
You can’t have an effective campaign without a proper social media strategy. (Image: Flickr)
Are you in the process of planning your latest social media campaign?
Without a proper strategy in place, execution will prove extremely difficult. You won’t have any guiding directives to keep you on course.
You can “wing it” if you want to, but pretty soon you will discover that your campaign isn’t anywhere near as focused, consistent, or effective as it could be.
Here are several reasons why you can’t run a campaign without an effective social media strategy.
Without A Strategy, You Won’t Know What To Post & When
If you know what your end goals is, and what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign, you can take actions that are in alignment with your objectives.
Conversely, if you haven’t thought everything through, and you’re not entirely sure what you have to gain from running the campaign, you’ll just post at random, not knowing whether or not what you’re doing is getting results.
You need to give some thought to what to post, at what times, and how often. This keeps your campaign organized and focused. It also makes your workload far more predictable.
You should also have a pretty good idea of what your audience is going to respond to, or have the flexibility to tweak as you go based on what the stats are showing.
Without A Strategy, You Won’t Know How To Interact With Your Followers

Knowing how to interact with followers and customers is key to social media success. (image: Flickr)
For example, let’s say that you publish a post that’s a little controversial. Pretty soon, your followers are adding their thoughts and opinions to the discussion. This can get out of hand if you’re not careful.
If you had a proper strategy (and policies) in place, you would know when and how to respond. You would know which users to block, and how to moderate and maintain a sense of peace with your following.
But if you never even considered that your followers would be interacting with you in the first place, and you didn’t make it a part of your plan, you may not know how to respond, or even have the awareness that you should.
Even some basic guidelines will go a long way towards helping you maintain a sense of consistency across all of your channels.
Without A Strategy, There Is No Beginning, Middle & End
Do you know what your campaign is for? Is it to drive attention to your social profiles and grow your following? To promote a new product or service offering? To create awareness for your contest or giveaway?
“Campaign” is a nice term to use to describe a concerted promotional initiative, but if you just leave it at that, you might have your team fooled into thinking it’s more than just an ad hoc marketing scheme.
Without a clearly defined plan, you don’t really have a campaign. Your campaign won’t have a beginning, middle or end, and campaigns always have a beginning, middle and end.
If your campaign isn’t measurable, then it won’t do you much good. You need to be able to look at the results and determine the return on the investment so that you can make tweaks to it and figure out what you could be doing better in the future.
Final Thoughts
If you’re getting ready to launch a new campaign, then make sure to start with a well thought out plan. This will ensure that you and your team will remain consistent in the message that’s being shared, when it’s being shared, and how often.
The results of your efforts will also be more predictable. This is important, as it allows you to plan future campaigns more effectively by making small tweaks to your strategy.
Are you looking for help with your social media strategy? If so, we look forward to hearing from you. Please get in touch to find out how we can help.