How to Create a Social Media Campaign

Social media campaigns can easily go viral…or at the least, generate impressive and measurable results for your brand. The challenge lies in crafting one that will help you appeal to the right audience and effectively deliver your message. In this post, we go through the step-by-step process of how to create a social media campaign. Let’s get started.

What is a Social Media Campaign?

A social media campaign is a focused marketing effort designed to achieve specific goals by leveraging one or more social media platforms.

Unlike everyday social media activities, these campaigns have a clear start and end, with defined objectives that guide the entire process. Whether you're looking to increase brand awareness or drive sales, a well-crafted campaign can make a significant impact.

Take OREO’s “Trust The Twist” campaign as an example. Launched globally in 2024 by LePub Amsterdam, the campaign builds on the brand’s iconic ritual of twisting the cookie.

Inspired by research into why the creme always sticks to one side, OREO turned this quirk into a playful decision-making tool. The campaign encourages people to “Trust The Twist” as a fun way to navigate daily choices, much like flipping a coin. With a mix of TV, digital, and social media activations, this campaign effectively resonates with OREO’s playful brand identity while engaging consumers in a fresh, interactive way.

By understanding the key elements of a social media campaign, you can better strategize and create initiatives that align with your brand’s goals and connect with your target audience.

1. Start with a Clear Campaign Goal

First things first, you need to know why you’re building a campaign in the first place. What’s the campaign supposed to help you achieve? Do you want more followers for your social media page, or do you want to drive sales for a particular product? Or perhaps you want to build awareness as you gear up for your latest product launch.

Make sure to get very specific so that you can use this goal to guide the rest of your campaign development. It will determine everything from the type of content you create to the messaging you share. Based on your goal, you may even need to determine whether you can rely on organic approaches alone or invest in paid methods such as influencer marketing.

For example, if your goal is to boost sales during a particular period, you may want to work with influencers to spread the message about your products. You can provide them with unique discount codes for their followers to use, which will help to drive more sales.

OGEE decided to work with nano-influencers to promote their targeted blemish treatment product. They provided each influencer with a unique discount code to drive sales for the product. 

2. Define the Audience You Want to Target

Your campaign should be targeted at a specific type of audience for it to resonate. When you have a clear understanding of the people you want to reach with your campaign, you can craft messaging and content that will address their specific needs and interests. 

Keep in mind that each campaign may have a different target audience. And the audience you target may be broader or more niche depending on the campaign. For instance, your holiday campaign may be targeted at a general audience while a launch campaign for a blemish cream may specifically target people who struggle with acne and blemishes. 

This makes it crucial to define the audience you want to target for the campaign. That way, you can streamline your audience research efforts to focus on your specific target audience. This will allow you to take a closer look at your target audience and gain a better understanding of their needs, interests, and pain points. 

Make use of social listening to see what types of conversations your audience is engaging in. See what they’re saying about specific brands and products as well as current events. This will help you identify the topics that matter to them, enabling you to craft messaging that resonates with them.

Source: sproutsocial.com

3. Conduct Competitive Research

Before you brainstorm campaign ideas and specifics, it’s important to get a better understanding of the competitive landscape. See what your competitors are doing so you can do it better and build a campaign that really stands out. C

A social media competitive analysis will help you understand what types of campaigns your competitors are running. You’ll be able to see how they execute those campaigns and how their audience is responding. See which channels they’re using and what content formats they’re making the most of. Identify whether they’re working with influencers and, if so, which influencers they’re working with and how. 

Based on these insights, you can start to get an idea of what other brands are doing with their campaigns and how you can set yourself apart. See what works and what doesn’t work so you can improve on them and craft a more impactful campaign.

Platforms like Mention can give you access to historical data about your competitors’ performance. You can track their product updates and compare your social strategy against theirs. It even helps you identify key influencers driving success for your competitors so you can inform your own partnerships. Also, check out these top social media agency campaigns for inspiration.

Source: mention.com

4. Hash Out the Campaign Specifics 

Once your goal and audience have been defined, it’s time to get into the specifics of your campaign. Plan out every detail of the campaign such as the channels and content formats you’ll use. These will be determined by the insights you’ve collected from your audience and competitive research as well as your campaign goals.

For instance, if you want to reach a Gen Z audience, you may want to focus your campaign efforts on TikTok and use short video content to spread the message. Or if your goal is to boost sales, you may consider working with influencers to promote unique discount codes.

On that note, if your campaign will involve influencer partnerships, this is the stage where you start to identify the right creators to work with. This will also largely depend on your target audience as you’ll need to partner with influencers who can connect with the type of people you want to reach. 

Following are some of the campaign specifics you need to plan out:

• Channels – Determine which social media channels you should include in the campaign. Where is your audience most active? Which channel will best help to achieve your campaign goal.
• Content formats – What types of content does your target audience engage with the most? Which content formats will be most effective for sharing your message?
• Influencers – If your campaign is going to involve influencer partnerships, you’ll need to determine which influencers to work with. Determine the niche, following size, persona, and voice of your ideal influencers to streamline your search.
• Metrics – What does success look like to you based on your campaign goal? Determine the metrics that you’ll use to measure the impact of your campaign. This can include metrics such as reach, impressions, engagements, ad clicks, conversions, sales, and share of voice among many others.

You can get as creative as you want with your campaign by keeping the above factors in mind. Try out new platform features and experiment with various content formats to see what drives the most impact for your campaign. Look at what other brands are doing and find inspiration in their strategies.

5. Decide on Your Strategies

One of the most crucial steps involves planning your social media strategies for the campaign. This will mostly depend on the campaign goal you want to achieve. For example, if your goal is to raise brand awareness, you may want to use strategies such as giveaway contests and branded hashtag challenges.

If you want to learn more about how to create a winning social media strategy, check out this article: Create a Powerful Social Media Strategy

Your campaign may also involve strategies such as influencer partnerships, sneak peeks, unboxing videos, reviews, discounts, targeted paid advertisements, and special offers. The best part is that you can get really creative with this part of your campaign. It’s all about figuring out how to best engage your target audience and drive the desired action. 

You can even combine multiple strategies to create something completely new and unique for your brand. For example, to promote the upcoming launch of a new Kayali fragrance, Mona Kattan created an ASMR unboxing video showcasing the product. The video was shared as a Collab post with the official Instagram pages of Huda Beauty, Huda Beauty Shop, and Kayali for optimal reach. 

This campaign engaged the audience through a mixture of two trending content types – ASMR videos and unboxing videos. It also featured the face of the brand to build a personal connection with the audience. As a result, it managed to build a buzz around the upcoming product launch, generating over 34k likes. Mona Kattan also asked her viewers to click the link in her bio to get notified once the new fragrance goes live, thus generating leads for the product.

The campaign also featured several other promo videos and photos that further helped to build excitement for the launch. For instance, one Reel showed Mona Kattan shooing away people holding phones with “Kayali Leak” written on the screens with an audio voiceover saying, “Well, that’s good… I’m gonna block you now.” By adding humor to address rumors about leaks of the upcoming fragrance, Mona effectively engaged her audience and got them even more excited for the actual launch.

The campaign promo didn’t end once the fragrance launched. They even held a giveaway contest where five people could win the Vanilla Candy PR boxes. This particular post generated tons of engagement with over 58k likes and 24k comments.

6. Create a Campaign Timeline and Calendar

How long are you planning to run your campaign? It’s important to have a clear campaign timeline so you know how to align your resources and efforts accordingly. Otherwise, you could easily run out of budget or experience delays that disrupt other marketing efforts. 

Creating a timeline for your campaign helps you stay on track and ensures that you’re revisiting your strategies at regular intervals. This will help you avoid overspending on campaigns that don’t work while adjusting them in a timely manner to improve your results. Specify the campaign start date and end date as well as when you expect to complete specific tasks and deliverables. 

For instance, say you’re running an influencer marketing campaign. In this case, you should specify the timeline for influencer identification and finalization as well as influencer outreach, onboarding, briefing, content approvals, and so on. This will allow your team to have a clear idea of what they need to do and by when so they can adjust their schedule and follow up accordingly.

Based on this timeline, you’ll want to develop a campaign and content calendar to organize your efforts. This should be a shared calendar where everyone can collaborate and keep track of the campaign tasks and content publishing schedule. It should allow you to assign tasks to relevant team members and schedule tasks to be completed by a specific date.

To get started, check out our IMH content calendar template by clicking the button below:

Content Calendar Template

Or, you can use an all-in-one marketing calendar like Coschedule to ensure seamless collaboration for your social campaigns. This will allow you to keep track of all your campaign deliverables in one place and have your team stay on top of their assigned tasks. You’ll also be able to plan your campaign content and ensure that you’re on track to publish them at the right time.

Source: coschedule.com

7. Craft Your Content and Creative

Now that all your campaign specifics and timelines have been identified, it’s time to put together the content and creative for your campaign. While the exact content may vary depending on the campaign goals, here are a few tips and best practices to craft successful content for a social media campaign:

• Create content according to the latest social media trends. Think content based on viral memes and TikToks but with a creative twist to promote your brand offering.
• Keep your content visually stimulating. This is social media we’re talking about, and visuals are everything. Eye-catching original graphics, engaging videos, reels and high-quality photos with cohesive design elements should be central to your campaign.
  
  Take a look at the following giveaway campaign hosted by CORA and Fabletics, for example. The photo showcases a CORA box alongside a person wearing Fabletics workout attire in complementary colors. This cohesive image instantly catches the eye and entices the audience to pay attention.

• Consider partnering with influential creators to help you create content for your campaign. These creators can maximize your reach and resonate with a broader audience by sharing your message using a creative approach. Give them the creative freedom to add their own unique voice to the campaign so they can authentically engage their audiences.  
• Even if you want more control over the content, you could still leverage the reach of influencers by featuring them in your campaign creative. This would involve including them as the face of your campaign while you take care of the creative production. That way, you can continue to stay on-brand and produce high-quality professional content while making influencers a part of the campaign.
  
  For instance, Stella McCartney partnered with Quannah Rose for their Summer 2024 campaign. The influential model has built a name on social media for her activism and her Navajo identity. They created an Instagram Collab post to promote the campaign, helping the brand to automatically reach Quannah’s 569k followers.

• Consider user-generated content to amplify the reach of your campaign. Come up with a unique campaign hashtag and encourage customers to spread the word. This will help you maximize reach beyond your existing follower base. You could even repost or repurpose this content to support other aspects of your campaign.  
• Repurpose content for various platforms and content delivery channels to get the most out of your campaign spend. Think influencer content amplified through social media ads, testimonials shared as original graphics, or authentic reviews added to your ad creative, for example. Check out how Moxie repurposes case studies and reviews for their Instagram ad.

• Come up with creative copy for your campaign. This copy should effectively get your message across to the target audience. It should also be optimized for different content formats and social media channels. This includes copy for your ad and social media graphics, captions, and videos.
• Ensure that your messaging is consistent across all channels for this specific campaign. If you’re promoting a diversity message on Instagram for this campaign, you should continue to promote the same message on TikTok. Or if your campaign focuses on a specific product benefit, you should promote this benefit across all your social media channels.

8. Execute, Monitor, and Optimize

Now that you have everything ready, it’s time for your campaign to go live. But it doesn’t just end there—you also have to review and monitor the campaign to make sure that everything’s going well. Double-check if your ad creative is displaying correctly, see if influencers are making any mistakes in their posts, identify any typos in your captions, and look at how your audience is engaging with your campaign. 

By reviewing your campaign as soon as it goes live, you’ll have enough time to make necessary corrections and prevent expensive blunders. Additionally, you should constantly monitor the campaign performance to look for areas to optimize. See if the content is driving engagements and clicks and pivot accordingly.

Make use of social media analytics software to monitor your campaign performance in real-time. This will help you keep track of relevant campaign metrics and quickly identify if anything’s out of place. You can then make necessary adjustments to ensure that the metrics are improving.

Don’t forget to monitor social media conversations around your brand and campaign. See what people are saying on social about the campaign to gauge their performance. This can provide valuable qualitative insights on how your campaign can be improved to better resonate with your audience. Some tools can even help you identify a potential social media crisis and respond accordingly.

9. Engage with Your Audience

Your campaign’s success highly depends on how well your audience is engaging with it. So it’s important to ensure that you’re making the necessary effort to boost campaign engagement. Don’t just observe the comments that pour in; take the time out of your schedule to engage with those comments. 

Answer people’s questions, provide them with helpful information, or simply interact with them to increase engagement on your social media posts. When you respond to people’s comments, you make them feel acknowledged and more connected to your brand. Moreover, your responses could provide answers to pressing questions that people might have about the campaign.

Glow Recipe regularly responds to most of their social media comments. While they carefully answer important questions, they also take the time to simply acknowledge other types of comments as well.

Create a Winning Social Media Campaign

Now that you have all the steps necessary to create a social media campaign, it’s time to take action. Start crafting the perfect social media campaign using a combination of strategies that will help you achieve the desired goal.

About the Author

Jacqueline Zote

Writer

Jacqueline Zote is a freelance writer and content producer. She writes for leading blogs in the digital marketing space. Her areas of expertise include influencer marketing, social media marketing, social media management, and content marketing.