How To Run Social Media Campaigns

With billions of active users on social media, brands are finding it more challenging than ever to break through the noise to engage with the right audience. To compete with other brands and viral influencers, crafting a social media marketing campaign is like the perfect game plan to effectively promote your brand, execute strategy and interpret your results. From TikTok challenges to seasonal holiday promotions, social media marketing campaigns are the bread and butter of a successful social media strategy. 

This guide covers the four steps to creating a social media campaign and how to promote and track its performance.

What Is a Social Media Campaign?

So, what is a social media campaign? A social media campaign is a form of promotion that reinforces a message about a specific brand, product, or service on at least one social media channel. Successful social media campaigns are strategically focused and have measurable goals. This form of social media advertising is one the most creative and effective ways to consistently promote your unique brand messaging to a target audience on multiple channels.

How To Create a Successful Social Media Campaign

Social media campaigns require more than just posting content. Planning and preparation are essential to ensure your social media campaign is effective and achieves your goals. 

These four steps will help you create a social media campaign that delivers on your goals and generates business growth.

Step 1: Set Campaign Goals

The first step in creating a social media campaign is defining your campaign goals and aligning them with your brand’s needs. Your next campaign should consider increasing sales, improving brand awareness, reaching new audiences, and boosting website traffic. 

Using the SMART method to define your goals more clearly can help outline exactly what’s needed for the campaign to be successful and the goals to be achievable. The SMART method is helpful for both your organic and paid goals and will help you pinpoint places in your strategy to pivot when things don’t work well or to continue when they pay off.

‍

Step 2: Establish Target Audience

The next essential step to creating a campaign is establishing your target audience. When looking at your social media analytics, consider your audience’s age, gender, location, income and interests to understand who you want to reach. Understanding what your audience likes, what influences them to action, and their interests will help inform your content strategy. When it comes to paid efforts, like boosting Instagram posts, identifying your target audience is especially useful since you can target your ads to specific demographics, like age, interests or industry. 

Creating content that appeals to your target audience is crucial to a successful campaign. Otherwise, you risk users simply scrolling through your post that took you so much time and effort to make. Google analytics for social media is a great way to pull in the most relevant audience data for your social accounts and website.

Step 3: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Next, conduct a competitive analysis to determine your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. This template will depend on the metrics and content factors that matter most to your brand and strategy. Still, it's a helpful way to analyze competitors' social profiles, video content, feed posts, and other relevant factors to your social campaign. Competitive analysis’ also ensures you don't miss any content opportunities once your campaign is underway.

Step 4: Determine Social Channels

Now that you know your audience, you should have determined which social media channels they most frequently use. It’s important to meet your audience where they are, especially if they are using the channel looking for solutions to a problem your campaign can solve. According to the New York Times, Gen Z prefers TikTok as a search engine over Google. If Gen Z is your target audience, you might want to prioritize TikTok over Google or any other channel. 

Each channel serves a specific purpose, and you can’t always repurpose content across them all. To run the most effective campaign, consider character limits, content formats and even the culture of the channel. Run a social media channel analysis with tools like Dash Hudson to help you deliver content that truly resonates with your audience by channel.

Step 5: Content Creation

After defining your goals, audience, and channels upfront, you can start planning your content. Analyze your best-performing content for patterns of your target audience's likes and dislikes. 

Content segmentation helps teams plan the best quality content with the data and insights to support their creative decisions. Segmenting content can also uncover types of content you need to utilize more, like UGC. For example, suppose your social media campaign focuses on a new lipstick product launch. In that case, segmenting content can inform you that your audience loves close-up lipstick swatches or a makeup tutorial from a specific influencer. 

Determine the formats and types of content you need to create or source for your campaign, then start creating! Collaborate with your team, designers, photographers, and content creators to build a robust strategy.

Step 6: Schedule Content

Scheduling upcoming posts and arranging them in a calendar is helpful for visualizing when and where different steps of your social campaign will take place. It also gives you plenty of lead time to reschedule posts as needed, reflect on content issues, and generally make posting more proactive. Dash Hudson's Social Scheduler function gives you a calendar overview, allows you to schedule posts, and tells you your brand's best times to post.

Step 7: Measure Campaign Results

Finally, it's essential to report on the success of your social media campaigns. Refer to those goals you set up in step one throughout your campaign, and most importantly, when it ends — just because it's over doesn't mean there aren't valuable learnings for social and marketing teams. For social teams, this will likely require sharing relevant KPIs and metrics with your wider team, including whether you reached your social campaign goals, how your paid ads performed, and how these goals contribute to your brand's needs. The measurement phase is also a great time to share what went well, what didn't, and what lessons you can leverage in future social campaigns.

Social Media Campaign Tips

Great content can take your campaign far, but strategic promotion can take it to the next level. Successful social media campaigns require key tactics to deliver the best results effectively — here are some tips to incorporate into your social media campaigns.

Keep Message Consistent

The best social media marketing campaigns deliver one key message across multiple channels. Keeping it strong, concise, and consistent makes your campaign easy to understand and helps your audience retain your key message. In contrast, repetition within your campaign helps to build familiarity and trust.

Don't Pressure Your Audience

Though repetition is good within your campaign, continue to post non-promotional content, too. While you want your audience to become familiar with your campaign, you want to avoid immediately pressuring your new audience into becoming customers. Strike a balance between promotional and non-promotional content that your audience finds engaging.  

Engage With Your Audience

Social media is a two-way street. You can’t expect to receive engagements without giving back to your audience by interacting with them. Be sure to connect with your followers who comment, like and share your posts. One of the most rewarding parts of working in social media is engaging with your audience, building a community for your brand and connecting with your followers to build brand loyalty and practice community-based marketing. 

Moreover, building an emotional connection with your audience can lead to deeper engagement and loyalty. Campaigns that evoke emotions — through storytelling, impactful visuals or relatable content — can create lasting impressions and foster a stronger bond between your brand and your audience.

Create a Unique Hashtag for Your Campaign

Like your key message, a hashtag can connect your campaign across multiple social channels with little effort. A unique and memorable Instagram or TikTok hashtag is a great and easy way to incorporate branded content, keep track of your campaign, and encourage your audience to participate with you. 

One of the most notable hashtag moments on social media in recent years is Calvin Klein’s #mycalvins campaign. The collaborative campaign, which started with celebrities, grew organically globally. By celebrating individuality and self-expression, fans joined in to share their own creative and unique perspectives. #mycalvins has over 800,000 posts on Instagram.

Schedule Your Campaign Releases

Automate your campaign promotion and give yourself more time to engage with your audience and create great content. Use a tool like Dash Hudson to schedule social media posts ahead of time to make a consistent posting schedule and ensure that other non-promotional posts balance out your campaign.

Creativity and Unique Ideas

Successful social media campaigns often hinge on creativity. Unique and original ideas capture attention and differentiate your brand from the competition. Whether it's a quirky Instagram hashtag or an innovative use of video, creativity can make your campaign memorable and engaging.

Seasonal Campaigns

Leveraging seasonal trends and events can provide a timely boost to your social media marketing strategy. Whether it’s holiday-themed content, back-to-school promotions or Summer specials, aligning upcoming product releases or content with different themes can enhance your relevance and engagement. For example, is your beauty brand releasing suncare products? It’s probably best to time this campaign — and your social media content — to Summer. CPG and food industry brands can easily time social content that centers around seasonal themes, like hot chocolate brands or recipes during the colder months or ice cream during the Summer months.

Mission-Led Content

Consumers and social media users are increasingly drawn to brands that stand for something beyond profit. Campaigns that highlight your brand's commitment to social or environmental issues can resonate with your audience's values and build a positive brand image. They can also attract new followers who are interested in the causes you aim to help. Focus on mission-driven content to showcase your brand's dedication to making a difference.

Social Media Campaign Examples

Now that you understand how to craft your social media campaigns, here are some inspiring examples. 

Barbie Movie

When you think of the box office or even the popular culture zeitgeist in general in 2023, you probably think of two movies — Oppenheimer and Barbie. While both films took the internet by storm, Barbie was undoubtedly a standout for online branding and awareness. Warner Brothers started the @barbiemovie account, sharing popular and relevant clips from the movie, behind-the-scenes glimpses at the movie-making process and press events for the movie. In addition to this, the very popular ‘Barbie Selfie Generator’ allowed people to create their own version of the promotional ‘This Barbie is…’ images, which were widely shared across social media, resulting in a ton of earned media for the brand.

McDonald and Grimace

Grimace has had his moment in 2024, thanks to a powerful and funny marketing campaign for the McDonald's ‘Grimace Shake’ this year, a purple-mystery-flavored milkshake. Along with a slew of marketing materials from the brand itself, Gen Z latched onto the 52-year-old mascot, sharing Grimace memes, milkshake reviews and more on TikTok. The brand even earned a 99.3 ‘Gen Z Score’ from consulting firm dcdx (based on a brand’s ability to earn UGC), jumping six spots from the previous year.  

This popularity resulted in powerful brand collaborations with Grimace and the Mets, The Empire State Building, NASCAR and more.

Spotify Wrapped 

Spotify Wrapped is a masterclass in turning a product update into a community-building social media trend. Artists, fans and brands alike await the annual rollout of their favorite songs, genres, artists, podcasts and listening habits to connect with others and share their unique music tastes. 

Aside from being a great way to connect with other users and discover new music, this also presents an excellent opportunity for brands to make memes and share their own ‘wrapped’ lists in relation to their brand. For example, a fitness studio might share their Spotify Wrapped featuring artists they commonly play in class, while a record label might choose to celebrate their top-performing or fast-growing artists. This also results in a wave of UGC for Spotify, who even in the last year (notably the ‘off-period’ for Spotify Wrapped, which comes out in December) earned 617 total posts, 41,528 total engagements and 67 average engagements per post in the past year (from June 28, 2023-June 28, 2024) according to Dash Hudson’s Social Listening Tool.

Track Your Social Media Campaign’s Performance With Dash Hudson

It is essential to track your campaign’s performance to optimize your content strategy and make any necessary changes for your campaign’s success. Invest in a tool for integrated campaign reporting to uncover the ROI of your multi-channel campaigns and collaborative content. Social teams can tap into Dashboards to discover how their social ads performed, from visibility metrics like impressions to the cost-per-click.  

Dash Hudson’s Campaigns tool creates holistic reports to track your key insights, inform your creative strategy, and optimize for future campaigns in a comprehensive and streamlined view.

FAQs

What are examples of social media campaigns?

The most common social media campaigns for brands revolve around launching a new product or a big promotion like Black Friday. But campaigns can also highlight a brand’s values, like promoting a sustainability initiative or participating in an awareness campaign for a specific cause.

What are the best social media campaigns?

Some examples of the best social media campaigns include Calvin Klein’s #mycalvins campaign that celebrated inclusivity and self-expression. Another good example is e.l.f. Cosmetics’ #eyeslipsface campaign that helped launch their TikTok virality. 

Why is it important to have a social media campaign?

Your social media campaign should deliver a clear message and call to action to your target audience. By clearly defining goals, types of content to create, target audience, and ways to track performance, a social media campaign can provide the direction your team can work towards to succeed.