Whether your motto is “fewer, bigger, better” or if your brand runs dozens of social marketing campaigns a year, reaching customers on social media is a necessity in today’s digital age. Marketers run campaigns for varying reasons—from product awareness to coupon distribution. All in all, social media marketing campaigns can serve a variety of purposes. Regardless of your campaign’s goal, there are certain best practices that all marketers need to know in order to run a stellar social media marketing campaign.

Here are five non-negotiable best practices for every single campaign you ever launch.

1. Write Clear Campaign Goals

Identify the goals and KPIs of your campaign from the very beginning. These are the metrics that you will be measured on, so they are important to have right from the onset in order to prove that your campaign was a success. Confused on what KPIs to use? While it depends what you are encouraging participants to do (e.g., use your discount code, submit photos of your products, etc.); at a high-level, you’ll want to choose metrics around campaign reach and engagement.

2. Be on the Right Social Networks

The social networks that you are active on need to reflect the demographics of your target customer. For example, if you are looking to reach men and women ages 18-29 with incomes over $75,000 you might choose to run your social media campaign on Twitter. If instead you are targeting women ages 65+ with incomes under $30,000, you might choose to run your campaign on Facebook. If you want to learn more about the different demographics of social media platforms, click here.

3. Engage with Participants

The work’s not done after you set up and launch your social media marketing campaign. You’ll want to stay highly engaged with the campaign if you want to gain momentum and make sure that your campaign’s a success. The most sure-fire way to engage with the campaign is to engage with its participants. This requires you to heavily monitor the online conversation around your brand and actively participate in it. If you need to, use a hashtag analytics tool to track your brand hashtag and mentions for the duration of the campaign.

4. Display Ah-mazing Content

Besides liking and commenting on participants’ posts, you’ll want to highlight some of the participants themselves. Not only does this offer recognition and praise to campaign participants, but it helps to get the word out about your social campaign and to build social proof for your brand. To sum it up: Re-tweet, re-post, and re-gram all day long. Major key to your social campaign’s success.

5. Prove the Campaign Worked

As the campaign comes to a close, look back on the original metrics you wrote down at the start of the campaign and determine your success. Did you meet your goals? If not, take some time to analyze your results and come to a conclusion on how your next campaign could be improved. Like all marketing, you’ll need multiple iterations of your social campaigns to achieve your goals. Keep moving forward, you’ll gain new insights from every campaign that you run.

Contests and campaigns are one of the most effective and fastest ways to get in front of current and potential customers. Regardless of the campaign’s goal, following the above five tips will help your social media marketing campaign hit it’s numbers and move the needle for your business.

This post was originally published on the Pixlee Blog.

Article Posted by Julie Carnoy of Business 2 Community