A social media marketing campaign is the best way to grow traffic to your business and improve your online presence.
How do we know that?
Currently, there are over 5 billion internet users worldwide. To catch the attention of this digital population, you must utilize digital marketing. 93% of internet users are on social media and there were 49.55 million social media users in Bangladesh. You can grow your social media presence by arranging an effective social media marketing campaign
To help with that, I’ve brought you an in-depth guide on how to develop a social media marketing campaign in Bangladesh in 2023. This article will walk you through the steps of developing a social media strategy that drives brand awareness and improves ROI.
What is social media marketing?
To put it simply: Social media marketing is the process of using social media to expand your brand’s reach, drive conversion and engagement rates, increase sales, and ensure the longevity of your brand.
A social media marketing campaign is a series of coordinated marketing moves to boost a brand, a product, or a service using at least one social media platform.
Your campaign needs to:
- Have measurable results.
- Be strategically focused.
- Encourage social media users to engage.
Businesses focus on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and others to reach their targeted audience. In 2020, companies in the United States spent over 40 billion USD on social media marketing. Predictions say the ad spend may cross 56 billion USD by 2022.
Why Invest In Social Media Marketing?
On average, a person spends almost 3 hours a day on social media. If these internet users come across a post by your business or a hashtag you created, wouldn’t this create curiosity about your brand?
Social media marketing brings interest to your business which expands your reach and drives users to customers. That’s why you need effective social media marketing strategies.
How To Create A Social Media Marketing Campaign – In 7 Easy Steps
We’ve broken down a successful social media marketing campaign into just 7 steps:
- Setting campaign goals.
- Target audience identification.
- Competitor research.
- Social media platforms selection.
- Social media content strategy formulation.
- Social media content calendar creation.
- Campaign monitoring and management.
Now that you know the steps to create a social media marketing campaign, let’s dive deeper!
Step 1: Set Your Campaign Goals
Like all things in life, your digital marketing campaigns also need solid goals. You can calculate whether your efforts paid off or not, depending on how well your campaign goals have been achieved.
Here are some goals that businesses generally set for their campaigns:
- Higher website traffic.
- New leads generation.
- Higher conversion rates.
- Higher audience engagement.
- Improved brand engagement.
- Increased brand awareness.
- Revenue growth.
- Increased client feedback.
- Maximizing user-generated content.
- Building a community around the brand.
Of course, you may set different or more goals depending on how big your business is, how much you’re willing to spend and your business metrics. Decide your goals after discussing them with your marketing team. Your goals may even change following how well the campaign is doing.
- How To Set Social Media Marketing Goals?
Your social media campaign goals need to be set on the basis of your business KPIs or Key Performance Indicators.
The ultimate result of a marketing campaign includes improved ROAS, ROI and KPIs.
*(ROAS: Return On Ad Spend, ROIs: Return on Investments.)
An easy approach to determining your goals is to follow the S.M.A.R.T method.
I’m going to share a more advanced and specific approach:
S.M.A.A.A.R.R.T goals.
- Specific.
- Measurable.
- Attainable/Achievable.
- Actionable.
- Agreed upon.
- Relevant.
- Reasonable/recovery-oriented.
- Time-bound.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
Let’s be real for a second: you can’t reach each social media user on every platform. You have to specify which groups you want to target through your campaign.
People of different age groups, races, and communities prefer different approaches. Target a fixed group of people and design a social media marketing campaign based on them. This fixed group of people is your targeted demographic.
- How Should You Select Your Target Audience?
Your audience depends on the type of business you run. If your brand is based on stationary, your clients will most likely be young children or even artists. You will build your campaign focused on these clients and focus on social media like Facebook, Instagram and Youtube- the apps most used by children.
While selecting your targeted demographic, you can keep the following in mind:
- Know your current customer base.
- Find out which social media your audience uses the most.
- Analyze the group of people your competitors are focusing on.
- Conduct customer surveys to know your audience better.
- Use popular social media to find communities your consumers are part of.
Yes, fixing a target audience is necessary but you should also be familiar with your current audience.
You can start audience analysis by dividing the target audience into the following groups:
i) Existing customers: Monitor the existing traffic on your social media platforms and website.
Who is visiting your page?
Who is buying from you?
Review where these people are from, what age group they belong to, and which demographics they fall under.
How will you identify your existing audience?
Create weekly polls that focus on your customer’s age or service preferences. Through this process, you can know what products they usually want to buy from you.
Use quizzes to engage your clients and gain information on their location and interests.
You need to map your customer journey by analyzing the collected data.
Once you’ve narrowed down the group of people who are already listening to you, work on keeping these clients connected with your brand for the long term. Turning a client into a repeated buyer is called customer retention. Through a higher customer retention rate, you can establish brand loyalty among your customers.
If you want to expand your brand’s reach, you have to gradually grow your target market. To widen your customer circle, you need data on the already existing buyers.
How does this data help you?
If you already know your clients, you can produce content, especially for them. You can also offer discounts or send them customized messages that will increase your customer retention rate.
Now from your existing customers, you focus on the related target markets.
Let’s look at an example for a better understanding:
Suppose you have a shop that sells notebooks. The notebook buyers are your loyal customers. People who use notebooks need pens to write. So you target the related new market of pens.
Every business has such connected or affiliated markets. Explore the markets related to your current customers and target them to expand your audience reach.
iii) Potential customers: Sometimes people may visit your website or view your social media pages but they don’t buy from you or interact with the posts. They may be looking for the same services you provide but aren’t your customers. These visitors can be your potential customers.
Recommended Reading: Target Audience vs Target Market: Key Differences
A Real-Life Example Of Target Audience For Social Media Marketing Campaign
Let’s take a look at Dove’s long-running “Real Beauty” campaign launched in 2004 and analyze their target demographic:
- Mainly women.
- Aged between 18-35 years.
- Highly active on social media.
This specific target audience also keeps Dove’s campaign alive through user-generated content.
Learn: How to Create User-Generated Content?
If your campaign is aimed toward Bangladeshi customers, you can focus on cultural aspects like clothing, music, and festivals. You also need to focus on the social media channels most popular in Bangladesh.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you need to divide them into categories using the audience segmentation process.
Identifying target audience is a detailed and integral process included in social media marketing.
Step 3: Research Your Competitors
Competitor research or competitive analysis includes monitoring marketing strategies and standard operating procedures of brands with a similar business to yours, who cater to a similar audience.
Competitor analysis is a broad topic with complicated steps but here are the basic steps of competitive research:
i) Identify your competitors: Usually there are three types of competitors you need to identify:
- Direct competitors: Brands with the same business idea as yours and the same target audience as yours.
An example would be Domino’s Pizza vs Pizza Hut
- Indirect competitors: Brands with similar ideas to yours but a broader target audience(which also includes your specific audience)
For Domino’s Pizza brands like KFC would be an indirect competitor.
- Replacement competitors: Businesses with a wider concept and similar audience to yours are replacement competitors.
If you decide to eat at Star Kabab instead of Domino’s, this is an example of a replacement competitor. Usually, these are the hardest types of competitors to identify.
You should focus on direct and indirect competitors before worrying about replacement competitors.
ii) Research the marketing strategy of competitors: You need to know what your competition is doing that you aren’t doing. Knowing marketing strategy gives you a list of tested “do’s” and “don’ts”. You can carry out this research in two ways:
- General/Overall: You can make a complete observation of your competitor’s marketing strategy – their promotions, which platforms they’re focusing on, how much budget they have, and the type of content they’re making.
- Specific niche: You can observe only their promotional campaigns or their target audience. The type of research you need to conduct depends on your business goals and your KPIs.
iii) Compare with your business: Now that you know what your competitors are doing, compare it with your campaign strategy.
What more can you add? Is something missing? What’s missing? What will make the customers engage more? Fill in the gaps in your business using everything you’ve learned.
- What Are The Benefits Of Competitor Analysis?
After conducting a competitive analysis, you’ll be able to:
- Identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Understand your target audience and business value.
- Keep up with business trends.
- Decide milestones or KPIs for future improvement.
- What Social Media Competitive Analysis Tools Can You Use?
Here are 5 social media competitor analysis tools to make your job easier:
- Hootsuite
- Sprout Social
- Brandwatch
- Sociality.io
- Socialbakers
Step 4: Select Social Media Platforms
Over 4.6 billion people worldwide use social media. These users are spread unevenly across different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, Snapchat, TikTok – and others. It’s not possible to actively focus on all these social media at once – you must decide which platforms will benefit you the most.
Platform selection is not an easy task. It requires time, proper planning, and lots of patience.
But no worries!!!
I’ll provide you with some effective strategies to decide on social media channels.
Select channels for your social media campaign based on:
- Where your target audience is the most active.
- Your campaign goals. (brand awareness, lead generation, conversion rates etc.).
- The kind of content you want to create.
- Platforms your competitors are focusing on and benefiting from.
- Platforms where you’ll get the most engagement.
Do not try to put the same focus on all existing platforms!
Which Social Media Channels Should You Focus On?
From the various social media platforms, we can compare the number of users and engagement rates to decide which social media would be the best for marketing.
Facebook Marketing: Facebook is one of the most used social media in the world with almost 3 billion active users. Bangladesh alone has over 58.9 million active users as of July 2022.
33.8% of the country’s population uses Facebook. 26.3 million of these users are between the ages of 18-24 years. If your targeted group is among these ages, you’ll know to pick Facebook for your social media marketing campaign.
Instagram Marketing: Instagram is slightly more popular these days among younger audiences. Almost
5.3 million people in Bangladesh use Instagram. 53.6% of Instagram users are between the ages of 18-29 years.
Posts, videos, and edits can go viral on Instagram if you use trending hashtags. So if you’ve designed content with images, videos, hashtags or small animations, Instagram is the platform you should target.
TikTok Marketing: TikTok is one of the most used apps for the years 2020 and 2021. It is also the most downloaded app of 2023. 80% of users of this platform are between the ages of 16-34 years. (src: TikTok)
Tiktok works great in multiplying user-generated content as the site is mostly driven by people scrolling through hashtags. They join the trends and add new videos by themselves to bring in more traffic.
If you plan on starting a short-form video trend with hashtags, TikTok can be your main focus.
YouTube Marketing: YouTube has been around for quite a long time and has built up a huge number of loyal users. Over 2.5 Billion of them. In 2022, YouTube has already garnered over 7.34 billion USD in advertising revenue. YouTube advertising is a foolproof way of attracting new audiences and increasing brand value.
Twitter Marketing: Bangladesh has over 756.6 thousand active Twitter users. This platform isn’t heavily targeted by Bangladeshi markets yet. So if you can get a hold of the audiences on Twitter, you’ll be ahead of your competitors.
Pinterest Marketing: Pinterest is a social media app that requires little to no interactions among its users. You can create a business account and make boards based on your business.
Suppose you run a restaurant. You can make a board with pictures of the recipes you serve. You can also make a board with pictures of the dishes in your restaurant. An interior decoration board with pictures of your restaurant will definitely draw the attention of customers. All these visual representations will set your brand apart from the rest.
Read also: How to Create a Retargeting Ad on Facebook
Step 5: Create A Social Media Content Strategy
A social media strategy is one of the basic pillars of planning a social media marketing campaign. Creating a social media content strategy is a time-consuming and structured process that also includes steps like platform selection, competitor research, audience research and making a content calendar.
In simple words: A social media strategy is the combined effort of your content creation, platform selection, posting schedules and business goals.
Here are some tips to create an effective social media strategy:
- Set up well-defined and specific content pillars.
- Make trendy and fun content that drives engagement.
- Select platforms depending on where you get the most engagement.
- Build a well-structured and consistent but flexible posting schedule.
- Conduct a social media audit.
Developing a social media content strategy is a gradual process with many steps. I can’t break down the whole procedure here. But don’t worry! We’ve got a separate feature on how to develop a social media content strategy.
Step 6: Create a Social Media Content Calendar
A social media calendar will have a complete overview of dates, posting time content type, content topics, posting platforms and post captions. A content calendar helps to plan out when your content will be posted, where it will be posted, and makes sure you can maintain deadlines.
A social media content calendar may be well detailed with all your actions like:
- Posting date and timing.
- Posting platform.
- Content type(text, video, image etc.).
- Content caption.
- Comments, goals and other specifications related to the content.
Or, it may be a simple outline with just the dates of content publication.
A social media calendar needs to be made strategically- you don’t want to overcrowd it.
- What Should A Social Media Calendar Include?
Here are some pointers you can include in your social media calendar:
- Posting platform
- Content type
- Publishing date
- Publishing time
- Post Title
- Post topic
- URL or other features
- Visual description of the post
Your content calendar doesn’t need to be overly detailed. (Unless you want it to be!)
A social media content calendar can also be called an editorial calendar and it can be changed according to your content strategy. A content calendar can be made for a specific week, month or even a year.
You can use tools like Google sheets, Microsoft Excel or Air table to make your social media content calendar. Many websites and tools provide free social media content calendar templates that you can fill up as you wish. Using Google spreadsheets is the easiest way to create a social media calendar.
If you don’t have content idea for social media, It will be difficult to maintain your content social media cullender. Don’t worry, we have in-depth article on How to find content ideas for social media in Bangladesh, Read this on first.
Learn more: A Definitive Guide on Social Media Content Calendar
Step 7: Monitor and Manage Your Social Media Campaign
Now that you know how to run a social media marketing campaign, you can check on how well it’s performing by monitoring your campaign metrics and data.
Likes on posts, impressions, shares, replies and organic account mentions – all reflect how well your brand is doing on social media. Collecting all data related to your social media platforms is social media analytics. By measuring social media analytics you can measure the success of your social media campaign.
Learn more this article: How to Manage and Monitor Social Media Marketing Campaigns?
Here are some social media analytics tools you can use to monitor your marketing strategy:
- Hootsuite.
- Keyhole.
- Sprout Social.
- Buffer Analyze.
- Social Report.
- Cyfe.
- Quintly.
- Google Analytics.
These services are designed to let you listen to what customers are saying about your brand, collect social mentions, and track hashtags, keywords as well as URLs. You can also use these tools to directly reply to your audience and engage with them.
Each business has some specific metrics that need to be monitored to measure the success of marketing campaigns.
The social media metrics you need to monitor include:
- Traffic to your social media channels and website.
- How much interaction you’re getting per post.
- Change in the number of followers.
- Your social mentions on social media and community pages.
- Discussions related to your brand in groups, forums and different community pages.
How can you monitor these metrics? Social listening is a process that will help you in metric monitoring. Social listening means tracking conversations related to your brand, gathering feedback and opinions, and utilizing the collected data to improve a service or the brand value of your business.
Social listening brings you different key information types, such as:
- Trends in the industry.
- Brand health and reputation.
- Event monitoring.
- Campaign analysis.
- Customer loyalty.
Popular social listening tools are:
- Agorapulse.
- Hootsuite.
- Falcon.io.
- Brand24.
- Awario.
The data collected from social listening and social media monitoring will help you manage your marketing campaign. If you have well-defined and specific management tactics, your marketing campaign will be successful in the long run.
Let me list some social media management tools to make your life much easier:
- RSS Autopublisher.
- Brandwatch.
- Nexalogy.
- Airtable Automation.
- Statsocial.
- Archivesocial.
Social Media management is not easy. It will be easy if you hire a social media manager. Before hiring read our in-depth guide on Things to Know When Hiring a Social Media Manager in Bangladesh. It will help you to select the right person.
Before Vs. After Of Your Social Media Campaign
After you’ve launched your campaign, you should do an overall review of how well your marketing strategy has performed. The data you should monitor and compare can include:
- How many of the KPIs and business goals have been met?
- Change in engagement rates.
- Increased social sales.
- Campaign cost.
- Increase or decrease in social mentions.
- Conversion rates
- SERP rankings
And that’s it! Now you know how to plan a social media marketing campaign.
What are the benefits of social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the most effective tactic to improve lead generation. 68% of consumers connect more with brands through social media.
It is likely that people will remember a fun challenge, a catchy tune, or a fun video for a long time. And nothing can catch people’s attention like a social media fire. A good social media marketing strategy can cement your brand in people’s memories for a long time. As it is easy to share content on social media, your business reach also expands without needing your constant and active participation.
Let’s sum up how social media marketing benefits your business from everything we’ve learned so far:
- Increased brand awareness.
- Improved ROIs and ROAS.
- Higher engagement rates.
- Increased traffic.
- Higher conversion rates (traffic to consumers to sales).
- Brand loyalty.
- Improved brand reputation.
- Higher client retention rate.
- Brand longevity.
Tips For Planning An Effective Marketing Strategy
Preparing only the infrastructure for your social media campaign isn’t enough. You need to keep updating your marketing plan so it can be sustainable.
I’ve got some simple tips that will help you design effective social media marketing techniques.
i) Make Your Content Mobile-Friendly
By 2020, there were over 4.08 billion people who use social media on their phones. The largest percentage of your social media target audience is on their mobile phones. So your videos, images, text posts, and all content must be created in a mobile-friendly interface.
Be sure to check the accessibility of your content on both computer and phone screens before making them public.
ii) Fix a Budget
How much does a social media marketing campaign cost?
This question must’ve crossed your mind at least once. Well, the answer is: we don’t know.
No, I don’t mean that we don’t actually know how much social media marketing can cost. What I mean is, we can only make estimates on the total cost of a marketing campaign. Your marketing cost will vary depending on the size of your business and your goals. Small businesses will allot a much smaller amount for running their social media campaigns compared to established corporations.
If you want to involve with an influencer marketing campaign or fund any visual props(posters, drawings, animations, etc.) you’ll need to plan out how much you’re willing to spend.
It won’t be any good if you end up spending more than your profit. This is where you need to prioritize ROAS.
Decide your budget by dividing your spending into different categories:
- Budget for social media content creation.
- Budget for partnering with influencers.
- Budget for paid advertisement.
- Budget for marketing tools.
The categories for the budget aren’t set in stone. You can select your budget types, fix how much you want to spend on that category, and even change the budget later on.
Your best friend in social media marketing campaigns will be user-generated content. User-generated content or UGC is when your users start trending hashtags and creating videos or other content based on your idea on their own. User-generated content needs to be correctly sparked so your users carry on with your business promotion by themselves.
Learn more: What is User-Generated Content in Social Media?
You’ll get more traffic, user engagement, and a rise in brand reputation- all of this within a limited cost!
iii) Follow A Consistent Posting Schedule
According to a recent study by Buffer, the best times to post on Facebook is between 1 pm to 3 pm on weekdays and Saturdays. There’s also 18% more engagement on posts on Thursdays and Fridays. Obviously, this timing is gold if you want to post on Facebook. So decide on a fixed posting time and posting frequency.
Posting twice or thrice a day may work best for you. Or maybe posting once a day may get you more engagement. Utilize your social media analytics to decide on your posting schedule.
iv) Try New Ideas
Humor is quite popular and effective these days. It can bring in new customers and keep people interested. So if you come up with a witty caption or idea for a social media account- go with it!
Post special content on days like March 26th, February 21st and even on religious festivals like Eid, Christmas, and puja. Specialized content like these makes your accounts inclusive, and fun to interact with. It also brings variety to your social media accounts.
v) Research On Some Successful Social Media Campaigns
Study some social media marketing campaigns that have been successful in real life. Learn what these brands focused on and what made their campaigns effective.
Many brands have launched social media marketing campaigns and gained amazing results. Let’s take a look at some examples and see what makes a successful social media campaign.
- Apple #ShotOniPhone
Apple’s #ShotOniPhone is one of the longest-running and most successful social media campaigns ever launched. The campaign started in 2014 with a single post with the hashtag #ShotOniPhone. Apple started reposting pictures using the hashtag and it took off.
This hashtag has over 25.6 million posts on Instagram, growing every day. The best part is the campaign is constantly driven by user-generated content. Apple doesn’t have to do much, users just post under the tag for fun and the brand gets a free promotion.
Why do you think this campaign works?
- #SpotifyWrapped
Each year in November or December, the music streaming service Spotify sends each of its users a complete yearly overview of all the music they played. This includes most played songs, artists, genres, mixes, and lots more. In the latest update, Spotify added a “what’s your music mood” section where the user gets a personalized color palette based on their music taste.
Why this works: Music listeners wait excitedly to receive their Spotify wrapped each year and to share them. They post their wraps with the tag #SpotifyWrapped and speak more on Spotify. Twitter engagements soar and more people download Spotify.
This works to increase social media engagement, the number of users, and brand reputation.
Plus, it’s super fun and interactive!
- Dove #ShowUs
In 2019 Dove partnered up with Girlgaze and GettyImages to launch the #ShowUs project. This campaign was to encourage representation of all kinds of beauty. The tag #ShowUs with the tagline “#ShowUs a more inclusive vision of beauty.” has over 5,000 pictures on the GettyImage gallery.
The campaign even kicked off on Instagram with over 650,000 posts under the #ShowUs tag. This campaign was accepted rather as a movement than marketing and that’s why it has been sustained. Like almost every long-term successful campaign, the #ShowUs project is driven by user-generated content.
Why does this work? Dove simply showcased their values and brought in a unique way of making people feel represented and validated.
Now you know how to introduce a social media campaign!
a great read!
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Best resource for social media marketing. Thank you digisocial.
Thanks for your appreciation. Stay Tuned with us to get the latest blogs on digital marketing trends & updates- http://digisocial.com.bd/blog