Now that you’ve identified your brand and created your content strategy, it’s time to put it to work and create a campaign!
A campaign is a concentrated communications effort to educate, excite, or engage with your audience about a particular subject, like a special, an event, or an aspect of your brand. With every campaign you create, think about the objective. What problem are you trying to solve? Then identify the ways in which you are going to meet that. We wrote up some exercises for you to practice.
What is your main theme or message?
If your goal is to educate followers on your brand, create content that best edifies that. Identify all aspects of your main campaign theme. Write out your posts, your main points that you are trying to communicate and any essential information your followers will need to know. Remember how you identified all this about your brand in your branding exercises? A campaign is like a mini brand strategy.
How are you going to communicate that?
This can be as simple as creating a campaign on one platform (like only on Instagram) or cross-promoting the same campaign on multiple platforms. If your campaign is centered around an event, that means you will need consistent information, branding, and artwork/visuals across all of your platforms (social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram).
That brings us to the next question: What social platforms will you use to promote your sale or brand?
Look at your numbers. Where do you have the most followers? On which platforms are they most engaged? Capitalize on that.
For example, If you’re hosting an event, it would be wise to create an event on Facebook if you already have a business account, but if you’re finding that your Instagram is growing, it would also be smart to promote the event on Instagram. You could add the facebook event URL to your Instagram website link in your profile and tell people to check out your link in profile for more information. All of your information for the event can live on your Facebook event and people can RSVP to it. If your Facebook performance is poor, but people follow your events listed on your website, consider directing Instagram users to your website for full details of your event.
How will you measure success?
Okay, so you’ve got all your great ideas, but the essential part of strategic communications is making sure they’re working. This goes back to creating a data-driven strategy. Before you launch your campaign, and even before you write it, consider what you define as a success. Does success mean more foot traffic, more email subscribers, more engagement? Write and create your content strategy so that it encourages people to do what you want them to do.
You can set paid campaigns to target your customers and get the reactions you want, like clicking on a website link, RSVPing to your event, or sharing your content. Consider rewarding your customers when they engage with your content.
Then, when your campaign is over, evaluate your success. Did people engage with your content in the way you wanted? If they didn’t, then look at how they engaged with your content or reacted to it and consider changing the strategy of your next campaign.
Example: Combatting Customer Dissatisfaction
Maybe you find that your customers are very aware of all the specifications that your products have, but not aware of your values of customer service. Or maybe you’ve had poor customer service reviews. Your content strategy for a specific campaign to address this issue would look like this:
Objective: Improve the customer experience through educating customers on where they can find help.
Strategy: Conduct interviews and surveys to listen to customer concerns. Offer incentives for customer participation. Educate customers on where they can find help in the store.
Implementation: You could
- Share your customer service process
- Create an FAQ page, or post those FAQs as questions with the answer on Facebook.
- Show photos of employees helping customers and educate followers on where your help desk is located.
- Create a survey to gather data on customer concerns and incentivize followers to fill it out for a chance to win a gift card.
Key Performance Indicator(KPI): Measure customer satisfaction over a period of time. Compare campaign beginning and end results over a six-month cycle through survey results.
Related:
How to Create a Content Strategy (Part 1): A Data-driven Content Strategy
How to Create a Content Strategy (Part 2): Designing a Cohesive Content Strategy
