06 Jan 3 Questions to Answer Before Your Social Media Campaign Launch
Congratulations, you did it! You’ve managed to build your social media following into an active and engaged community. You’ve taken to heart that your social media community is about quality more so than quantity, and you now want to reward your community with a fun loyalty program, contest, sweepstakes or giveaway. But hold on, you’ve done so well about tracking the performance of your social channels that you know that you need to keep track of metrics for this campaign. You also need to know how to define what success looks like and understand the “SOTs” of the campaign—strategy, objectives, and tactics.
How do you do that? Well, in order to tackle that piece, here’s a few questions you need to ask yourself before your social media campaign launch:
- What is the objective of this campaign?
- What are my Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)?
- What does success look like?
Define Campaign Objective
Having an objective is paramount; objectives help to drive strategy and thus help to realize the purpose of the campaign. Without an objective you’re basically aiming a football at a basketball rim in the dark without knowing the location of the hoop – good luck with that.
Your objective is something measurable that you’re looking to get out of the campaign; it’s one of the reasons why you’re launching the campaign in the first place. Several example objectives to consider are:
- To gain awareness of Product X
- To drive brand advocacy
- To build upon social CRM database
- To increase sales through digital marketing channels, etc.
- To increase engagement
- To generate online buzz
- To increase video views/page views
- To acquire new Fans/Followers/Subscribers
These all have varying ranges of “ease” to accomplish, but having a clear and scalable objective is always a key ingredient to the foundation of your social media campaign.
Identify Key Performance Indicators
Now that you have your objective(s), you need to start thinking about how to achieve those. To do that, a group of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) needs to be developed in which you will ultimately set your goals against. KPI’s are performance metrics that vary from industry to industry and should align with the objective(s) set.
This blog post “Six metrics all social media marketers should be familiar“, provides an awesome baseline to get the wheels turning on what metrics are important to your campaign. Avinash Kaushik also gives great insight into what he feels are the best social media metrics: conversion, amplification, applause, and economic value.
(Source: www.kaushik.net/avinash)
The metrics that Avinash provides are more content focused but can still be applied to social media campaigns as well. Several other social media KPI’s you might want to consider include:
- Page views/video views
- Unique visitors
- Average time onsite
- Registrations/entries
- Engagement rate
- Social shares
- Votes
- Net new Fans/Followers
- Opt-in conversions
- Lower-Funnel Activity (LFA) responses, etc.
This is just a small subset of potential KPI’s but there are literally hundreds that could be utilized. One important thing to remember is that KPI’s should always align with the original objective(s) and strategy you’ve set for your campaign.
Know What Success Looks Like
Now you’re making progress! You have your objective(s) set and you’ve strategically aligned your KPI’s. If you’ve made it this far, you’re now ready to begin the process of setting goals for your campaign.
From this point there’s a handful of questions that need to be address in order for you to accurately develop goals/measurements which will help you to define what success looks like, and to accurately track your campaign’s progress:
- How many days is this campaign scheduled to last; what are the start and end dates?
- What volume of traffic can I expect to receive from my owned, earned, and paid media?
- What will be the traffic drivers for this campaign?
- How many social media posts will support this campaign per social channel?
- Will there be any ad buy support (ex., Facebook Promoted Posts, Twitter Promoted Products, display advertising, SEM, etc.)?
- Are we utilizing influencers for support?
- What are my potential conversion rates?
- Visits to registrations
- Social shares
- Opt-ins, etc.
- Based on my social channel growth patterns, do I expect to increase Fans/Followers/Subscribers? If so, by how much?
This may feel like a game of “a million questions,” but answering them are essential and are baby steps on the bridge that connects social media to return on investment (ROI).
Once you accumulate enough programs/campaigns over time, you’ll then be able to add an economic value to each of your KPI’s which will help you to better measure the actual value of a given campaign based on what was invested. At the end of the day, isn’t that what this is all about— showcasing your successes while proving ROI?
Click here to learn more about measuring the ROI of social media in our whitepaper “Six Ways to Measure the ROI of Social Media.”
Featured image courtesy of buzztime.
