When creating a social media campaign I still see a lot of brands making the mistake of doing it “the old way”. They spend months discussing the different approaches they can take for the campaign, to eventually pick one that they think will work best. True Mad Men style! And it’s quite mad indeed.
You see, this might have worked in an era where Don Draper drank more whisky before lunch than I drink espressos in a day, but it’s definitely not the best approach you can take today. Nowadays you have the opportunity to experiment with as many variations on an ad as you'd like. And, this is the best part, actually finding out which variant connects with people IN REAL-TIME!
The 3 variables that determine the performance of a social media campaign
There are basically three variables that will determine the performance of your social media campaign. Two of which you can improve in the short term and one of them that’s a long-term game.
Variable 1: Your Audience
The first variable is the audience that you are targeting with your campaign. To make sure that your ads are as relevant as possible, which will impact your results in a positive way, you want to make your audience as specific as possible while still being large enough to be meaningful for your campaign.
For example, if you are selling B2B software your message to the end-user will probably be different from the message to the relevant C-suite role.
Once you have nailed down your target audience, this will probably not change very often, if ever. So now it’s time to move on to the next variable.
Variable 2: Your Creative
Since we now know who we want to reach, it’s time we get to the fun part of building a social media campaign: Creating our creative!
Now there are a couple of things you want to keep in mind for the creative of your social media campaigns:
- Create at least 2 variants for each campaign, but preferably even more
- Each variant can only have one specific change, otherwise you will not be able to learn why one ad worked better than the other
- Each target audience needs its own campaign (or ad set, depending on the platform) so that you’ll be able to tailor the creative to them
- Rotate your creative within a campaign at least once every two weeks to prevent ad fatigue
- ALWAYS KEEP TRYING NEW IDEAS
Variable 3: Brand
This is the variable that is often overlooked when evaluating campaign results, but the brand you have built over the years has a huge impact on the performance of your ads. I mean, there is a reason why Apple does not have to focus on their products in their ads.
If you have a brand that is widely recognized, your ads are probably going to perform better because of it. If not, this is something that you can build over time.
Follow the basic guidelines in this post and your social media campaigns will already be better than 95% of all of the social media campaigns out there!
