Although your agency may have expertise in brand monitoring, community management, content strategy and other ongoing services such as brand management, brand monitoring, brand strategy, content strategy, and so on, targeted promotions is where you should start.
A solid workflow, powerful tools and a well-constructed plan are essential to a successful social media campaign.
Let’s take a look at how to create and implement social media campaigns for clients, so that your agency can achieve the best results.
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What is a Social Media Campaign?
Your team creates a social media campaign to help clients reach their marketing goals. Social media campaigns can have a beginning or an end, but they can be extended over any period of time and use any number channels.
What makes a campaign different to a social media strategy and how does it differ from a campaign? Strategy is a method of social media marketing. Strategy often involves multiple campaigns spread over a longer time period. Social media campaigns require planning and extensive research. A campaign is nothing without a strategy. It’s just a collection of posts on social media that are not related.
Social Media Campaign Benefits and Challenges For Agencies
Agency know-how, dedicated software and well-written playbooks give them an edge when planning and executing social media campaigns.
Social media campaigns have many benefits.
The following are benefits for your agency:
Knowledge. No matter how large or small your team, they all have impressive experience managing a variety of social media accounts. Yet everyone also has a unique area of expertise, ranging from paid social to brand monitoring.Resources. Agencies require the time-savings that marketing tools offer and the enhanced capabilities they provide. They don’t hesitate in investing in the best. When your agency takes on a new client, you already have the dashboards and apps you need.Experimentation. You have many opportunities to try new strategies once you have managed campaigns like most social media agencies. Because you have tried everything, your team will know what works and can help you apply the lessons to future campaigns.
gency challenges
When creating campaigns, agencies also face serious challenges:
Requirements. It is not easy to get clients to agree to campaign goals and budgets. Approvals. You might not get everyone to sign off on a campaign if your clients have multiple stakeholders. To streamline the process, encourage your clients to name one person to approve campaign content. Clients deserve to know whether the campaigns they run are worth it. It can be difficult to demonstrate value if campaigns aren’t geared towards sales. Your agency can show value with insightful reports.
Considerations for Large Agencies
Do you run a large agency? Expect to have both the challenges and benefits of running a large agency.
These are some things to remember:
Tools: Make sure you are using the right tools for the job. Workflows. You can document the processes of your agency so that you can use them again and again. Modify your processes when you find improvements or use new tools. Keep doing what is working, but be open to improvement. You can improve and revise your workflows and tools quarterly or annually.
Step-by-Step Guide on How to Manage a Social Media Campaign
It can seem overwhelming to start a social media campaign.
This complete guide will help you to take the process step by step and achieve optimal results.
1. Set goals and establish a budget
Your team must have an objective in order to create a social media campaign that is successful and delivers results. Do not set vague goals, but instead focus on SMART goals.
Focus on SMART goals
SMART goals are clear about the goal, the reasoning and the tracking.
Here are some tips to help you set SMART goals in client campaigns.
Specific: What is your client looking to achieve and why? Specific: What is your client’s goal and why? Choose a measurable metric like revenue, website clicks, or new followers.Attainable: Is the goal possible to achieve? To motivate your team, set ambitious but achievable goals. Time-based: When is the campaign due to reach its goal? It is important to know when the campaign begins and ends.
Calculate your budget
Even if you only use organic content, social media campaigns aren’t free. You should consider the costs of your team’s salaries, content production and advertising.
Reverse engineering is a great way to give budget advice to your client. Begin with the campaign goal, and then factor in your agency’s past campaigns results or benchmarks. Next, estimate the amount they would need to spend in order to achieve the desired outcome.
2. Research is a great way to guide your approach
Once you have confirmed the campaign budget and goal, it is time to start researching.
Your team must conduct competitive research and audience research to get the information they need to plan a successful campaign.
Study your client’s audience
What is the target audience for your client? This information is essential to create the best social media campaigns.
Go to the Agorapulse audience report for your client. It will provide you with essential demographic data such as location, gender, age, and country.
Next, you can use native social media tools for checking your clients’ profiles and filling in any gaps. Facebook’s built in insights are focused on demographics while LinkedIn’s focus is on employers and fields.
To find out more about your client’s website visitors, check their Google Analytics report. Google Analytics provides information beyond demographics. It also reveals the interests and shopping habits of visitors.
Keep ahead of the competition
You won’t be able to copy the success of your clients’ competitors. It’s a good idea to look at the top competitors and see if they are succeeding.
Take a list of the top competitors for your client and look through their social profiles. Pay attention to the promotions and features they are using. Are they working well? Can you identify why?
Use a competitor report from Agorapulse to conduct your competitive research. You can then plug in the top competitors of your client and compare their engagement and audience size.
3. The Social Media Campaign Structure
Your team can begin structuring your campaign once you have an idea of the client’s budget. You can create a framework by selecting the right channels and creating a social media funnel.
Sometimes it is logical to use social media channels where the client has an existing presence. However, you shouldn’t automatically exclude other channels.
Instead, you can look at Pew Research Center’s statistics about who uses social media platforms. To determine the channels that your clients use, you should review your competitive research.
Weighing paid vs. organic
Your agency can design social media campaigns that include organic, paid, or both.
These are the questions to ask when deciding on which product to use:
Is organic content enough to reach your campaign goal?
(You can read more about the opinions of other agencies about organic vs paid methods in our 2021 State of Social Media Agencies Report.
The most successful social campaigns target a buyer at a particular stage in their buying journey. They then guide prospects through the sales funnel to convert.
This is how you can incorporate the buyer’s journey of your client into your social media marketing funnel.
The top of the funnel is where you should start.
4. The Right Tools for Your Job
Is your agency equipped to manage social media campaigns? These essential apps and tools will help you get started.
gorapulse
Are you looking for a social media management platform that manages publishing, monitoring, and reporting? Agorapulse allows you to manage all aspects of your social media campaigns from one place, for as many clients as possible.
Sana
Are you a busy person who needs to keep track of content creation, copywriting and scheduling? Asana allows you to manage complex projects, assign tasks to teammates or clients, and set deadlines.
Canva
Are you looking for an app that organizes and simplifies the design of your campaigns? Canva allows you to access templates and make graphics stand out. You can also maintain the branding and style of your clients with Canva.
Google Sheets
Do you need a simple tool to help plan campaigns? Google Sheets allows you to create templates for your calendar, write content and communicate with your team. You can also share campaign materials between clients and team members.
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5. Plan Campaign Content
Once you have the campaign framework in place and tools, you can start to draft your first draft. Now is the time for your style guide, hashtags and calendar to be in place.
Create a calendar
Translate your campaign framework into a calendar. Note the start and end dates. Include introductory and last-chance post dates. Next, write down the rest of your content ideas.
Posts about your client’s brand for top-of-the-funnel prospects.Informative blog posts and competitor comparisons for middle-of-the-funnel prospects.Prompts to subscribe, try out, or purchase for bottom-of-the-funnel prospects.
Fine-Tune the style guidelines
It could be a waste of time for your social media team to guess what to say and how. A style guide is a way to ensure that you do it correctly every time. It should contain:
How to spell and capitalize brand terms. Which words or emojis should you use? What writing style and tone to use?
Choose a hashtag
Your team can track metrics such as reach and brand awareness with a campaign hashtag. Choose a hashtag that is unique, memorable and easy to remember.
6. Create Copy and Creatives
Once you have completed the planning phase, it’s time to shift into production. It’s best to start with creative tasks first, as they take longer to complete.
Create creative ideas
Get together with your team to plan all of your campaign creatives.
These visual elements might be part of your list:
Editing video and filming
Copy the text
Next, create the campaign messaging and then use it to write your copy. Keep the campaign focused on two to three key points that support the overall goal and repeat them throughout.
Next, write and edit the captions for all posts you plan to use social media marketing. Use social calls to actions (CTAs), to encourage your clients to take the next step.
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7. Upload Campaign Content and Schedule
You can also schedule your social media content ahead of time, even if you are not using livestreams. You can schedule your social media content ahead of time to ensure everything gets out on time.
Find the best time to post
It’s not a good idea to time campaign posts around product launches and sale announcements. Instead, publish content when your client’s audience will be most likely to read it.
Agorapulse has an audience report that will help you identify when your customers are most engaged. Note the best times to post on each channel, and add them to your campaign calendar.
Bulk publishes campaign content
Instead of uploading each post individually to Agorapulse, you can save time using the bulk publishing tool. Upload a group of images, or a CSV file with campaign content and links.
Review the posts and confirm the timing. You can also add UTM parameters to track. You can then schedule all content in one click.
8. Confirm stakeholder approvals
Once you have scheduled the campaign content, it is time to get approval from stakeholders. Agorapulse provides previews of how the post will appear when it is live so stakeholders can see how copy and creatives are combined.
First, you need to know who must sign off. Do you need to know who needs to sign off: the account manager of your agency, the point-person for the client, or both? Use one or both! These are the methods that will get your campaign content approved.
You can assign posts to stakeholders. Any post can be assigned to either an internal or external stakeholder. The assignee must approve the post before it can be published.
Make a shared calendar. Clients can access your Agorapulse shared calendar to get an overview of the site without having to assign any tasks. Clients can view and comment on scheduled posts, but they don’t need to act.
Your team should be available to monitor engagement once the campaign content is live.
These tips will help you streamline your workflow
Save replies
You don’t have to write the same reply over and over again. You can save replies to the Agorapulse dashboard so that your team can respond more quickly to engagements.
Moderation of utomate
Spam comments should not be allowed to see the light. Moderation rules can be set up to hide, delete or review spam comments to save time.
You can also assign important comments and DMs automatically to team members. You can flag them for future follow up so that your team doesn’t miss any important engagements.
Clients want to know what customers think about the brand and the product. You can create labels that reflect customer sentiment to gather data for your campaign reports.
10. Leverage Social Listening
Social listening can be used by your agency at any time. It’s especially useful for social media campaigns.
Monitor mentions
Agorapulse listens automatically for brand mentions. You can also use searches to find indirect mentions and conversations about the products, services, and competitors of your clients.
Have you created a hashtag to promote the campaign? You can add it to your listening dashboard to tune in to every conversation. You can also reply and share directly from the Agorapulse dashboard.
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11. Review and optimize
No matter how long or short your campaign is, it’s important to monitor the progress of each step. This will allow your team to spot and fix problems and optimize the result.
Check out the campaign results
To keep track of important metrics, use Agorapulse’s reporting dashboard. You can see engagement over the campaign’s time period.
To see metrics for individual posts, click on the content report.
Step-by-Step Guide to Power Reports
To see how much buzz your brand is generating, you can also monitor hashtag interactions and brand mentions.
Agorapulse’s AdsReport tool can be used to monitor Facebook Ads. You can track metrics such as CTR, CPM and revenue.
Optimize your campaign
Make adjustments to your campaign before it ends if your client isn’t meeting the goals that you have set. Try these optimizations:
Posting at convenient times for the audience.
12. Analyze and Report
Report on the results of an ongoing promotion or at regular intervals. These tips will help you make your agency’s reports more informative without taking up too much time.
Concentrate on the metrics that are most important
An average campaign report can include more than 100 metrics. Reports often have more value if they are focused on the most important metrics.
To put it another way, you may start with a campaign overview to provide context. Next, for brand awareness campaigns, you can quantify results and highlight top-performing content.
You may also be able to measure customer sentiment and report on #Hashtag interactions.
Create comprehensive reports
Agorapulse allows you to create customized reports that include the relevant metrics and social profiles. Send weekly or monthly reports directly to internal and external stakeholders.
Add additional metrics to the social media report before you send it on to your client. You can add an AdsReport breakdown for any paid campaigns.
Google Analytics can be used to show breakdowns of website traffic, conversions and e-commerce revenues.
Include expert insights
Add your expert insight from the team to the final report
What campaign goals were you able to achieve?
Your Agency can reach the next level
This guide will help you create a strategy that works for both your clients and your team. It also teaches you how to plan, implement, and analyze.
You can take control of your social media. Get a free trial of Agorapulse, which will help you plan, track, measure, and measure your social media efforts.
