Marketing
10 min read
The Ultimate Guide to Planning & Tracking Social Media Campaigns
Any smart digital marketer will tell you that planning and tracking social media campaigns involves a combination of strategy, follow-through, and the right tools and software. Whether it’s a new product launch, an expansion of your company’s services, a holiday promotion, or a bid to increase brand awareness, successful social media campaigns can be valuable in achieving marketing and broader business goals.
Before we get into some best practices for tracking social media campaigns, let’s start with the basics of creating a social media campaign strategy.
What is a social media strategy?
Social media strategy is a plan for leveraging digital and online platforms to achieve specific goals and objectives. A social media strategy should outline marketing techniques that will be used, progress and success metrics, and platform-specific goals.
Executing a great social media campaign requires more than a ‘set it and forget it’ attitude. Planning and tracking social media campaigns needs deep planning and responsiveness to audience behavior.
How to plan your social media campaign
The impact of social media marketing cannot be overstated. In fact, 75% of marketers confirm that social media marketing has increased traffic to their brand. At the same time, 92% agree that it has increased visibility for their company and its offerings.
However, social media marketing can yield disappointing results when there is no strategy or direction behind a campaign. Thorough planning helps you visualize the work to be done and take concrete steps to move the campaign forward. Let's find out how to create compelling social media campaigns for your brand.
Set the right campaign goals
Did you know that marketers who set goals are 378% more likely to achieve them? Before planning a social campaign, take the time to clarify the ‘what,’ 'why,' and ‘how.’
Why is the social media campaign being launched? What is the end goal of this campaign, and how can it be achieved via social media marketing? Here are some of the most common reasons for launching a social media campaign:
Increasing brand awareness
Getting more leads and/or customers
Increasing sales
Boosting engagement
The goal of your social media campaign is the most critical element. It should roll up to your department's goals and all the way up to the larger business goals of your company.
Remember to set SMART goals, i.e., a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Once these goals are established and communicated to your teams, move ahead.
Identify the target audience persona
Spend time researching and identifying your ideal customer for your product or professional service offerings.
One of the best ways to do this is by creating a relatable buyer persona with clear demographic elements such as gender, age, likes, preferences, family size, income, and social media channels of choice.
Any social media or marketing persona should be well-researched, tested, and adjusted over time as needed.
Pick the appropriate social channels
Companies want to be present where their potential customers are. Study your audience and buyer personas and choose the social platforms they favor.
Another option is to prioritize the platforms that have brought the most visitors, leads, or customers to the brand in the past. If a suitable channel such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram brings in leads for your brand, stick to it and analyze the messaging that converts.
Play to your strengths
Every marketing team has its strengths, and knowing them is critical for success. If the team has talented video producers, platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are opportunities to reach audiences with engaging video content.
Find out the natural strengths of team members and the available resources before crafting and finalizing a social media campaign schedule that works for your team’s specific needs.
Mix it up with curated content
85% of marketers agree that content curation has directly contributed to their company's success. But creating content regularly can be challenging.
Sharing third-party content can help boost brand visibility, thought-leadership, and improve customer engagement.
Choose the right marketing campaign software
Versatile marketing campaign software can be a marketer's best friend. When implementing a social media campaign, you'll need the right tools to manage efforts effectively.
Using Wrike as your marketing campaign solution enables teams to create and assign actionable tasks, set due dates, establish team and content calendars, and easily track progress and goals.
Teams can also leverage campaign management templates allowing them to optimize future campaigns.
How to plan a social media campaign schedule
Planning a social media campaign schedule involves a number of components. Here are a few elements that can help a team create an effective social media campaign schedule.
Goal: Achieve [X number] of [metric] by [date]
Duration: [date] to [date]
Budget: [$ amount]
Platform(s): Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
Content format: text, image, video, audio, slide presentation, etc.
Frequency of content posting for each platform
Keywords: for internal organization
Milestones: additional deadlines for completing specific sections of the campaign
Details: further information you want to cover
Create a social media calendar
Now that your team has identified the social channels to use, it's time to make a strategic social media calendar.
Think of it as an editorial calendar for each channel to ensure that the content posting schedule is consistent, relevant, and features appropriate and engaging messaging.
Of course, wherever feasible and possible, your social media calendar should be considerate of changing trends, digital movements, and online conversations.
Keep holidays, occasions, and seasons in mind
Holidays and seasons are one of the busiest and most profitable times of the year. More than 40% of online sales happen in October, November, and December.
Even if you don’t have a seasonal or occasional business, your brand can leverage how customers typically behave in these seasons.
How to track your social media campaign
Tracking social media campaigns can be accomplished with the help of link tracking and building tools, website and platform analytics software, social media insights, and more.
Platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, for example, all have tools that allow users to monitor social stats like reach, engagement, and click-through rates.
[caption id="attachment_465655" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash[/caption]
By using these tools, your team can monitor how your audience responds to content, what they share, what type of content users respond to, the type of messaging that converts, and how much of the overall goal has been met.
Let’s look at the most important social media metrics to track when measuring success.
What are important metrics to measure the success of social media campaigns?
Social metrics are not just for vanity. They tell you what’s working, what’s not, and what progress is being made toward the overall campaign goals and objectives.
For every social media goal, there will be a related metric that will help determine if the strategy has been hitting the mark or not.
Here are specific metrics that you can manage and assign to your social media campaigns:
Estimated time / actual time spent
Estimated budget / actual budget spent
Goal metric / achieved metric (e.g., goal # of followers, number of sales, etc.)
Engagement
Reach
Once the social media campaign metrics are clear, track and report outcomes via individual tasks in a campaign management solution like Wrike.
How to analyze the success of your campaign
No matter what your chosen campaign goal is, measuring its effectiveness is key. To optimize your resources, you’ll want an accurate picture of campaign performance.
The easiest way of analyzing the success of your social media campaign is by reviewing the results and how they measure up against your campaign goals.
For instance, if an eCommerce company had a goal to grow their Instagram account to 20k followers by the third quarter of the year, that is a very specific and easily measurable result.
The following metrics are all indicators of success when it comes to analyzing social media campaigns.
Audience engagement
Likes, follows, shares — audience engagement tells you how much a message or piece of content is resonating with your audience. If your main campaign goal is increased brand awareness, this may be one of the most important indicators of success.
Reach
Connected to audience engagement, reach is important when it comes to optimization and reporting. Whether we’re talking organic or paid, reach can offer insights into the impact of your content and potential campaign audience size.
Conversion rates
How often were you able to get your audience to complete an intended action? That action could be clicking through to your website, signing up for a trial/account, or even completing a purchase. Conversation rates speak to how well you were able to reach your intended audience and convince them to perform a specific action.
All of these metrics can tell a piece of the story when it comes to determining and analyzing the effectiveness of your social media campaign.
Why plan your social campaign in Wrike?
Using Wrike to plan and track your social media campaigns is easy. Wrike allows marketing teams to automate reporting and streamline campaign tasks easily.
Manage all the moving parts of your social media campaign, track success, and optimize for the future. Wrike even makes it simple to duplicate successful campaigns and turn them into a template for future work, saving critical time and effort.
Start a free two-week trial to see how Wrike can set your marketing team up for social media campaign success.
