How to Set Goals for Your Social Campaign

In the past, marketers lived in a simpler world. Although the task of finding the right marketing channel mix wasn’t easy, the number of channels and how content was consumed was limited. Marketers could carefully select their mix of television, radio, print, event, and out-of-home advertising and that was it. Customers only had so many places to consume content, and advertisers knew they’d be there.

Image (Television)

The internet changed all that.

The first disruption was connectivity that enabled on-demand content consumption. Then, mobile put the power of the internet in our pockets. Communication with customers was upended and traditional channels fragmented into individualized, on-demand content consumption. Then social media arrived, adding a new layer to an increasingly complex mediascape.

This new channel brought with it the rise of new set players. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linked-In became new places for consumers to discover content. While other players like Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest and Tumblr, delivered on other content needs. These new social channels had a fundamental difference, consumers created the content and different social platforms served different purposes for customers. It’s a new reality, that’s created a challenging calculus for brands. 

So how can a marketer develop a winning social strategy?

Step one is to pause, take a breath, and smile about the fact that social gives brands the ability to target advertising at well-defined target customers. 

Step two is taking a multi-platform social media strategy, it’s the best way to achieve brand reach, know what customers are saying about you, and elevate your rankings in search results (Hovde, 2017).

Step three is knowing that you already have the answers to a great social media strategy and it’s based on answering a couple of key questions: 

1.    What goals do you want to accomplish with social media? 

2.    Which platform(s) best aligns with those goals?

But before moving forward, let’s understand the difference between organic and paid social media marketing. Organic social media is the content you own and post to your social pages, like videos and pictures, as well as the comments your customers make (Gurd, 2018). Paid social media is the stuff that you pay for, like an advertisement or sponsored post, that is then displayed to a potential customer (Gurd).

For the bulk of this article, we’re going to focus on paid social media. 

What goals do you want to accomplish with social media? 

Social media’s reach has become massive. According to one global statistic11 people start using social media every second, that’s nearly 1 million new users every day (Kemp, 2018). The potential for reaching customers is irresistible, but reach itself does not guarantee that customer’s will positively engage with your brand in social. Having a strategy that’s aligned with your business goals will ensure that you’re using the channel and platforms to best support your brand.

So, let’s start with your brand’s social media goals. What do you want to accomplish with social? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive sales? Improve customer loyalty? Let’s take a closer look at each of these goals, the content that complements them, and which platforms are the best fit.

Increasing brand awareness is one of the most powerful capabilities of social media. When it comes to brand building with paid social, the two networks that dominate are Facebook and Instagram. An Oxford study showed that "Most campaigns that ran on Facebook and Instagram had a positive outcome on brand saliency, associations, and motivations for consumers.” (Tan, 2017). The key to the content that delivered those results? It was “more personable, emotional, and less functional...more human.” (Tan)

The key approach with Facebook and Instagram is developing messages that humanize your brand and align with your target’s personality. It’s a quality over quantity approach, more ads doesn’t necessarily mean more brand awareness, but a carefully, crafted personable ad that showcases your brand’s personality can positively impact your brand awareness. The content of your paid content is incredibly important, like this clever Instagram post by Vans shoes, it taps into their counter-culture, throwback style by featuring an older style Spiderman comic:

If your goal is driving sales, paid social media can play a part. You will want to keep the top reasons that people use social in mind as you choose your messaging and platform though. Topping the list for reasons people use social media is staying in touch with friends, knowing about current events, filling spare time, and finding entertainment (Cooper, 2018). Coming in at number eight on the list? Researching which products to buy (Cooper).

This doesn’t mean that you can’t “sell” via social, just temper your expectations about how big a chunk of your sales goal it can meet, and how long it will take to close the sale. The good news is that 76 percent of consumers have purchased items they’ve seen in social posts, but 65 percent of those customers purchased later (Cooper). So be patient, customers might see your product promoted in their feed, but the purchase comes later. 

When it comes to selling on social media your content simply offering up coupons or special offers may not be the way to go. Influencers are incredibly important on social media today. An influencer is someone with a large following on social media. One studyof Twitter users found that nearly 40% of Twitter users were prompted to purchase a product after an influencer’s tweet. (Barker, 2018). Influencers hold sway, and their star is a rising.

When it comes to selecting a social platform to sell items, Facebook is the current king. What’s the last platform that 48% of American social media users made a purchase on? Facebook (Cooper). The key to success may not just be in advertising on news feeds, but in Facebook Messenger too as internal tests have shown an 8% increase in impressions and seven percent decrease in cost (Cooper). Here’s one example of a Messenger Ad, it uses Facebook’s personal assistant called M, while searching for a restaurant the application makes a recommendation for a paid advertiser, Command Burger:    

Pinterest is another place to consider for sales, especially for small businesses. One Shopify survey showed that Pinterest ads/postings yield an average order of $50 more than other leading social media platforms. Pinterest has its own promotional tools, and also provides ways to simplify the sales process with a shopping bag. (Barker)

Using social media to drive brand loyaltycan come in many forms, and we’ll discuss content approaches to that later in this piece. But if you want social to help you accomplish loyalty it’s important to focus on these channels to facilitate customer care. The American Marketing Association breaks social care down into 5 P’s:

1.    Participate: Listen for issues

2.    Platform: Have a customer care listening post

3.    Prioritization: Identify the real problems

4.    Problem resolution: Have a team that knows social

5.    Process: Respond quickly and see it through (Crosby, 2017).  

Take this example from JetBlue, it helps the brand build loyalty by taking care of a burning situation when their other care channels weren’t working for the customer:

For your customer loyalty goals, it’s good to listen on all the social media platforms you can handle. Responding to posts on owned Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram social pages, like now stands as a basic expectation of customers.

Aside from customer care, if you want to really drive loyalty through social media, you can still leverage organic pages on Instagram and Twitter to share user generated content, either through hashtags or retweeting/reposting your customers content about your brand. That’s right, good old organic content. There’s no guarantee that it’ll get views, but all that matters is that one customer who smiled because a brand they love, loved them back.

Therein lies the power of social, it has the ability to create closer conversations between brands and their customers. Whether it’s someone that found the brand for the first time, or a returning buyer, the active voice of social media gives a brand a scale to engage with more customers on a one-to-one level, and that’s a challenge the traditional media channels could never meet.

References

Barker, S. (2018, March 26). 7 simple ways to drive sales on social media [with examples]. Medium. Retrieved on October 29, 2018 from https://medium.com/strategic-content-marketing/7-simple-ways-to-drive-sales-on-social-media-with-examples-8012193aa2fb

Cooper, P. (2018, June 5). Social media advertising stats that matter to marketers in 2018. Hootsuite. [Blog]. Retrieved on October 27, 2018 from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-advertising-stats/

Crosby, L. (2017, April 4). How Effective Is Social Media Marketing at Driving Brand Loyalty? American Marketing Association. AMA.org. Retrieved on October 27, 2018 from https://www.ama.org/publications/MarketingNews/Pages/how-measure-social-media-brand-loyalty-driver.aspx

Hovde, K. (2017, February 22). Why every business should be using multiple social media accounts. Business.com. Retrieved on October 29, 2018 from https://www.business.com/articles/why-every-business-should-be-using-multiple-social-media-accounts/

Kemp, S. (2018, January 29). 11 new people join social media every second (and other impressive stats). Hootsuite. [Blog]. Retrieved on October 26, 2018 from https://blog.hootsuite.com/11-people-join-social-every-second/ 

Tan, E. (2017, November 9). Good news, social media advertising really does work for brand building...mostly. PR Week. Retrieved on October 29, 2018 from https://www.prweek.com/article/1449735/good-news-social-media-advertising-really-does-work-brand-buildingmostly

Television. [Image]. Retrieved on October 29, 2018 from https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjY1tTj86zeAhWug-AKHQvUB_IQjB16BAgBEAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpngimg.com%2Fdownload%2F39283&psig=AOvVaw0dGfRIlkZDhzzNarXg-sUW&ust=1540945516911382

Vans. (2018, February 27). [Video]. Retrieved on October 26, 2018 from https://www.instagram.com/p/BftUQgPDWLT/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=embed_video_watch_again