Social Media Campaign Checklist

Keeping a regular social media presence is already a stretch for many teams, so if you’re cooking up a separate campaign on top of that, it definitely needs to be grounded in a solid strategy. 

When you get the call from leadership that “we need a social campaign for this”, don’t be afraid to push back and figure out if it really warrants the lift that a social campaign requires; because here’s a hard truth: not everything needs a social media campaign. Sometimes a couple of posts will suffice and sometimes a completely separate channel is more appropriate for the message in question. 

Start by asking yourself two important questions: What business objective does this campaign address? and What are your objectives for this campaign? If there aren’t satisfactory answers for these questions, the campaign won’t have a strong enough foundation to justify the time and resources of a campaign.

If you’ve answered the first two questions, it’s time to round out the basis of your strategy with a few more:

• What persona(s) are you targeting with this campaign?
• What channels are most effective for those personas?
• What are your KPIs for each channel?
• What resources (internal and external) will you need to execute the campaign?

Once you’ve thought through these, you’ll be well on your way to setting your campaign up with a solid strategy.

Every marketer wants to see their campaigns succeed, and with a good strategy underpinning your campaign, you’ve already done half the work. In addition to all the usual analytics sources from in-app reporting, Google Analytics, and analytics programs, you can add an extra layer of attribution by using a short self-reported attribution survey at conversion.

When reviewing the results, remember that with social media, ROI isn’t the main goal. Your audience follows your brand on social media platforms because they value the content you post and want to engage with it and your brand. At the end of the day, social media isn’t built to be the ultimate conversion tool, it’s meant to build affinity and engagement that can lead to conversion further down the pipeline. 

If you find that your engagement metrics tend to outperform your conversion metrics in social campaigns, use that knowledge to tailor the way you approach future campaigns. Is there a way you can produce the same quality of content with a more efficient use of resources and a lower cost so that your ROI automatically gets a boost? Is there anything blocking your audience from converting (e.g., in- vs. out-of-app shopping experiences)? Is your audience inherently not the type to convert on social media? 

The ROI from conversions is important, but the first-hand data and knowledge of your audience’s behavior and preferences is just as valuable.