Social media marketing is an essential part of anyone’s marketing strategy today. What is a successful marketing campaign without including your social media channels?
Sure you can’t even imagine it! It’s impossible to avoid social media marketing if you’re interested in easily reaching more people than ever. It is available to almost everyone, and it’s straightforward to track the results. Your job is to create a unique and original campaign that will bring people to you and help you gain their trust – the more new followers you have, the more new customers you may get and the more your sales will increase.
How to come up with something new?
If you take a look at big companies’ social media, you may think it’s easy. However, when you sit down and try to figure out a way to start your campaign, you feel like you’re stuck, with no inspiration at all. You are under the impression that you have already seen everything. However, the truth is, you can always come up with something original because your brand is unique and one of a kind. There may be other similar businesses, with similar products and services, but take a minute and think about the essence of your work. Think about what you do and why you do it. What makes you unique compared to other businesses in the same field? When you find that 'little something' makes it the center of your marketing strategy and develop your plan around it. People can recognize when something is done with love, so this is your chance to show it and to win over thousands of hearts in your marketing campaign. Here are a couple of ideas that may help you remarkably express yourself.
Campaign Launch
Remember when we were children, and we had something to look forward to? Remember scratching out the days on our calendars and impatiently waiting for the day to come? What exactly are we doing those ten seconds before midnight every New Year's Eve? Get it? A countdown! Maybe it’s no news, but there is no better way to launch a new product or a new service! It’s an everyday thing, but it boosts excitement in your audience and makes them curious. They will be waiting to see what all the fuss is about and you will have more clicks and likes than usual.
That also gives you the opportunity to post about it a little bit more often, and it won’t be considered ’spam’ – you’re simply reminding people about it and building the excitement. Keeping the buzz around your launch will attract more potential buyers and the word about your brand will be spread, trust us. There are many interesting ways to present this to your followers so don’t just use plain text – use your imagination instead. That is the best possible timing for that! Great visuals – both photos and videos – are excellent for experimenting with colors, slogans and other aspects that will make your posts shareable. The more people share your countdown posts, the more impatient followers you’ll have.
Social Games & Marketing
People love games. Games mean there is an activity with a goal to achieve. That sometimes means there is a competition. Competition usually means people are trying to get a better score and giving their best. Moreover, that is always fun! Especially when it comes to online contests and games, where it’s effortless to participate, and you can do it straight from your bed or during your commute. You only need to have a little bit of free time and a bit of enthusiasm! Social media games and challenges are a great way to advertise your new product or service without people even noticing it. If your game or competition are exciting, exciting and fun, you will get new followers and potential clients, and you won’t be worried about spamming people, and their news feeds. So think of a simple game people could play on your page or a challenge that might make them interested in participating. Let's say, if you own a coffee shop, you could do a photo challenge. Say you want to introduce something you haven’t been selling before – donuts. Have people present their ideas of a perfect donut and choose the best one for making it a part of your selection. Of course, there should be some awards, at least for the top 3 suggestions. Give, and you’ll get increased sales in return!
Tease your audience
This social media campaign trick is similar to the countdown strategy. When you go to the movies, how many times do you say ’Oh, I have to watch this film!’ while watching trailers? Those couple of scenes, even though they usually don’t reveal much, make you excited about the whole film, and you already start planning on a movie night with your friends. Well, this is an excellent strategy you can use when presenting a new product or a service in your social media campaign. Instead of telling your audience what the news is about, you start counting down to the launch, but without revealing your secret! You followers might as well let curiosity kill them – they will be impatiently refreshing your pages, waiting for new hints to be published, so that they can continue trying to guess what the new product is. Let them try, maybe even organize a competition with a reward for the one who gets it right. You can opt for a simple version of the teaser campaign and post different teaser photos of the product or short teaser descriptions of the service or take it to another level and create teaser videos or engage your audience! Be mysterious and use the hashtag #comingsoon. Remember that this type of campaign requires regular posting or your followers will forget about your big reveal!
Hashtag creation
Your own, awesome hashtag is something you can and should use no matter what the rest of your campaign includes. Instagram, Twitter, all of the biggest social media networks today use hashtags, and it makes it easier to find exactly the subject that you’re looking for. So, why wouldn’t you make it easy for your target audience to reach your pages? Through your social media, they’ll get to your website, and that’s where they will become your customers. Apart from this practical aspect, a hashtag is a good opportunity to show your uniqueness and imagination, so think of something catchy and cool that could become viral. It is usually something that boosts the engagement on social media – an invite to share your own experience or a funny story from the past, or an interesting challenge you can connect to your business. We are sure you’ve seen the #tenyearschallenge all over the social media since the beginning of the year. Be a trendsetter and start a new craze online!
Involve your fans
Have your followers be a part of your campaign. If you’re ready to launch a product but still not sure about the final design, ask your audience for their opinion. First of all, you know that your products need to appeal to your target group if you want to be successful, so why not take their impressions into account? Social media platforms are the best and the simplest way to ask directly and to get quick responses, all in one place. Second of all, this will boost the engagement on your pages as everyone will rush to give a suggestion. Also, your followers will be happy to be asked what they think about something, and they will feel appreciated. A happy follower is a happy customer! So ask them to help you choose between two designs or suggest a slogan for your new service – you may be surprised by their great ideas!
It takes time to develop an excellent strategy for your social media marketing campaign, especially with all the new information coming up every day. It’s not easy to stand out, but these ideas can help you start. They might sound simple, but they have proved to work very well when put in practice. If you implement them in your plan, the only thing left for you to do is sit, relax and enjoy your success.