So you finally did it. You finished that fantastic blog post that you’ve been diligently working on for days. Undoubtedly the people of the internet will be drawn to its greatness, and pour over every word that you wrote, right? In a perfect world, maybe. In the real world, finishing your blog post is just the beginning.

I’m sure you have a few bloggers you idolize or at least a few individual blog posts you’ve read that were wonderful. Do these bloggers simply create this amazing content and then sit around twiddling their thumbs? No! They realize, just as you will that the post itself is only part of what needs to be accomplished. Behind every successful blog post (or any content that you’re trying to promote), lies a well thought out and executed social campaign.

What is a social campaign, you ask. A social campaign is a series of posts across all different social media platforms, and often even an email sequence, designed to promote and draw attention to the blog post you so lovingly crafted. A widespread mistake made, is that people expect their posts to be found organically. Don’t wait for your target audience to stumble upon your content, make sure it gets right to them!

Tracking your progress and setting goals

There are a lot of individual aspects to a social campaign that are all important, the first of which is to have a clear, identifiable goal. Whether that be driving sales of a product or service, you offer, growing your email subscriber list, or even just generating views and recognition of your blog.

Defining your goal from the very beginning makes the entire process more manageable, for it gives you a purpose that you can and must act upon. It’s also important to have a way to track and measure that goal so that you can make a note of, and react accordingly to, your growth towards your goals.

Do not forget your call to action!

Paramount to keeping in line with your goals, is your call to action. Throughout all of the content, you’ll be making to promote your subject matter, it is essential to keep gently (or not so smoothly, depending on your style) nudging your audience towards what it is you’d like them to do.

Are you looking for email subscribers? How will they know to subscribe unless you ask! Maybe you’re more concerned with attracting more readers to your blog. Again, your audience won’t know what steps you’d like them to take unless you point them in the right direction.

Diversified platforms, the more, the merrier

Another fundamental principle of crafting your social campaign is diversifying the platforms you are using to promote yourself or your content. With a multitude of options in front of you, it can be easy to choose one, and arbitrarily make a few posts and call it a day. That is not going to generate the results that will help you meet the goals you set for yourself.

Being present on as many facets of social media as you can help you to reach out to a much broader audience than you would expect. Each platform also differs significantly from each other, so don’t expect to be able to create one single post and then copy and paste it onto each platform. It’ll take some work to flesh out your campaign fully, but the potential for growth towards your goals is too much of an opportunity to pass up!

Cohesive imagery, staying on brand

Another essential piece to the puzzle, which might seem like common sense to some, is making sure that all of the images you use across platforms are on brand and cohesive. Keeping yourself on brand is incredibly helpful not only to attract new attention but also to maintain recognition.

Choosing a handful of strong images to utilize across every platform in your campaign will keep your campaign tied together, instead of having it appear to be random. It might be beneficial to you to create your images specifically for the campaign itself using a program such as Canva or Easel.

Coordinated, thought out scheduling

Lastly, executing this social campaign becomes much more comfortable with a thoughtful, coordinated schedule. Instead of posting about your blog on facebook three times in one day, and then nothing on the next, it can be beneficial to you take a step back and look at your calendar from a bird’s eye view.

It’s also essential to maintain a balance across all platforms in your campaign. Identify which platforms make the most sense for you to present yourself on, and focus on them, but don’t let the others fall by the wayside. If you know your target audience will respond well to a twitter campaign, that’s all well and good, but you’re missing out on the potential gains you could make from the same campaign reaching across Pinterest or Instagram for example.

Looking at what we’ve just discussed in a list form:

The keys to unlocking a successful social campaign are:

1. Have a goal in mind, that you can track.
2. Make sure to include your calls to action
3. Diversify your social platforms
4. Cohesive images
5. Thoughtful, coordinated scheduling

An excellent tool I’ve found for meeting every point on that list while crafting your social campaigns is Coschedule. Coschedule provides the framework to efficiently manage and execute a successful social campaign, whatever your goals may be. It has loads of easy to use features that simplify the entire process, such as best time scheduling for taking the guesswork out of when to post, or their social helpers which allow you to craft and assemble the meat of your social campaigns quickly and efficiently.

Article Written By: Peg Fitzpatrick