Six fundamental principles that make a successful social media campaign
Lessons from Pilar Barrio, founder of the Brilliant Minds Collective and Barrio Digital. Part of the Business Growth Hacking series, this article is a reflection on digital marketing with special focus on social media and content, and on how startups and smaller brands can get ahead of the competition.
If you read my previous article about the evolution of marketing on social media platforms, and more generally of digital marketing, you probably already know that I have worked with many brands and businesses of all sizes. In this post, I want to share with you the things that I have learned during all of those years, and how you can take these key principles and apply them to any campaign to make it work for you.
During the past few years, I have tried and tested many methods and tactics for brands big and small. Many clients called me when they needed to solve a problem, develop their audiences online or launch a new product. Particularly when they didn’t have budget to spare. I have run experiments for them to understand what works and does not work on each of the social media platforms. These experiments have sometimes led me to find golden formulas that worked, for a while. But the machines running these platforms are constantly changing, so these ‘golden formulas’ were only valid for about 6 months.
But, I learned a lot, and I found there were some fundamental principles that remained valid throughout all of the campaigns I have ever run, and through all the tests, experiments and strategies I have ever been involved with.
So, here are my six principles for running a successful campaign on social media:
- Really understanding who I am talking to: Spending considerable amounts of time researching and defining who will be interested in buying my services, and what drives them.
- Segmenting my audiences or customers: Understanding that every person has different motivations and needs, that lead them to having an interest in my services.
- Doing it with personality and authenticity: Creating content that is sincere and explains who my business is, and who I am. People buy from people. People buy through stories. Brands want to be like people so they become valuable, trustworthy and worth buying from.
- Understanding the platforms: Getting to know each platform so I can choose which ones I should be using for my business, for what purposes and how to make the most out of them. Platforms are marketers tools.
- Promoting my best content: Testing different content options at a small scale helps me understand what people want. This means I’m not spending time, effort or cash on promoting something that people will hate. This way, I also know, when I am sharing something of value that I should create more of.
- Analysing what’s really working: Only by understanding the numbers behind my analytics can I ever grow my business. Only if I know what gets people to my website, what makes them click, what makes them press ‘buy’, can I then do more of that to generate more income.
These 6 key principles can be summarised in one single word: STRATEGY.
What I noticed, too, was that strategy was the missing ingredient from many marketing activities run by businesses, big and small. I have seen brands of all sizes waste money because they do not understand their audience, because they are not telling the stories that connect with them, because they are promoting poor quality content, because they do not use the platforms appropriately, because they do not know what takes people to their site.
Because THEY DO NOT HAVE A PLAN.
Because they lack STRATEGY.
I have created a pro-level course about marketing your business with video, where I am focusing on giving you the skills and tools to build your strategic plan.
Strategy is what I want to teach you in this course and I want to:
***Share with you all the knowledge I’ve gathered through the years.***
***Present the best examples I’ve found out there.***
***Give away my templates, for you to keep and use.***
***You to ask me all the questions you come across when you try them out.***
I’m looking for people that will be committed to go through the process, that will dedicate time to build their strategic plan and that will want to use video as the core medium to connect with their customers and potential customers.
If that’s you, find a free spot on my calendar and book your initial consultation.
What’s this consultation all about?
- Understanding if this course is aligned with your goals
- Offering you some direction about what’s best for you business
- Choosing the right package for your personal situation
Can I just enrol in the course without this consultation?
Right now I am only inviting people that are ready to make a commitment to their business success. However, I will be opening the course to more people soon. Stay tuned!