Esteban Panzera

Planning a Social Media Marketing Campaign can be a rough job if you don’t know how to do it properly or can also be a waste of time if not done properly. Following this 9 tips will help you get more organized and will give you more chances of succeeding on social networks.

1. Set Real Goals: the first thing you have to think of when planning a social media marketing campaign is what you want to achieve, they have to be real goals, things you know that you can do. Some common goals are:
   • Increase Site Traffic: as Social Networks are visited daily by millions of users, creating a successful social media marketing campaign will get your website tons of visitors.
   • Increase Brand Awareness: your brand name would get a lot of visibility, consequently its brand presence would get increased a lot.
   • Increase Revenue: from all the people that you will get to visit your site, some will be really interested in what you are selling/offering and will probably buy it.
   • Increase Link Popularity: most social media users have got personal blogs or websites, if they really like what you did in the campaign they might as well link to you.
   • Understand People: this one is not that common, but it is one of the bests in my opinion: understand how people interacts with your products and with your website. This would let you improve everything in your company and your website.
   • New Product Promotion: social media is a great place for announcing when a new product/service launches.
   • Social Media Networking: you might as well get to know people in your niche that are also using social media for their success.
2. Set Targeted people: the question you need to answer here is, who do you want to see your website that will help you accomplish your goal? The answer to this question is the targeted audience.
   For example, if your goal is just to increase the traffic of your site, you wouldn’t have a specific audience, but if your goal is to increase your revenue and you are selling cars, your audience would be the people of 16+ years old. Webmasters would be the suitable audience if you want to increase your link popularity.
3. Research Social Networks: if you know who you want to target, you can now start researching where that people gets together, on what social networks they are. After you find out which social networks are the point of meeting for this audience, you will have the social networks you have to target.
   Once again you will have to do some research on that social networks to see how users there act, what they like, what they dislike, which are the top users, what they did to get there, etc.
4. Define your Strategy: after you know which social network you will have to target, you will be able to define which strategy you will use on your social media marketing campaign; if you will use content, a video, if you will try to make a new viral website, etc. Remember to check your goals and targeted audience for defining this.
5. Get submitted by a Top User: if you have already got an account at that social network and you are a respected user submit the story yourself, if not try to get someone that is a top user at that social network to submit it for you. If you can’t get anyone, you can either register and try to make yourself a top user (requires effort) or you can just register and submit it how you are (if you correctly researched the social network, you would know if you can have success doing this).
6. Find Bloggers in your niche: getting your company in a top blog of your niche, will help you accomplish nearly any goal you previously setted. To make this happen the best thing you can do is research the niche to find the top blogs in it and contact the bloggers just after you launch the social media marketing campaign telling them about it and how their visitors can benefit from it. If your campaign is really good, they might post it to their blogs.
7. Be prepared to Promote through Social Networks: depending on the social media marketing strategy you chose, you might be able to promote your campaign in one social networks by using other social networks. For example Twitter is a great example of this, if your strategy is Digg-based you could post the Digg link into your Twitter account so that all the people that follows you can see it. You obviously have to have prepared the social networks where you will promote your other social network submission before launching it.
8. Be prepared to Monitor Results: you definitely have to measure your results so that you can know if you successfully accomplished your goals. There are some general things you should monitor on any Social MEdia Marketing campaign:
• Analytics: set up any analytics program in your site to measure: unique visitors, page views, time spent on site, depth of visit and conversions.
• Contribution: if the page where people lands has got social elements (people can contribute into it, for example comments), monitor the number of comments you receive, you will then be able to see the unique visitors/comments relation.
• Feed Subscribers: check how many you had before and how many you have after finishing the campaign.
• Other Social Networks: check if your content gets to be successful in other social networks.
• People talking about you: use MonitorThis to check who talks about you and who is helping you spread the word.
9. Check you have everything you need: this might sound stupid, but just before launching your campaign, re-check that you have everything you need for its success and that you are following the 8 tips mentioned before. Remember that if you forget anything and your social media marketing campaign, doesn’t succeed because of that you will have lost lots of hours of work. After all it is better to lose some minutes than lots of hours.