Building Killer Social Media Campaigns: Guidebook

Building [ insert awesome adjective here ] Social Media Campaigns: A Guidebook April, 2015

Building Thriving Social Media Campaigns: A Guidebook
Stellar
Flourishing
Remarkable
Meaningful
Stunning
Killer
By Gwen Woltz, Co-founder at Wahine Media
gwen@wahinemedia.com
http://wahinemedia.com
808 744-9269


Introduction
Campaign - verb: Work in an organized and active way toward a particular goal.
In the marketing world, campaigns are typicaly an initiative that has a start and an end. It
may be long term or short term, but one important trait of a campaign is it has a specific
goal in mind.
Social Media Campaigns can be in many forms, from contests to content, from
sweepstakes to #hashtag submissions. This guide is designed to equip you with a
checklist on what you should consider when running a campaign, and help inspire you to
run the best campaign possible.
Before you think about running any campaign, you must have the following:
Time
Resources
Dedication
Planning
You shouldn’t run a campaign on a whim or half-hazard, and careful planning is
instrumental in a smooth execution. When you first begin to think about running a
campaign, do not think about the details at first. This will hinder you from planning out the
backbone pieces that drive the campaign. The strategic plan should inform the details, the
details should not inform the strategy.
Research and answer the following 7 (SEVEN) QUESTIONS before you think about the
details of executing the campaign. Compile the answers and release this as your project
brief. Be sure to distribute this document among all team members who will be involved
with this campaign.


1. GOALS: WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE?
A clearly defined goal is instrumental in a successful campaign. Usually a campaign is
derived out of a specific problem you may want to solve. For instance, a common problem
is “I have a lot of fans and followers, but why don’t any of them comment or like my posts?”
You also want to be sure your goals are realistic, and that those goals are accomplishable
at the current point in your social media journey. For instance, if you have just begun your
social media journey and only have 500 fans, an unrealistic goal would be to obtain high
quality leads or generate sales. You need to first work on building a fan base (community)
and building a relationship with those people before you can convert to sales.
The following outlines a few goals you may have in mind:
Create Buzz & Awareness
Buzz is all about riding the current
wave of media, adopting the latest
media to promote your message or
brand to the most people possible.
Generate Traffic
Optimizing your use of social media
increases the probability that
people will click through, and most
importantly, pass along your
message to their social networks.
Generate Leads
Leads are the highest sought after
goal in social media, and can only
be obtained after your community
trusts you. When the sale is pitched
it needs to be in a way that won’t
tarnish that relationship.
Influence the Conversation
Individuals and their experiences
matter and hold sway over other
consumers. The conversation will
happen with or without you there,
and joining the conversation is
about identifying where they take
place, and having a strategic and
genuine approach in joining.
Serve Your Community
It pays to get your customers
involved instead of ignoring them.
Social media is a give before you
take environment, and serving your
community for their benefit will
result in long-lasting results that will
serve you in the long run.
Build Your Reputation
Gaining credibility is a longer
process, but is about building a
legitimate social media voice and
developing influence within your
community. This usually entails a
“give-back” component with robust
content and genuine outreach.
Increase Engagement
This is a common problem with
brands on social media, especially
with the “pay to play” model.
Keeping engagement up is key in
continually serving your content to
your community and staying top of
mind.
Gain Market Research
Once you’ve built a community,
members can be valuable in
providing feedback on your brand
or product. Polling or asking for
opinions can often times yield
surprising results that may even
inform some inner workings of your
product or business.
Gain More Subscribers
Whether it’s your blog or email list,
opt-in subscribers are an important
group in your community. They can
turn in to qualified leads, but are
also a group that can be
instrumental in getting your content
shared.


2. AUDIENCE: WHO IS YOUR PERFECT PARTICIPANT?
Who are we targeting, specifically? What is the demographic? Where do they live? Be as
specific and descriptive as possible and build a profile for 2-3 people you would like to
reach that outline the following:
• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Employer(s)
• Hobbies & interests
• Family & marital status
• What their connection is with your product or brand
Take this information and write short essay on this person, as you were writing a short
biography. An example profile for a florist business target is as follows:
Amy is 37, does everything she is a mother, wife and up and coming realtor. Originally Amy is from
Seattle but after marrying her Husband Chris moved several places and became a military wife. They
now have two kids (7 and 10), and live in Houston, Texas.
Chris is finishing up his career in the military and has 3 years to go. They really like Houston and plan on
living there after he retires. They lived in Hawaii for 4 years while Chris was stationed there. It was the
beginning of their marriage and they had their oldest Tyler there. They traveled all over the islands and
have a million pictures to prove it. Both Amy and Chris's parents came to visit several times and loved it
here.
After several years moving around Amy is really excited to put down roots and has started a job as
realtor. She specializes in military families and loves buying Hawaiian flower bouquets for clients from
Hawaii.
When she thinks about Hawaii she remembers being happy, young and in love. She likes buying flowers
for her parents and her in-laws for special occasions because they live in different places and they all
visited Hawaii several times.
Lastly, take this information and research which social platforms are relevant to the each of
the profiles you just created. For the profile above, key platforms would be Facebook and
any Military or parenting oriented niche platforms.


3. STORY & MESSAGE: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SAY?
The next step is to build out the “heart” of the campaign that will begin to inform the details.
Is there a compelling story behind the idea of the campaign? How will that story come alive
in the execution of the campaign? How will we draw people into the campaign? What
about this campaign will relate to our key target? What is the core message we are
promoting?
Think deeply about what will you need to include in your campaign that will stand out
among all the other competing noise. Research what your competition has done in the
past, what other brands with similar audiences have done, and how they have connected
with their audience.
The best way to get started with messaging your campaign is to come up with an example
of a post that you would make. Below is an example for a campaign for a florist. In this
campaign, they would like to increase engagement on the profiles, and generate qualified
traffic into the website. The idea is to host a series of small giveaways on Facebook of
products featured on the website.
She kisses boo-boo’s, she tucks in at night, she brings
smiles and giggles—Mothers hold a special place in
our hearts. Show her how much you appreciate all the
love she gives!
Tag your mom in the comments below and write her a
special Mother’s Day message for a chance to win her
a beautiful Hawaiian flower assortment, just in time for
Mother’s Day! Entries close [date].
Prize details: [link]


4. TIMELINE: MAP OUT THE PLAN
What is the timeline for the campaign? What are the major milestones that will keep
everyone on track in the execution—content creation period, launch date, content
publishing calendar, key dates or holidays, metric collection dates, push period? Map out
everything you hope to achieve and when on a calendar that is in a sharable and
collaborative form. Google calendars are great for collaboration.
You should map out your campaign with weekly and monthly tasks or objectives, and fill in
as you go with daily tasks. Below is an example of a campaign calendar:
Week 1 Research & strategize
Week 2 Develop & build (baseline metrics)
Week 3 Launch (posts on social)
Week 4 Promote (launch FB ads)
Month 1 Launch and promote
Week 5 Promote (influencer Tweetup)
Week 6 Promote (feature entries so far)
Week 7 Final push (incentivize the share)
Week 8 Announce winner
Month 2 Collaborate and push


5. MEASUREMENT: HOW WILL YOU SHOW IT WORKED?
How will you measure success of your campaign? What are the tangible metrics you will
keep track of, such as Facebook likes, comments, re-tweets, mentions, views,
membership, etc.? What are the intangible metrics, such as increased awareness, or
increase in credibility?
Metrics for success should always be tied back to your original campaign goal. Gathering
metrics that speak to general social media performance is a good habit to keep, but what
key performance indicators (KPI’s) will you track to show your campaign is a success?
When planning your measurement strategy, you should first and foremost take baseline
metrics before you start. You should also define benchmarks (metrics along the way) and
numeric goals.
Below are some metrics you could measure for the goals outlined earlier in this guide:
Create Buzz & Awareness
Impressions & reach
Shares & re-tweets
Generate Traffic
Social traffic into website
Traffic into landing page
Traffic into specific blog post
Number of clicks on links on posts
Generate Leads
Number of entries or submissions
Number of uses of a promo code
Number of calls or contact forms filled out
Influence the Conversation
Number of posts / post frequency
Number of blog post published
Number of comments on blogs
Impressions & reach per post
Number of comments/replies per post
Sentiment of comments/replies
Increase Engagement
Number of fans / followers
Engagement rate: number of people taking an action on your page
Applause rate: average number of likes/favorites per post
Conversation rate: average number of comments/replies per post
Amplification rate: average number of shares/re-tweets per post
Posts to page, mentions & private messages
Gain More Subscribers
Number of opt-in’s
Number of subscribers
Serve Your Community
Number of times someone thanked you
Number of “just because” surprise prizes given
Number of dollars donated
Number of conversations
Build Your Reputation
Number of brand advocates
Number of positive reviews
How far a post or tweet reaches


6. RISK ASSESSMENT & MITIGATION: WHAT IF?
As with any online activity, there are risks involved. Plan for the worst and hope for the
best. What are potential risks with running this campaign? Is there currently any negative
sentiment surrounding topics or components of the campaign? Search for any recent news
surrounding topics and keywords relating to your campaign. Often times you may be
surprised to find out about headline news topics you may want to steer clear from.
Play the devil’s advocate and outline at least 3 (three) worst-case scenarios and then map
out a plan to mitigate those risks. Come up with sample responses to negative comments
on posts, or internal protocols if a PR nightmare were to happen.
7. TEAM MEMBERS: WHO IS INVOLVED?
Who is the main point person who is in charge of the campaign? Who are the supporting
team members? Are there supporters of your brand who you can call upon individually to
support your campaign?
Will there be collaboration in the campaign? Some of the most successful campaigns are
in collaboration with other businesses or brands. Collaboration is best when both parties
have a win from the campaign. Consider collaborating with another business that has
followers who align with your target audience. What will they gain in return? Will you both
share entry emails? Who will supply the prize?
Collaboration may also be internal. Are you collaborating with another department such as
customer service or HR? Can the social media campaign be supported by other efforts
such as traditional marketing or PR?


Build
If you took time for detailed planning, building is much more efficient. Fewer surprises will
come your way, and all team members will be on the same page as issues arise.
Once planning is complete, the fun begins as you dive into the nuts and bolts of what
makes the campaign come alive. Not every campaign follows one formula, but below are
some components of common campaigns.
ESTABLISH PLATFORMS
Just because you’re active on 5 social profiles does not mean you should execute a
campaign on all 5. Especially if you have a contest component in your campaign, you
should envision the user’s experience if you send traffic from one platform to the next.
Decide on the “need to have” platforms for your campaign, and refer to where your target
audience lives online when making this decision. Don’t discount email as a platform that
can help support your campaign.
Begin by becoming more active on those platforms and post more frequently than normal.
You may even consider starting some light social advertisements to get the activity on the
page elevated and the community “primed” for the campaign before it starts.
HASHTAG
Almost every campaign has a hashtag to identify it. Most times the hashtag is used as a
way for people to participate or even enter, but sometimes the hashtag can be used in
order for onlookers to see the activity from the campaign. Using hashtags for live events
are especially useful for keeping everyone engaged in one place from multiple platforms.
When designing a hashtag, do your research first. Are any other brands using the
hashtag? How does the hashtag relate to my brand or contest? Second, don’t make a
complicated hashtag that people cannot remember. Try to avoid numbers or acronyms
that are internal. The best hashtags are catchy word meshes that are easy to remember.


CONTESTS AND GIVEAWAYS
A very common component of a campaign is a contest or giveaway. If you have a contest
or giveaway component, you need to brainstorm and build the entry method.
How will someone participate in your campaign? Will they use an entry form, or can they
be a part by posting with a #hashtag or making a comment? Not all participatory
campaigns need an entry form, and with Facebook’s revised guidelines on how
businesses can run a campaign, participating is as simple as a comment on a post.
Entry requirements & functionality
For a contest or giveaway, the entry requirement should be in proportion to the prize. For
instance, you wouldn’t want to require entrants to submit a photo, opt in to your email list all
to win a $10 gift certificate—you won’t get very many participants. If your prize is a round
trip ticket to Hawaii with a 5-night stay, then the entry requirement can be very complex
with multiple steps, or it can be simple if you’re looking for a large number of entrants.
Below are examples of contest entry methods, and their requirement to enter.
Entry Form Within social platform
Photo or video contest
Vote for your favorite
Tell us a story, submit an essay
Opt in to our list enter
Comment to enter
Tag a friend and comment to enter
Post with a #hashtag to enter
Quality over quantity
When designing your entry requirements, consider quality over quantity. Many pages are
suffering a lack of engagement that built a large fan base using a huge prize and easy
entry method, such as a sweepstakes. In order to capture high quality community
members, strive to have some form of engagement when designing a contest or giveaway.
Entry Forms
If you have an entry form component for your campaign, this can be the most
technologically complex portion of a campaign. Some businesses choose to outsource the
creation of an entry form to a company that has the experience and specializes in the
technology.


Alternatively, you can build your own entry form by using a 3rd
party tool (possible options
outlined in Tools section). Below are some things to consider when you are building your
own entry form:
Social network terms of use: if your entry form will be on a social platform (whether it’s an installed tab
or comment entry) read the most recent terms of use for each social network the campaign will run on.
Sometimes they will change their rules without a major announcement, and you don’t want to get shut
down mid campaign because of a use violation. For instance, did you know Facebook no longer allows
you to fan gate a contest app?
Where is the form installed? Many 3rd
party tools that build an entry form can also install that form
anywhere on the web, such as your website. If you have an entry form, consider using a web form if
you want to promote a campaign across multiples channels and send all the entry traffic to your
website where the form is installed.
Below are examples of contest executed by real businesses on social media. Please note
these contests are no longer active, and may be in violation of a platform’s terms of use as
of this date. :


The Prize
The prize is the component of a contest that has the greatest opportunity for success, or
failure. When devising a prize, the most important element is relevancy. If the prize has
nothing to do with the target audience or contest itself, your contest may fall flat. A classic
example of a #campaignfail is giving away an iPad in a sweepstakes with no theme, rhyme
or reason.
The prize also needs to be proportionate to the entry requirements. Sometimes a prize
doesn’t have to be physical, it can be exposure. A popular contest many brands with a
larger following are executing is asking to submit a photo using a #hashtag in exchange
for that photo being featured on the brand’s profile. An example of featuring fan content is:
Contest terms
Contest terms are often overlooked, but very important to spell out and link to from your
contest in some way. In fact, Facebook requires that you link to your contest terms, even if
the contest is executed on your Timeline. Your contest terms outlines all the fine print. Who
qualifies, what is the entry method, when entries close, what the prize is, how the prize will
be delivered, what if the winner doesn’t claim the prize, contact information, and should
always have a liability release clause. Facebook also requires you to release Facebook
from any liability in relation to your contest.
Typically, you should link to the contest terms in an inconspicuous area of your contest, as
most people are not interested in reading it.


TOOLS
There are a plethora of social media tools out there to help in execution, and the key is to
keep it simple when choosing your tools. Research all the possibilities, and then narrow
down your choice to only the “need to have” and not “nice to have”. Often times using too
many or overly complicated tools will make for a more time consuming execution.
The following are a few options for tools to assist you in executing your campaign:
Stay organized – Podio, Google Calendars, Trello, Wunderlist, Slack
Keep in touch – Google Hangouts, Join.me, GoToMeeting
Publish content – Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social
Gather submissions – Short Stack, OfferPop
Measure results – Simply Measured, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Bit.ly, Google Analytics


CONTENT
Once you design the campaign nuts and bolts, the last step before implementation is
developing content, and building a content calendar. Authoring content before
implementation will make the implementation process go much smoother, and leave room
to focus on maintaining the campaign and the new community it is creating.
When authoring content to be posted on social, make sure you consider the following:
Language and captions: keep captions for social media posts SIMPLE and short. Don’t use salsey
language. Entice people by only divulging details that are necessary for people to get involved. Provide
a link where they can get the details, if they choose.
Social media posts: when promoting your campaign, vary social media posts. Don’t use the same
photo and caption every time you post about the campaign. Tell a story through the content you post,
don’t “give away the farm” by posting too many details.
Optimize content for each profile: When posting to Facebook, post the image, link, or video so it
propagates to be full width. For Twitter, consider using Twitter Cards, which a kind of tweet with more
bells and whistles including a call to action button. Instagram forces you to post natively, but consider
adding filters to the photos that you post to Instagram to make it look and feel as though it was created
just for the platform.
Supporting content: if your campaign has a theme, fill some of the gaps in between promotional posts
with content that has a similar theme. Keep the campaign idea top of mind.
High impact and simple visuals: the best posts on social media are stunning, simple photos or videos.
Don’t overlay your images with promotional text, keep the most important details of the campaign in the
caption. Make sure your images are colorful and will grab someone’s attention. If you don’t you’re your
own photos, invest in stock photography.
Include #hashtags: if you have a campaign hashtag make sure it’s included on every post. In addition
you should research other relevant hashtags you can include that may get the contest exposure in
conversations outside of your profiles.
Easy to share: as a part of short captions and high impact photos/videos, make sure your content is
sharable! Put time and creativity in designing pithy captions that captivate people. Create content
where people want to share for the sheer beauty or creativity of the post itself.


User generated content (UGC) and submissions
Does your campaign have a user generation component, and will you share that content
along the way to help promote the campaign? If the campaign has a submission
component, will those submissions be integrated into the nuts and bolts of how that
campaign works?
For example, perhaps you hold a weekly photo contest for 2 months where the top photo
by likes is featured on the profile. Then all the winners from each week are entered to win
the grand prize.
Blog posts
Creating blog posts may be part of the campaign itself (for instance, if a campaign goal
was to build influence), or they could be used to help promote the campaign. Blog posts
are the opportunity to have a longer dialogue, or hold extended information (such as
contest terms).
Be sure to optimize any blog posts with an image, keywords, utilize an SEO plugin to
embed metadata that will help search rankings. If you’re using a blog post to help promote
your campaign, you should also consider making pre-formatted tweets that people can
send straight from the blog post. Remember content should be sharable— make sure
social sharing plugins are installed and working.
Content calendar
Tapping into your content “bank” you built by pre-captioning several posts, build a content
calendar that outlines what posts will happen when on what profile. Use a calendar tool of
choice to build the calendar, and share it with all team members involved in the campaign,
including any collaborators. Google Sheets is a common tool for creating a collaborative
content calendar.


SOCIAL ADS
In order to give your social media campaign the exposure it needs, consider running social
ads. Ads can be placed on several social channels including Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Pinterest, and for some brands Instagram ads are available.
The benefit of social advertising is you can be very targeted in who you reach, and they
are typically a far lesser expense than traditional media purchases such as print or
television.
You can utilize social ads to reach several objectives to support your campaign including:
Boost post or promote tweet: give the content you post an added “boost”. You can promote posts to
your existing fans/followers, their friends, or a separate group of target audiences.
Promote page or profile: gain fans or followers based upon your specified target audience.
Dive traffic to website: especially useful if a component of your campaign is a content that has an entry
form on your website. You could also use this objective if you are trying to drive traffic into your blog.
Promote app: if you installed an “app” or entry form on Facebook you can design an ad specifically to
gain installs or engagements of that app.
Solving Facebook “fan-gate” restrictions
With Facebook’s new fan-gate incentive restriction, many brands are utilizing Facebook
ads to help increase fans while running a campaign. A couple techniques are as follows:
Technique #1: pinning a campaign post to the top of a page, then running page like ads where the
landing page is the Timeline. The campaign post will be the first thing they see.
Technique #2: creating an entry form app, running page like ads where the landing page is the app.
The app then welcomes new fans, and prompts them to now enter their contest or giveaway.


Implementation
In order to keep a campaign alive, follow through of the plan is essential. Using the plans
in the previous two steps, implementation should be simple, leaving time for other tasks
that are often overlooked such as actively engaging with any new followers or activity on
your profiles.
SCHEDULING POSTS
This is the #1 technique that you should utilize when implementing a campaign. Pre-
scheduling posts is the best way to keep everything organized, and save yourself time and
resources. Using a 3rd
party tool is helpful, and in some cases necessary to pre-schedule
posts.
Facebook has a scheduling component built into the platform, and it is recommended to
use Facebook natively to pre-schedule posts. The biggest reason for this is only through
scheduling natively in Facebook can you preserve all the features of a post such as
tagging other pages.
You can schedule posts in Twitter, but a 3rd
party tool such as Hootsuite is recommended
since tweet features are preserved, such as photo uploads. The only feature of Twitter that
is not preserved by a 3rd
party tool is Twitter Cards. If you are utilizing Twitter Cards or ads
in your campaign, it is recommended to keep all scheduled posts in one place.
LIVE POSTING, MONITORING & ENGAGEMENT
Leave room in your schedule to do active posting. You may stumble upon a relevant article
or post from another page that helps tell the story of your campaign. You may have an
element of the campaign that requires you to monitor and post submitted content on an
ongoing basis.
Similarly, the most important piece of implementing a social media campaign is monitoring
and active engagement. Set aside time daily to monitor the progress of your campaign,
look at entries, explore the profiles of new fans on Facebook, check ads. Engage with new
followers by thanking groups at a time, reply to more comments than normal, actively
follow new profiles on Instagram and Twitter, seek out conversations with Influencers, and
have fun with your growing community!


TAKING BENCHMARK MEASUREMENTS
Don’t forget to take benchmark measurements along the way. While most measurement
tools can go back in time, taking measurements along the way helps keep the momentum
going of reaching a numeric goal, if one is defined.


Case Studies
JW MARRIOTT CANCUN RESORT AND CASAMAGNA MARRIOTT CANCUN
RESORT, MEXICO
Five travel video bloggers were selected to travel to Cancun to each produce one original
video highlighting the two sister resorts, where they were hosted for five days. Vloggers
were also asked to post their experiences on their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
accounts, using the hashtag #gottequila.
The campaign generated media value of $378,280 and reached 1.8 million viewers.


JETBLUE GETAWAYS “GET AWAY WITH IT”
People know JetBlue as an airline, but they don’t know that JetBlue offers flights, hotels,
wheels and more via their JetBlue Getaways product. Our task: take a limited media
budget and increase awareness of JetBlue Getaways in a crowded vacation package
category. Our approach: break through the clutter and encourage participation with
Getaways in a way that is uniquely JetBlue and unique to any category — the first ever
online game show using Skype.
https://youtu.be/Mg3ywbhMKxo
http://www.mullen.com/jetblue-get-away-with-it-the-first-ever-live-online-game-show-
starring-mark-hammerberg/
BAHAMAS TOURISM BUREAU
#BahamasWinterWarmUp
Call To Action On Social: Post a creative video explaining why you’d rather be in the
islands of the Bahamas enjoying sun, sand & sea, for your chance to win a trip for two to
the beautiful Turquoise Cay boutique hotel in The Exumas. All eligible entries will be
judged by The Bahamas judging panel to determine the Grand Prize winner.


ON-PAGE CONTESTS

Building Killer Social Media Campaigns: Guidebook

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