Tips for creating and managing your own successful social media campaigns

The number of applications and tools that you can find on the Internet allows users without great knowledge of online marketing to create and manage a complete advertising campaign to promote a product, a service or simply a specific project. But before starting, it is necessary a previous planning that allows us to define the objective of the actions that we are going to carry out.

It is obvious that a planning prior to the creation of the campaign is always necessary, but first it is necessary to establish the important points on which the rest of the actions will revolve:

Campaign objective: what do I want to achieve?

Each campaign should have a predetermined objective and all the actions implemented should be focused on achieving it. Among the most common objectives for social media campaigns we can find the creation of leads, getting clicks to the website, attracting fans, generating engagement, conversions… What should I base my objective on? It is a question of priorities. Tools such as ShortStack will allow us to choose between several objectives to facilitate the creation of campaigns. If our goal is to create leads, Cool Tabs is a good option.

Platform: which social network is the most suitable?

To manage campaigns on the main platforms, there are proprietary tools that are quite simple to use and very powerful. In the case of Facebook and Instagram is Business Manager and its Power Editor tool, where we can directly upload the images and content of the posts of our campaigns. Twitter has done the same with its Twitter Ads and Google, despite being a step behind with its Google+, must be taken into account for Youtube (and its tools for this network).

Format: how am I going to reach the audience?

Choosing the right format is almost as important as choosing the right platform. If we have decided to launch our campaign on Facebook, the next step is to decide how we are going to reach the audience. This depends largely on the objective we have. If what we are looking for are leads, the most convenient is an image or video campaign, with a ‘call to action’ that encourages the user to register. In this case we will have to prepare a form and privacy policies. If we want something simpler, such as video views, we will only need the video in question and some text to inform. There are suitable formats for each of the objectives and combining them well is essential for a successful campaign.

An example would be contests and promotions on social networks. Tools such as Easypromos make it very easy as it automates almost the entire process of creating and publishing the promotion.

Segmentation: which audience am I going to target?

Another vital aspect for the operation of the campaign is segmentation. Each product has a specific target that can be wider or narrower, but without a doubt, a good segmentation helps to ‘impact’ the right users, thus reducing the cost per user of the campaign and also maximizing the possibility of achieving customers, conversions, registrations or whatever the objective of the campaign may be.

Creativities: how will I attract attention?

An 18-year-old is unlikely to be interested in a particular product in the same way as a 65-year-old retiree. Both could be targeted by a beer brand, but the way to reach them is different. Having a single campaign does not mean that the creative (ad content, posts, etc.) has to be the same every time. Throughout a campaign it is convenient to use different creatives for different age ranges, interests or location and measure those results in real time to be able to make changes at the moment and optimize the campaign. A very powerful tool that will help us to create very effective and visually attractive creatives is Woobox.

Analysis and data: what conclusions can I draw?

All this work will be of no use if there is no data monitoring and subsequent analysis. The use of monitoring pixels and other tracking tools allows almost total control of user behavior, from where they land on the page, to their movement around the web through their clicks, or the time they spend viewing a specific product. All these data are measurable and it is convenient to do it reliably to draw relevant conclusions for decision making. Google Analytics is a very powerful tool for measuring visits to our website, but it loses effectiveness when the campaign is within the social network. In this case it is better to use a tool that integrates all the activity of the campaign, such as Agora Pulse.