Social media campaigns have become the norm for most of the large organizations in nearly all industries now. If you look around, it will be difficult for you to find a large brand that is not using some kind of social media promotion at the moment. While conventional promotion strategies have become almost obsolete and really expensive, businesses have been looking for an alternative to this for a long while. With the array of content marketing and social media marketing, both big and small brands have finally managed to find out a new strategy that suits their needs. Since social media marketing is quite efficient, accurate, and cost effective, it has become the first choice for many big brands. All those big brands are now gradually moving away from conventional marketing strategies and using more social media marketing. Through the social media marketing they are getting higher engagement and interaction among their customers. This is all a business wishes to achieve through its marketing. However, you should keep in mind that there are no hard and fast rules about social media marketing strategies. Each brand has their own approach and mindset towards social media strategies and they tend to develop their own campaign according to their preference. It will be almost impossible to find two big brands with a similar process map and marketing strategy. However, there are a few similar steps in social media strategy development that every organization goes through. In the following, we will tell you about two critical stages of social media campaign, campaign planning and implementation, where different organizations went through.
Campaign Planning
For any perfect strategy, a thorough and careful planning is a must. If you don’t know where you are going, you will go all over the place. Hence, it is a must that you develop your own marketing strategy before you leap into a grand campaign. Planning a campaign usually starts with sketching a strategy, the means by which a business can achieve its goal. While many organizations would assign a third party to develop a concept and strategy for a campaign, most of the major businesses do prefer to develop them in house. But there really is no standard for this. For example, Fiat took a number of ideas from an advertising agency named Ignite and then the company took two or three days to make a decision in favor of the “Score a Scorpion” concept. On the other hand, Coke Zero’s campaign was conceptualized when the VP of global content excellence at Coca-Cola, Jonathan Mildenhall met choreographer Jon Chu in a chance encounter. What happened later is a great success that everyone is familiar with. Hence, you can see that brands can plan and develop their social campaign in any way. However, they must make sure that they come up with an interesting concept and they have all means to transform their plan into a reality.
Implementation of Social Media Campaign
Once the brands have come up with an idea, their next course of action is to decide about the execution of the campaign. Depending on the concept and idea, the implementation might take only a few hours to even one or two years. If you have a simple idea, you can create a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page in a few hours. However, you must keep in mind that, a mere social account won’t give your brand the momentum needed in the market. The brand will also need to make sure that they assess all their options and steps before they implement the campaign. For example, it took Fiat more than a month to collect and complete all the paperwork involved in their sweepstakes through the legal department and actually building the campaign on Facebook. However, it was a different case for Ford who had a mixed reaction with their execution of the “Doug” campaign.
Therefore, you can see that developing a social media campaign could be quite flexible yet intensive process.
