5 Steps to Creating a Successful Social Media Promotion
Social media promotions stand the best chance of delivering tangible business results when they are run correctly. Not only can they help grow your online audience and gain valuable leads, they also can provide an opportunity to give something back to your audience for staying engaged with your brand. Regardless of the type of social media marketing, we have found these 5 steps deliver the best chance for success.
- Set Realistic Objectives
Before you embark on your promotional journey, it is important to set clear objectives and know your end goal. The last thing you want is to wrap up the promotion and not know whether or not it was successful (Spoiler alert: if you don’t know, then you weren’t successful).
Examples of objectives include: increasing your Facebook likes, adding to Instagram or Twitter followers, gaining leads from a specific target audience, or even driving traffic to your website. Avoid too wide of a focus because you might sacrifice optimal results in a specific area.
- Find Your Theme
Once you have your objective in mind, it is vital to have a promotional theme. You may think to yourself, “Do people care if I have a theme if I am giving them a prize either way?” Simply put, the answer is yes. When your target audience comes to your profile, having an overarching theme for your promotion makes it easier to follow and understand, which will in turn give you more entries.
- Select your Channels
With the objectives and theme in place, you now need to select which channels you will use for the promotion. Keep in mind on which channels your target audience is most active. For example, you may have a large Facebook audience, but if your target audience is most active on Pinterest, you are going to want to turn your focus there.
- Create a Schedule
When the day comes to launch the promotion, you will want to have a schedule in place for the ongoing posts throughout the promotion. Avoid the mistake of delivering a big push at the beginning, only to fizzle out later in the promotion and miss out on opportunities for better results.
Before you launch the promotion, research the best times to post to your selected social channel(s) during the week. Schedule posts for those days/times to create the best possible reach of your targeted audience throughout the duration of the promotion.
- Engage and Adapt
Even though you have created a schedule for your posts, don’t let your promotion cruise on autopilot. Take the opportunity to engage with your audience and answer questions they ask, or simply thank them for entering.
If you are finding that the engagement isn’t quite what you expected, look for ways to course correct. You may need to try posting at different times, or even pay to boost your posts if you haven’t done so already.
Once your promotion finishes, you will want to review your objectives set at the beginning and compare your results. We recommend saving your results so you can refer to them when developing future campaigns. When running other promotions down the road, it is helpful to revisit past promotions to see what worked and where you could have improved.
It's critical that, as a marketer, you know how to leverage social media to build your brand, drive demand, and engage your customers. We have found these 5 steps make promotions run successfully, more smoothly and help reach your objectives.
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