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Social media can be tricky to get right. From the outside, posting images on Instagram or funny TikTok videos looks simple. And it is. But creating and executing a successful social media strategy that can generate engagement, leads, and conversions? Well, that is much more complex, and often requires you to get off your chair and learn a few things!
To make your life even harder, social media changes all the time. You’ll also find that what works well for one business can be an absolute flop for another. New social media platforms pop up all the time, and the tactics that once worked can become redundant quicker than you can say “viral”! That’s why it’s so important to stay on top of trends and understand which tactics work the best for your brand at any given time.
Your efforts on social media should be led by a comprehensive, carefully considered social media strategy as well as additional plans for social media campaigns that cover things like special events, promotions, and launches. Whether you’re just getting started and need a social media strategy template or you’re launching a special campaign and you need some brilliant new ideas, we’ve got you covered.
We’ll show you how to find the best social media campaign templates for you, and then show you what to do with them once you’ve got them in your hot little hands!
What is a Social Media Campaign?
Social media campaigns are different than your ongoing, day-to-day social media activity. Social media campaigns usually have a specific objective, such as:
Social media campaigns are typically run for a finite amount of time, although they may be extended or repeated if they’re successful. Your social media campaign might run for a day, a week, a few months, or even longer, depending on your objectives.
For instance, a product launch campaign might only run for a week, whereas an ongoing influencer marketing campaign promoting all your brand’s products might run for six months.
Social media campaigns can be run in addition to your regular social media content or they can replace it entirely. After the campaign is over, it’s important to conduct thorough reporting and analyze your campaign performance, as this information will help you refine future social campaigns.
Think of it like this: social media campaigns allow you to test new tactics, boost your activity, bolster your social media presence, and leverage popular events, days, or social movements to your advantage.
But the golden ticket to a successful social media campaign is in the planning. You need an air-tight strategy if you want to launch a kick-ass social campaign.
What is a Social Media Template?
A social media plan template could be any number of things. Let’s face it – there’s a template for everything these days. But when we talk about social media strategy templates, we’re talking about templates that allow you to figure out things like:
A social media strategy template might refer to your ongoing, always-on social media strategy outlining your objectives, your audience demographic, and how to achieve those objectives.
On the other hand, it might refer to a specific campaign. A social media campaign template is a little different. It outlines your approach for a specific social media campaign.
We recommend approaching your overall social media strategy before you start to think about individual social media campaigns.
Why Use a Social Media Template?
A social media campaign template is a super-easy way to articulate your campaign strategy in one simple document.
You might already be working towards strategic business goals in your head, but putting it all down on paper gives you more focus, direction, and accountability. You might already have a social media marketing strategy for your overall social activity, but creating mini strategies for campaigns is a little different.
Social media campaign templates are very easy to use, and if you ever need to revisit them or change them, this process is super simple. Campaign templates are also great for sharing with others – they allow you to collaborate more easily with team members, partners, or agencies.
Overall, social media campaign templates help you outline your objectives and achieve them that much faster. They should also tie in with your wider content strategy.
How to Create a Social Media Campaign Template
Ready to get stuck into it? Find out how to create your own social media campaign template below. We’ve outlined a full step-by-step guide on how you can optimize your social media campaigns for success and created a FREE template for you to use at the end. Read on to find out how and get the template for yourself!
1. Figure Out the Basics
First up, sort out the basic details for your campaign. This might require some thought, and maybe even an analysis of previous campaigns or a social media audit. Then, once you’re ready to get started, map out your social media marketing plan for your campaign.
Your basic campaign details should include:
Now that you’ve got the basics set in stone (as much as possible, anyway), let’s get into all the nitty-gritty details.
2. List Your Objectives
Next: create your social media goals. You might have only one objective, or you might have several. It will depend on the length and the complexity of the social media campaign you’re running.
Your objective/s should be very simple. At this stage, you're really just outlining what you want to achieve. The how will come later. That said, you do want to be as specific as possible. Social media objectives should include clear KPIs and can include things like:
If you’re running a longer campaign or a large campaign with a significant paid social component, your social media goals might be larger, or you might have several objectives.
You can base your marketing goals on things like past performance, industry benchmarking, or use reasoning and research to create a goal.
3. Outline Your Audience
Defining your audience and establishing buyer personas is crucial for your success. If you don’t understand who you’re talking to you’ll never master your messaging, and you won’t resonate with your audience.
Typically, your social media campaigns can go one of three ways:
Either way, you need to define this before you move on to the campaign planning phase. You can use reporting tools like Facebook Insights or Sked Social to understand your existing audience and determine where and when they’re most likely to be active and engaged on social media.
Sked Social has advanced social media analytics that can provide you with insights to help you understand your existing audience, which can inform your future social media campaigns. The bigger your existing social media audience, the more concrete your data will be.
You’ll need to do the work and:
You might have one key target audience or several. Either way, it’s important to identify them and learn as much as you can about them.
4. Decide on Your Social Media Channels and Allocate Team Members
Next, decide on your social media channels. Depending on your campaign goals, you might use one channel or a combination of channels. Things to consider are:
Once you’ve decided on your social media channel mix, you’ll want to consider your mix. For instance, if you have two marketing channels, consider whether you’re going to run the campaign 50/50 or rely more heavily on one channel. Will you have a different approach for the different channels, too? For instance, will you run an influencer marketing campaign on TikTok and support this with product posts and paid ads on Instagram? These are all things you need to consider.
5. Decide on Your Strategy
This is where things really get interesting! The campaign planning and strategy phase is the hardest part of developing your campaign, but it’s also the most fun. Your strategy should outline the how of what you’re doing. By now you should have the basic details of your campaign, you just need to decide how you’ll execute it.
You might choose to get ideas in a variety of ways, such as:
Once you have an assortment of different ideas, you can start to formulate your strategy. Your strategy might be very simple in itself, but to execute it properly you’ll need to tie it back to your original objectives and outline how you’ll appeal to a specific audience using your creatives.
Your strategy should outline:
How you will execute your strategy and how this ties in with your objective – which tactics you’ll use and which social media management tools you’ll need.
For instance, your strategy might simply be to build your newsletter audience by hosting a giveaway on social media that links to an opt-in form. The aim will be to collect [X] new subscribers. You might use additional channels and tactics to support these aims, like Instagram posts, a video series, or a brand collaboration to support the giveaway. Or, you might diversify your social media platforms to expand your target audience.
When you will execute your strategy – which days and times will your campaign run on and how long they’ll run for.
How you’ll measure success – which tools you’ll use to measure your campaign performance and determine what defines success. You might even want to narrow down your broader social media objective into more definitive KPIs so it’s easier to measure and track your progress.
6. Create a Social Media Calendar
Before you go posting like crazy, you’ll want to create a social media content calendar to ensure your content is relevant and strategic. Posting on an ad hoc basis means your marketing efforts are often inconsistent, and you might miss key campaign dates or promotions. It’s also easier to include a varied mix of content and ensures you’re posting all different types of content in different formats. Because the more you mix things up, the more insights you’ll gain, especially when you’re just starting out.
A social media content calendar is exactly what it sounds like – an editorial calendar outlining all your social media posts on various channels, including the creative, caption, hashtags, location tags, product tags, and any other details. It should also specify the date and time of the content.
Some businesses prefer to create a social media calendar in Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs, or use other collaborative software services. Others prefer to create their content calendar directly in social media scheduling tools like Sked Social.
Sked Social allows marketing teams to collaborate, comment on content, make changes, and schedule posts, all in the one tool. It can also be used to store all your campaign assets, which is ideal for teams working remotely.
With Sked Social, you’ll be able to see all your scheduled posts for all your social media channels in a calendar format like in the below image. You can even add special filters to overlay special events and holidays so you don’t miss a thing!
7. Measure Your Campaign and Assess Results
Finally, measuring your campaign is critical to its success. The keys to a successful social media campaign are to prepare (this is the strategy part), execute, and assess.
But why measure? Well, there’s no point waiting until your campaign is over before seeing whether or not it has worked. If the campaign isn’t working halfway through, you’ll probably want to make some tweaks to see if you can salvage it.
Measuring ensures you can optimize your campaign and make the necessary changes to turn it from a failure to (hopefully) a success!
Let’s be real – there’s no point in launching a campaign (successful or otherwise) if you don’t know what components made it work – or not work.
To be able to assess your social media campaign you need to conduct ongoing reporting. The exact metrics you use will depend entirely on your objectives. To get the business results you want, it’s important that you do a deep dive into your campaign performance and modify your approach for next time. The best brands on social media are continually refining their content strategies and optimizing their campaigns.
The metrics you use will depend on your objectives. For instance:
Either way, decide on your reporting metrics and how frequently you want to report. That might be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on how long your campaign is running for.
Your Social Media Campaign Template
In summary, your social media campaign template should include your:
- dates, team members involved, products or services to promote, timings, and other channels involved
- including your wider objective and specific KPIs
- including your buyer personas
- the social media networks you’ll be using
- including any key tactics, which tools you’ll need, how you’ll measure the campaign and track progress
- including at least an outline of your social media calendar, and where this will live
- including any special reporting tools or templates you’ll need to assess results
Ready to get started with your campaign? Download our FREE social media campaign template here.
Ready to Action Your Next Social Media Campaign?
Digital marketing can be complicated, especially when you have several business goals you need to achieve, but campaign templates can make life a whole lot easier. The key to success is mapping out your strategy before you begin and implementing the right social media management tools and resources to help you along the way.
Managing a social media marketing plan and trying to keep on top of content curation, scheduling and reporting can be stressful, particularly when you’re balancing your social campaign content with regular campaign content.
To keep on top of it all and execute a fabulous content calendar, you need to have a high-performance social media scheduling tool like Sked Social. You also need to test, report on, and refine your results using specialized reporting functionality to ensure the ongoing success of each social media campaign.
Sked Social is an all-in-one social media tool with powerful scheduling capabilities and advanced reporting functions which can help you optimize campaign performance in an ongoing capacity. Its reporting features will enable you to create automated reports for each campaign, so you can spot the trends that will help transform your campaigns and refine your social media strategy.
Get started by signing up for Sked’s 7-day trial. Our all-in-one social media scheduler allows you to automatically schedule posts including tweets, hashtags, carousels, Instagram Stories, videos, and more, saving you hours each week. But it doesn’t just work with Instagram. It also works with LinkedIn, Twitter, your Facebook page, and plenty of other social networks!
Sked Social is your all-in-one social media management platform
Brands and agencies with an eye for aesthetics use Sked Social to plan, schedule, and engage customers with visual content — On Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more.
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