How to Design and Run a Social Media Campaign from Start to Finish

Social media, in the relatively short time it has been a part of modern society, has revolutionized how we communicate—and business communications are no exception. Let’s go over why you should absolutely be using social media to your marketing’s benefit, and how you should go about doing so.

Why Should Today’s Businesses Be Putting Social Media to Use?

There are plenty of reasons that a modern business (particularly a managed service provider) should be utilizing social media to their marketing advantage—something we’ve been saying for years now, despite the many excuses we’ve heard.

First, it’s another reminder of your business and the services that you offer, delivered someplace where your audience isn’t necessarily looking for it. This can help make whatever message you’re trying to share that much more impactful, as well as boost the reach of these messages. This is particularly true if you encourage your audience to interact with them, share them, and otherwise amplify your message on your behalf.

How Socialization Can Boost Your Business

The “social” nature of social media can also encourage this naturally, as the format helps to inspire interaction organically where many people spend some of their downtime. This means that a more casual tone is of benefit on many platforms, with added personalization to better… well, personify your services. With a casual tone to help draw in your audience and send them to your website, social media marketing can generate some relatively quick returns on your investments.

Furthermore, managing this activity is relatively simple, especially with the assistance of the tools that these platforms commonly offer to assist you in creating your ads and budgeting them appropriately. Working proactively can also make this kind of activity much simpler, especially if you’re in the habit of scheduling your social media posts ahead of time.

So, there are some clear benefits to utilizing social media in your marketing efforts. Now the question becomes how to do so most effectively.

How to Effectively Use Social Media to Market Your Business

There are many different facets that should be incorporated as you implement social media into your marketing strategy, starting with the strategy you will use to do so.

Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Marketing

In fairness, the word “strategy” sounds scarier than it must be where social media is considered. As social media is effectively an extension of your business’ brand, its corporate personality, that needs to be reflected in how it takes shape.

So, should the content you post there be all improvised and shared on the fly if that reflects your company culture? Absolutely not. The tone of your social media activity, the variety of content you share, and even which platform you primarily utilize should be planned out and pruned.

Managing Your Business’ Social Media

While we always recommend that you should diversify your use of social media platforms and populate them accordingly with content, it can pay off to focus a little more attention on the platforms that best suit your industry’s audience and service offering. For instance, if you were trying to market a bakery instead of an MSP, visual platforms like Instagram or YouTube can make a stronger impression than written content.

We’ve created an assortment of blogs that outline social media marketing best practices that we call our Social Media 101 series. Make sure to check them out:

• Facebook 101
• Twitter 101
• LinkedIn 101
• Instagram 101
• YouTube 101

Again, we aren’t saying to abandon the relatively-less-optimal platforms but perhaps, focus your energies a little more strongly in certain areas. The real key is to be consistent: both in the branding that you put on your social media and the schedule you keep when publishing it. This reliability will help you to build your brand so that your followers are more prepared to act like a following and follow you back to your website.

How to Approach Your Social Media Followers

Once you’ve developed a following on social media, you need to make sure that you’re interacting with them appropriately.

It is important to remember the medium that you are using. With relatively few exceptions, social media channels operate with a more casual tone, encouraging communication between human beings. This means you should be talking to your followers as human beings, to other human beings.

It is also important that you continue the conversation with anyone who engages with the content that you’ve posted. Things like comments, rather than likes or shares, are particularly valuable because they imply that the person commenting is open to starting a conversation with you.

Use Your Available Resources

Of course, as social media platforms are effectively marketing platforms disguised as communication tools, there are ways that you can really amp up your own efforts while using them. With the ad capabilities that social media networks now incorporate into their platforms, there are a variety of ways that you can improve the efficacy of those that you put out there.

For instance, these networks—particularly Facebook and Instagram—offer advertising capabilities in a variety of formats that are meant to encourage different goals. These advertising tools also allow you to take more control over what you are investing into your social media marketing.

Other tools are available through third parties to help you manage how your posts are scheduled over time (which we can help with, too). These tools can also help you collect and analyze your all-important metrics, which can help you further optimize your advertising and marketing activities.

So, What Should a Campaign Look Like?

Let’s take what we’ve gone over and build an example social media campaign together. Let’s say that you’re trying to promote your MSP’s backup and disaster recovery services—although a little bit of tweaking is all it would take to adapt this to effectively any industry and/or service offering.

The messaging behind a BDR campaign can take many forms to help put the right impression into your audience members’ minds. Therefore, many formats can be used. For simplicity, we’ll focus on Facebook and Instagram (keeping in mind that more platforms could and should be used alongside them).

With the visual capabilities that Facebook and Instagram offer, a campaign focused on images will likely be most effective, so it makes sense to use such elements to their full advantage. Furthermore, with these platforms commonly being used in the home more than during working hours, the language you use should be urgent and directed toward a business user, but somewhat more casual in how it is crafted. Perhaps you would put up and boost some video posts describing the biggest risk factors that a business operating without a backup in place may face, with a call-to-action that encourages them to share which statistics they found most surprising.

Utilizing one of the scheduling tools we’ve mentioned above, you could then plan out a lead generation campaign that focuses on the biggest pain points that a business could face and convince them to visit your website for more information—where they would hopefully fill out a form and/or reach out to your business directly. At the very least, they would be on your website, which makes it much more promising than they would reach out at some point.

Using the data generated during this campaign execution, you could then review the marketing materials and posts you had used to identify which ones were most effective. With this information, you’d be closer to figuring out a variety of valuable tidbits: which messages resonated most when most people engaged with your social media content, and which contacts showed to be most receptive to your efforts.

The result: new leads and (ideally) clients, with a better idea of how to use your social media to attract more later. Mission accomplished.

Yeah, This Can Be a Lot to Manage...

...But That’s What We’re Here For.

If you find that marketing your MSP sufficiently means that you’re not left with enough time to operate it, we can help. Our team of professionals can manage your marketing for you with our wide variety of marketing services, including many that are designed to improve your use of social media.

Check out our website to find out more about what we have to offer or give us a call right now at 888-546-4384 to learn more.