Creating Effective Social Media Campaigns

Lauren Owens - September 23, 2013

Effective social media campaigns begin with strategy. Before you begin to think about channels, artwork or giveaways, it’s important to take a giant step back and consider the purpose and goal of your social media campaign. Specifically, how does the campaign fit into your overall marketing strategy and initiatives? What do you intend to get out of a social media campaign?

Once you’ve answered those basic questions, you can start to think about the scale of your campaign. Specifically:

•    What channels do you intend to include in your campaign?
•    What resources will you need?
•    How will you market your campaign?

If you wanted to run a Facebook-only campaign, for example, you might need:

•    A custom Facebook tab
•    Campaign-specific imagery
•    A static web page for contest rules and details
•    Facebook advertising to drive engagement
•    Additional marketing collateral, including an email and press release announcing the contest.

If you wanted to run a multi-channel campaign, you might need:

•    A custom Facebook tab
•    YouTube videos
•    Strong, share-worthy imagery
•    A Pinterest presence
•    A “sticky” hashtag
•    A static webpage

Once you had all of these moving parts in place, you would want to “launch” the campaign with:

•    A press release
•    A dedicated email
•    Blogger / influencer outreach
•    Additional paid advertisements to drive awareness / interaction

Consider, for example, Speedo’s brilliant Summer 2013 campaign, Get Speedo Fit. This campaign included:

•    YouTube videos starring Michael Phelps
•    A mobile App
•    A hashtag
•    Useful onsite content
•    A printable PDF describing the program in detail
•    Strong imagery that was promoted on both Facebook and Pinterest
•    An advertorial
•    A press release

Speedo’s content, and message, was further proliferated by bloggers and fans, who wrote about, and shared, Speedo’s content widely.

But the genius of Get Speedo Fit was not the depth and breadth of its content, but its overarching theme and purpose.

Here was an apparel company connecting its brand identity – and products – to user need (fitness). In doing so, Speedo was creating not just a single sale, like or share, but positive feelings in its followership that had the potential to last far beyond the length of the campaign.