Businesses must be strategic to gain a market advantage and stay ahead of competitors. Creating a social media campaign is the first step in maximising your digital marketing impact and making strides toward the overall company goals.
In this article, we uncover what exactly a social media campaign is, take you through several examples, and discuss what it takes to build an effective campaign of your own.
When we’re done, you’ll have all the tools you need to create and execute a quality campaign that helps you reach your organisation's broader goals.
- What is a social media marketing campaign?
- Three examples of successful social media marketing campaigns
- What are the five stages of a social media campaign?
- 10 tips for creating a successful social media campaign
- How can Sendible help with your social media campaign?
What is a social media marketing campaign?
A social media campaign is a blended mix of marketing activities across one or more social networks to achieve business goals.
While you can run a campaign for a specific channel, social media strategies work best in harmony. This doesn’t mean using the same content for all accounts. Rather, your posts should be adapted to the platform and its demographics while remaining in sync with the rest of your content.
Social media campaigns should be monitored and analysed using relevant metrics. Any insights gained can inform future decision-making and should be the basis of tweaks and adjustments to your social media strategy.
Various components come together to create a social media campaign.
Common features of a successful campaign include the following:
- Organic content
- Paid posts (advertisements)
- Branded or industry-related hashtags and tags
- Varied content, including images, videos, and user-generated content
- Brand partnerships and collaborations
- Consistent tone and message delivery
- Engagement and interaction with the target audience
Three examples of successful social media marketing campaigns
The easiest way to learn what a good social media campaign actually looks like is to explore some examples.
Here’s the thing: Two effective campaigns can be totally different from one another.
The right approach can look drastically different depending on the business's goals and personality, as well as its target audience. However, the core marketing principles, like planning, goal-setting, and analysis, remain important.
Let’s take a look at some good social media campaign examples.
1. Apple: #ShotOniPhone
Apple’s #ShotOniPhone social media campaign has been running since 2015 when the iPhone 6 and its 12-megapixel camera were released. The idea behind the campaign was to drum up user-generated content from Apple customers to showcase the camera's quality.
This ongoing campaign is a testament to its success. A quick search for the hashtag on Instagram will reveal more than 30 million posts. Apple was able to use this simple slogan and concept to produce a range of ads and branding materials.
Apple continues to repurpose the idea.
For example, one of the earlier campaigns encouraged iPhone owners to use the hashtag on social media. Apple would then select certain photos to feature on billboards.
Rather than plugging the features, Apple uses photos to market its phones. Through clever marketing and gamification, it draws in the audience and creates organic social proofing.
More recently, in 2022, Apple repurposed the hashtag once again. It encouraged iPhone owners to post macro photos using the iPhone Pro 13’s new lens. 10 winners were selected and their photos were featured in a gallery on Apple Newsroom as well as on the brand’s socials and in Apple Store locations, etc.
What can you learn from this?
User-generated campaigns work best when they are simple. The fewer barriers to entry, the more excitement and engagement they generate among your target audience. Focus on clear, straightforward ideas that invite people to get involved.
Pro Tip: If you run a B2C company, find inspiration for your next social media campaign by reading our article, The Strategic Guide to B2C Social Media Marketing: 7 Campaigns That Deliver.
2. Spotify Wrapped
Source: Spotify
Another great example of social media flair is Spotify’s Wrapped campaign.
If you’re not a Spotify subscriber, you’ve still probably come across Wrapped on friend’s Instagram stories. In a nutshell, it’s an annual recap of Spotify users’ most-listened-to songs, artists, genres, and podcasts.
Everyone’s Wrapped is unique to their listening habits, making it perfect for sharing and comparing on social media.
The data Spotify provides is interesting and engagement-worthy, stimulating shares, replies, and discussion across social channels. It gives you information such as total listening time, your top listener percentage for artists, and your favourite genres.
Spotify users now look forward to their end of year Wrapped, creating anticipation toward the end of the year. The music streaming app teases its release by reminding you of last year’s report.
How can your business learn from this?
You can come up with a campaign that revolves around personalisation. For example, after a certain number of purchases or a subscription milestone, you could send your customer a custom message or a gift. Most importantly, you need to make the content shareable for social media.
3. Barbie (2023)
Source: Statista
The Barbie movie, produced by Warner Bros., reportedly had a marketing budget of $150 million.
To give you some context, the average marketing spend for a movie is usually around 50% of the production costs. Barbie cost $145 million to produce, meaning the marketing cost more than the film itself.
Warner Bros. used a breadcrumb marketing strategy to promote the film.
As you might have guessed, this means teasing small pieces of content, little by little, building hype before releasing the full trailer and other promotional content later.
How did they do this?
Firstly, the film’s teaser trailer was released way ahead of the movie itself. After viewing the initial teaser, Barbie fans had more than a year of anticipation. The nostalgia was enough to send a tidal wave of social media engagement.
However, this was nothing compared to the second teaser. It registered 7.5 million social media engagements within 24 hours. At this point, the marketing team unleashed its selfie-generator tool that used AI to allow people to create customised film posters.
The movie stars, other actors, influencers, and regular social media users participated heavily in the trend, creating a buzz online. When the movie was eventually released, once again, the promotion was social media-led.
Life-sized Barbie doll cases were placed outside movie theatres and shopping centres, creating perfect photo ops. Songs from the movie became popular additions to TikTok trends and Instagram Reels, keeping the film on people’s minds (and feeds).
What can your business learn from the Barbie social media campaign?
A breadcrumb strategy is always a good way to build anticipation around an event. For example, you could tease special offers in the lead-up to Black Friday or a major sale. Creating shareable and interactive content is key to getting your target audience involved.
Check out some more examples here
- The Strategic Guide to B2C Social Media Marketing: 7 Campaigns That Deliver
- Achieve Your Fashion Marketing Goals: 6 Creative Social Media Campaign Ideas
- Stay organised and plan ahead with Campaigns
- Plan Like a Pro: Your Go-To Social Media Campaign Template
What are the five stages of a social media campaign?
From the examples above, you can clearly see how the most effective campaigns aren’t necessarily the most complex. In contrast, they’re well-thought-out and straightforward. To boot, these major campaigns encouraged regular social media users to do much promotional work through engagement and shares.
That said, just because a social media campaign is simple, it doesn’t mean it’s easy to execute. Careful planning and preparation are needed to give your campaign the best chance of success.
Putting in the work ahead of a campaign launch helps prevent unforeseen issues that could slow progress or create a whole new set of problems. Understandably, creating a social media campaign from scratch can be daunting.
Sendible's campaign creation process consists of three stages that includes all five steps listed below:
1. Planning
Planning is arguably the most important stage of any social media campaign.
The more time you have to plan, the better the chance of success. This is mainly because you can spend more time researching your competitors and target market.
Gaining a deep understanding of what your audience wants will help you better meet their needs. Studying the competition will give you an indication of what is and isn’t working. It will also allow you to determine if there are any gaps where the audience isn’t being adequately served.
Do as much research as possible but within reason. Action is also important, so don’t get too bogged down in this stage. Start generating campaign ideas with a good overview of the market and your competitors.
Brainstorm concepts and think about:
- What problems your target market faces
- How you can help solve them
- What social networks your target market spend its most time on
- The type of content they mainly consume
- What type of campaign will best resonate with them
Remember that a social media campaign should be integrated with other business functions. It’s not a mission to get likes and shares or to go viral, which leads us to our next point.
2. Setting goals
A winning social media campaign is one built on goals.
Your campaign should also align with the business's broader ambitions. The type of goals you set can drastically differ depending on the size of your business, your target market, the competition, and a host of other factors.
The first step of goal setting should be to consult other departments and determine what the priorities are for the business.
Next, you should identify the areas that need the biggest push.
From here, you know why you’re running a campaign and can start honing in on objectives.
It’s useful to split your goals into revenue and branding categories. That way, some of your content will focus on sales, while others will aim to build your brand and develop relationships with your target market.
Regardless of your industry, make sure you follow the SMART approach to goal-setting. This means your goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Once you’ve set your goals, assign metrics that you will use to measure success.
Let’s look at a simple example.
Suppose the goal of your campaign is to generate leads. Be sure to have a specific number of leads in mind. Next, consider the most relevant metrics such as impressions, interactions, shares, saves, etc., to determine whether your content is hitting the mark. Finally, you should have a deadline for reaching your target.
All major social networks have native analytics built in. However, a quality analytics tool makes the process smooth and easy, especially if you post on multiple platforms.
3. Creating the content
With your planning done and goals established, it’s time to create your campaign’s content.
The campaign should not involve reposting the same promo video or poster over and over again. You’ve got to be much more strategic than that.
Creating content with the social media marketing funnel in mind is a smart approach. This strategy recognises that customers move through five stages of the funnel, with specific types of content being most effective at each stage. Tailoring your content to align with these stages can help guide your audience smoothly through the customer journey.
Ensure your content serves your target audience at the various phases. The stages of the social media marketing funnel are:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Engagement
- Action
- Advocacy
What would this look like in practice?
Let’s take the first step, awareness, as an example.
The aim here is to increase awareness of your brand as well as the products or services you offer. You’re not worried about sales here. You’re introducing yourself to new customers.
Think back to the Barbie teaser trailer. It wasn’t released to sell tickets. It was meant to create awareness and eventually, generate interest (which is step two).
Not all the content has to be curated by your marketing team. A user-generated strategy, like we saw (and continue to see) with Apple’s #ShotOniPhone campaign, can be just as effective.
Pro Tip: Use formats that fit each platform and resonate with your audience. In 2024, short-form video dominates most industries, but not all. Research your audience's preferences and create content tailored to each platform for maximum impact.
4. Scheduling content
At this point, plenty of marketers assume the hard work is over. In some ways it is.
However, if you plan on posting to several platforms or you’re a social media manager overseeing multiple accounts, there’s a lot of time-consuming work ahead. Publishing photos, videos, and stories isn’t difficult, but it takes time.
That’s why marketers should schedule their campaigns in advance. The best way to do this is by using a scheduling tool. Even better, if it’s linked to a calendar that integrates with multiple social networks.
With this combination, you’ll have a visual overview of all your content for every platform in seconds. Plus, you can schedule content for multiple platforms in one place. This removes the need to painstakingly log in and out of every account to manually publish or schedule.
If you go with a scheduling tool, like Sendible’s, you can give exclusive access to team members. Individuals can be assigned specific roles and permissions too. For example, designers may upload drafts to the calendar but only managers have permission to publish or schedule content.
5. Analysing and learning
The final, and crucial stage of the campaign is analysis.
You must have ways of measuring success. Campaign analytics provide just that.
Consult the metrics you assigned to each goal and monitor if the campaign is working. Depending on your goals, the key metrics will vary.
It’s also important to study the data. Think about what the numbers actually mean to your campaign and the business as a whole. This process gives you insights that should impact future decision-making and upcoming campaigns.
A social media management tool can often produce comprehensive social media reports that pool together data from multiple platforms and social networks. This makes it easier to draw conclusions and gain insights.
10 tips for creating a successful social media campaign
There is plenty of room for creativity and flair alongside the strategic elements of your campaign. However, with so many components to think about, it can be difficult to lean on your creative side.
With this in mind, consider the following 10 tips if you want to come up with fresh ideas for your campaign.
- Engage in social listening to get a better indication of what your customers are thinking.
- Think outside the box by studying other industries.
- Use trending sounds on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
- Focus on conversions.
- Experiment and test (remember to analyse and compare results).
- Collaborate with partners and influencers.
- Prioritise customer service.
- Think about the customer journey and social media funnel.
- Research SEO to come up with content themes.
- Lean on your brand’s core values and discuss its impact on your audience.
How can Sendible help with your social media campaign?
As we’ve referenced a few times already, a social media management tool is one of the best weapons to add to your arsenal when building a campaign. It adds value at every step, from the planning stages to the post-campaign analysis. Without one, you’ll likely spend significantly more time on mundane social tasks daily.
If you want to build quality social campaigns and save time doing so, Sendible can help. Our tool benefits at every level. It helps you to avoid common errors, improve consistency of tone and branding, create eye-catching posts with engaging captions, analyse campaigns, and more.
Here are some of the features you can enjoy with Sendible.
Campaign management
Sendible allows you to group social media initiatives under Campaigns for seamless access. This mitigates the need to manually go to and from various campaigns across all channels.
Improved campaign cohesion breeds more consistent messaging, smoother workflows, better organisation, and increased efficiency.
Another key benefit is quickly accessing in-depth analytics for specific campaigns whenever necessary. We’ll discuss this further below.
Content Library
Sendible’s Content Library feature allows you to strategically organise and access various forms of content. You can store images, articles, draft posts, and align content for future use, create and save content, assign tags, and store your most used hashtags.
Say goodbye to cluttered storage folders. The Content Library makes uploading, arranging, and accessing your social media assets efficient.
Custom Content Tags
The Custom Tags feature is a godsend for social media managers, especially those handling multiple clients.
In a nutshell, it allows you to customise your content in bulk in a matter of seconds. Add prefilled, brand-specific details, including URLs, phone numbers, copy, and hashtags that are unique to certain brands.
Every time you post, you can include this information instantly, making consistent branding a breeze.
Bulk Import
Sendible’s Bulk Import box allows you to simultaneously schedule multiple posts, eliminating the need to manually upload content on each platform. What’s more, posts may be scheduled months in advance, so you are constantly looking forward and improving as you go.
Team Collaboration
If you work with a social media team, Sendible’s Team Collaboration tool creates seamless workflows. Your team will benefit whether you work in an office or remotely. Various team members can be assigned specific roles with custom permissions. This means you can have certain people approve of posts at different stages.
Furthermore, your team will have access to other useful collaborative features, like direct messaging, workflow comments, and delegated messaging, in case one teammate is better suited to handle a specific task.
Priority Inbox and Assign Task
One of Sendible’s best time-saving tools is its Priority Inbox. It brings all of your social interactions from each network into a single inbox. This includes comments, so you can engage with and reply to followers from Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok from the same place.
With our Priority Inbox, decide which profiles get precedence. You may also filter messages by date or even archived status. Sifting through messages and comments is made easy.
AI Assist
Sendible is always looking for ways to push the boundaries and AI Assist is the perfect example. It’s your virtual sidekick that can be used to write engaging social media captions, come up with content ideas, and optimise existing content. The best part is that AI Assist works fast, taking seconds to complete tricky tasks.
Writing copy and staying consistent with your messaging and branding is tough for marketers. Coming up with social media captions can easily take hours. AI Assist will help you cut down this time to minutes, or even seconds.
Sendible Free Trial
Each of Sendible’s management tool features contributes to improved social performance. When used together, they allow you to build comprehensive social media campaigns that you would need a team to create.
That said, why take our word for it?
At Sendible, we know our product adds value. And so, we’re happy to offer you a free 14-day trial with no sign-up obligations. Simply register, try out the key features, and see the benefits our tool can bring to your business.
Sound good? Sign up here.
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