Day by day, more shoppers are resorting to social media for product research and discovery.
That’s why ecommerce brands need to create social media campaigns that stand out from the crowd, drive user action, and deliver desired results.
But, how can you run social media campaigns that drive results, without being salesly?
Be creative.
Design social media campaigns that rise above the noise and deliver social media success.
But how?
Just follow the six-step process described in this guide.
Design Creative Social Media Campaigns in 6 Easy Steps
The process described below helps you manage your ecommerce social media campaigns end to end. Check it out.
1. Outline the Campaign Basics
When we talk of the basics of a social media campaign, we refer to our goals, audience, and channels.
Identifying them ensures that you stay focused throughout the creative process and during implementation.
What’s more?
Knowing them ensures that you can track, measure, and repeat tactics that deliver results.
It’s, therefore, important to understand why your ecommerce business wants to run the creative social media campaign and whom it will target.
For example, do you want to create awareness, drive traffic, promote a product, do a giveaway, or champion a social cause?
Next, identify the best channels for your social media campaigns, depending on the products you want to sell and the platforms that your target audience uses.
2. Develop a Creative Campaign Concept
The creative concept of your social media campaigns represents the big idea that captures your audience’s interest, influences their emotions, and inspires action. It’s the unifying theme that will be applied across the messages, channels, and calls-to-action in your campaign.
And, if you want to succeed with your campaign, you have to come up with a concept that’s memorable, relevant, and distinctive.
Take, for example, the #ShowUs campaign by Dove.
Dove sought to target women who don’t feel fully represented in the media due to society’s unrealistic beauty standards. They wanted to break beauty stereotypes by having women of all shapes, sizes, and colors share their unfiltered pictures with the world, without feeling any shame or prejudice.
The campaign’s creative concept of inclusivity struck a chord with the audience, inspiring them to post over 10K pictures all over social media.
So how can you come up with creative concepts for your social media campaigns?
Understand your target buyer and the problems they encounter in their daily life. Pick one pain point that your campaign can strive to alleviate through its messaging or action. Anchor all your campaign strategies around that concept/
Alternatively, you can check out what’s currently trending with your target audience and pick a theme that unites all of them.
3. Create Supporting Visuals
Ensure that you use unique visuals in your social media campaigns instead of repeating what’s already out there. This means experimenting with different designs to find what works for your ecommerce business and sets you apart.
For example, you can collect or take high-resolution images of people using your products or use stock photos if you don’t have an extensive collection of user-generated visuals.
However, ensure that images you use in your social media campaigns align with your ecommerce brand’s look and feel.
Alternatively, you can hire a graphic designer to create great visuals for you. If you don’t have a big marketing budget, you can create flyers, posters, and slick visuals yourself by using design tools like Genially, Visme, and Canva. Identify a template and base all your visuals on it to give a unified look to your social media campaigns.
What’s more?
You can reinforce your creative concept by using certain representative colors across all your target channels and platforms. For example, you can use light green or light blue to reflect tranquility, or bright red and yellow for passion.
Likewise, choose fonts that go well with your brand, again to aid brand recall and aesthetics.
For example, check out Dollar Shave Club’s choice of fonts. They use the same curvy font throughout their campaign posts, making it almost synonymous with their brand.
That said, your campaigns’ look and feel isn’t set in stone. It’s okay to opt for a completely different aesthetic for a specific campaign in order to make it unique or just for shock value.
4. Create and Schedule Posts
By this point, you’ve got your social media campaign materials ready for publishing.
However, you’re not ready to post yet.
Why so?
You need to plot your publishing schedule for each channel separately. Your posts should be published at times when your target audience is most responsive.
At the same time, you don’t want to fatigue users by bombarding them with too many posts in a short span of time. So, determine your posting frequency keeping in mind your audience’s schedules and marketing best practices.
With that done, you can craft captions or messages that’ll be used to drive engagement on each platform.
In addition, you can leverage hashtags to boost your campaign’s reach, engagement, and discoverability. You can either create custom hashtags for identifying your social media campaigns, or use hashtags trending in your niche and among your audience.
Include the hashtags in all your campaign-related content, and encourage people to use them when they reshare your posts.
When your posts are ready to publish, put things on auto-pilot by using a publishing platform like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social. These platforms will queue posts, auto-post them, and also track their engagement.
5. Respond to and Engage with Your Audience
Don’t publish and forget.
Instead, keep your audience engaged throughout your social media campaigns.
But how can you keep up with messages and replies from all the platforms?
There are tools for managing multiple profiles that can give you a holistic view of all activities across social platforms. By using them, you can log in to different platforms at once and respond to messages or comments fast.
What’s more?
Increase engagement on your campaign by sharing the visuals your audience posts. However, remember to tag the owners to increase the chances that they reshare the message with their followers and boost your reach.
6. Track and Optimize Your Campaign
You might have pulled off exemplary social media campaigns, but there’s always room for improvement.
That’s why you need to track your campaign performance diligently.
For calculating your campaign’s engagement, reach, and ROI, you need analytics data (such as clicks, impressions, etc.). You can access this data either from host social media platforms or from the social media management tools mentioned above.
But what should you track?
Track conversations as they happen, with ongoing analytics. Adjust your tactics if the response is lukewarm. Track customer sentiment and use those insights to modulate your content. This way, you can create perfect social media posts even while a campaign continues.
After a campaign ends, use metrics like clicks, impressions, etc. to understand the end-result of your overall strategy. Create detailed reports with actionable insights and improvement suggestions for future social media campaigns.
Time to Get Creative with Your Social Media Campaigns
With the tactics above, you can design social media campaigns that drive engagement and bring in great results.
However, ensure that each tactic you use works towards helping you achieve your goals. And most importantly, don’t forget to engage your audience in the campaigns so as to drive them to action.
Need more help designing social media campaigns for your ecommerce business? Comment below so I can share winning tips and tools with you.
