the person feel good, and the ones who didn’t win will try the next time again because, as I said, everyone loves the feeling of being important.

Here you can use the boost post feature that social media platforms offer to increase your reach. However, if you don’t have a decent number of followers then wait for 2-3 posts and then go for the paid features, as the social media algorithm will be able to target your audience with a much greater accuracy.

Non-Profit partnership

We are now living in a world where the news channels are filled with many bad happenings worldwide, and we all feel like doing something good for the world. It is more like giving back to society initiative. Have you ever read this sentence “For every one notebook you buy, we donate Rs. X to ABC organization”? Why is this sentence important? This gives you a feeling that indirectly you are doing a noble cause and the odds of you repurchasing the same product increases by a considerable margin. This is the reason for running such social media campaign

For this, you will have to get in touch with a non-profit organization and convince them how your brand’s vision meets with them. Once this is done, you are all set. Create a post stating how your product helps the needy. Your post should be able to arouse the viewer’s emotions. You can use a tagline like “for each like you give to our page we will help one person’s family” and so on. 

Nonprofit features are usually one of the best returns when it comes to using paid social media campaigns simply because of the fact that it appeals to those senses of the audience that doesn’t have any malice and people in most of the cases support these initiatives.

Podcasts

Podcasts are the most underrated forms of the social media marketing campaign. This is a handy tool for getting reach from multiple places. A start-up from my college used this to get close to 1500 followers on Instagram by the time the campaign ended. It involves inviting people for a podcast to discuss any topic for about 5-7 minutes. Make sure that the topic for discussion in some way complements your brand. We don’t want to have a case where we invite an esteemed sportsperson to a podcast whose company sells music recording software! Podcast, however, carry a bit more risks than other forms of a social media campaign which is: There are high chances that your target audience won’t like the podcast for some reason, and this can have adverse effects on your brand, but if it is a huge success, well then you need not worry about your product sales for a long time.

One thing to keep in mind is that many social media campaigns aren’t using this feature simply because they have the resources to do large scale advertisements. This also brings a huge advantage as podcasts becomes a lesser explored domain and this way you can get your advertisements to the top in a much easier way.

How to decide which is the best social media campaign?

The best way to think about it is to be completely selfish here. Sounds weird, right? Yes, it does, but it works 😊. Think the same a shrewd politician would think before launching any election campaign. I am sure that the following questions will come to your mind: Is it good? What benefit am I going to get from this? Will this turn the tide in my favour. Sit with a pen and paper and answers these questions for each type of social media campaign, and you will realize which one is the best for you.

Which ideas did you like the most? What are the social media campaigns you have tried? Tell me in the comments. 

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