Are you wondering how social media can do anything for your business? Are you tired of learning about the tactics of using social media without any idea how to put them together for a campaign? One that works for YOUR business?
Let’s talk about the most important factors to putting a social media campaign together that can:
- Increase the calls you’re getting
- Bring more people to an event or your business
- Broaden your market to a younger audience
- Grow your business
First, a reminder of what a campaign is. People live mostly in routines around their life activities. Generally, they deviate from routines when an outside event occurs: if they get sick, they go to the doctor; if they’re invited to a party, they may go; if they need more clothes, they’ll go shopping. A campaign is driven by a business to get people to operate outside this pattern: to come to your business because YOU want them to. Maybe you want to bring them in for the first time, maybe you want to increase the frequency they do business with you or decrease the time between sales, maybe you want them to buy more from you. In summary, you’re creating an external event to attract your customers into your business. You’re essentially trying to interrupt the flow of their lives to do something different – and spend money with you.
The central pieces to all this – the first, second, and third factors to your success – are to:
- Know yourself or your business or your organization,
- Know your customer, and
- Thoroughly understand why they buy from you.
That means you need to understand how buying from you relates to the rest of their life. How does your product or service make a positive difference in how their life works? In how they feel – both generally and about themselves? What is the emotional hook for them in buying your product or service? And in buying it from YOU?
Once you understand in depth the relationship and investment your customers have in you and your product or service, then you’re in a position to understand what the sweet spot would be in creating a campaign that will bring more revenue into your business.
The sweet spot is the intersection of:
- Fun
- Value
- Relevance
Fun
If what you’re offering doesn’t move the needle of your customer’s life in a positive direction, then you’ve got an uphill battle. That means whatever special offer you have or event you’ve created, or invitation you’ve make or request – any call to action that you’re building the campaign around – must either alleviate a pain point or create lots of entertainment or someplace along that continuum that’s important. Otherwise they’re not going to be interested in deviating from the flow of their lives.
The fun element is the trigger for them to be aware of you in the midst of whatever they’re currently doing that doesn’t involve thinking about you.
Relevance
Once you have a clear understanding of the role you play in your current customers’ lives, you can translate that into the role for new customers as well as leverage it in communicating to existing customers.
For example, if you’re a personal trainer and it’s March then you can guess that there will be people out there interested in gearing up for outdoor sports for the summer time. If those are your ideal customers (the kind of people who are active in the summer, not so much in the winter, and actually are interested in preparing in advance), then you can have calls to action that remind them it’s time to start training. That’s context and when you use that you’re relevant to them in their lives.
Another example, if you sell dresses, you can remind your customers or potential customers it’s time to start looking for the dress you’ll need for prom, or for your friend’s wedding, or for your graduation celebration – that’s all part of being relevant.
Another part to being relevant is to understand the larger picture of what’s happening in the community, in the region, in the nation, and in the world. You don’t want to make light of people’s real challenges or tragedies, like American Apparel’s campaign during Hurricane Sandy.
Value
This is the bottom line, the value that’s exchanged when someone takes the time to engage with you, comes to your business or finds it online or makes an appointment, goes through the process of discovering what they want, and then pays you for it. That’s all accumulated value – time and money and good will – they’re will to offer in exchange for the value you deliver.
Your campaign also has an element of value in it – the intrinsic value of participating in something fun as well as the extrinsic value of whatever you’re offering. This is the closing element of the equation – if the value is clear and worth the customer’s time and energy, then they’ll participate.
Note: creating intrinsic value in your campaign does not require offering a discount. Discounts are problematic in many ways. The value of your campaign can be the care you show, the tip you’re offering as part of the campaign, the gentle reminder that you’re available and it’s time for them to take care of the problem, or just the value you always deliver. If you’re offering fun as part of participating in the campaign (like in a sharing contest of some kind), then that could be value (or if it’s not fun, then it’s a cost to your customer).
Marketing Campaigns Summary
Campaigns live or die on this equation: Trigger someone with fun or the solution to the problem, demonstrate relevance by being within the context of their lives, and deliver value at every stage.
Campaigns have all kinds of other success factors: goals, metrics, building your audience, specific focal points, partners, budget, and consistent execution. But fun, relevance, and value are the heart and soul of the campaign.
Do you agree?
