More than 5.2 billion people worldwide use social media. They access an average of 6.7 social platforms each month and spend nearly two and a half hours on social channels every day.
With statistics like these, it’s easy to see why social media is a great place to connect with just about any audience. Whether you’re hoping to reach moms in Minneapolis, bachelors in Boston, or teens in Trenton, chances are you can find them on social media.
A social media campaign allows you to create content that speaks to your audience and serves a specific marketing goal. Read on to learn more about social media campaigns: What they are, how to design one, and the specific tactics that work.
Contents
- What is a social media campaign?
- How to create a successful social media campaign
- 12 social media campaign ideas
What is a social media campaign?
A social media campaign is a set of posts shared on one or more social media platforms in service of a discrete marketing goal.
The campaign can be a mix of both paid and organic posts, and it should have a concrete beginning and end date, with defined KPIs to measure its success.
How to create a successful social media campaign
To craft a social media campaign that works, it pays to do some planning. These steps will set you down the right path.
Define your audience
The most effective marketing serves a tailored message directly to its targeted audience. That’s why settling on the correct audience for your campaign is the first step toward success.
This list of questions is a good starting point to find your target audience.
You can find your target audience by looking at your current customers. What shared demographics, psychographics, and buying behaviors define this cohort? If your brand targets several personas, which one best fits this marketing campaign?
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Set a goal
Once you know who your audience is, you can turn to your campaign goal. What effect do you want your social media campaign to have on your audience? Will you:
- Encourage new purchases?
- Fill up your sales pipeline?
- Drive greater brand awareness?
- Generate more online buzz and media attention?
These are just a few of the goals you can target with your campaign. No matter what you hope to achieve, remember to set SMART goals (those that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).
Create your high-level plan
You defined your goal; now you can draft the roadmap to reach it.
Your high-level plan looks at the logistical elements of your social media marketing campaign:
- Which social platforms will you use?
- What is your budget?
- Will you employ a mix of paid and organic tactics?
- Will you create an overarching theme for the campaign, and how will you unify your content (a branded hashtag, recognizable slogan, or something else)?
Dive into content creation
The next step is to get granular. What actual content will you need to produce as part of your campaign? This may include video, audio, photos, or copy.
Build out a content calendar outlining what will be posted on which platform and when. Then, draft the actual content you need in advance so you can easily stick to your schedule.
An example of a monthly content calendar
Measure results
As part of your planning process, you should have identified KPIs to track. Once your campaign is running, monitor those indicators.
Fortunately, social media platforms offer a host of trackable metrics, which makes it easier for you to spot trends and watch results in real-time.
Sometimes, the data immediately reveals something obvious. If that’s the case, be ready to lean into a positive indicator to maximize results. Or, if the data shows an issue, be nimble enough to pivot away from something that isn’t working.
Debrief and learn
At the end of your social media campaign, sit down with your team to audit your results. Did you reach your goal?
If you didn’t, what do your KPIs tell you about your miss? Is there anything you can learn to adjust for next time?
If you did, what went right? Take those successful tactics into your next campaign and look for opportunities to refine and improve on them.
📣 Free resource! Your Copy & Paste Social Media Calendar
12 social media campaign ideas to try
So what do you actually build your social media campaign around? These 12 concepts and tactics can help spark inspiration as you craft your campaign.
1. Encourage user-generated content
One of the greatest hurdles in social media marketing is maintaining a steady cadence for content creation and publishing. Leaning on fans and followers to create content for your brand can help buoy your social media campaign.
As a bonus, user-generated content builds trust. 84% of millennials say they’re more likely to trust a brand that shares content from users—after all, they have no reason to inflate the benefits of the brand’s product or offering. If an outsider says the brand is great, that carries some weight!
Well-known brands have built social media campaigns around user-generated content before. Remember the #ShotOniPhone campaign? It invited users to post stunning photographs they’d taken using their cell phone camera.
2. Host a challenge
Challenges are an exciting, engaging way to encourage fans to interact with your social channels. Brands that create a challenge often ask their audience to get directly involved, filming themselves taking part or sending in other user-generated content.
A well-designed challenge inspires commitment from the followers who do it. And when you design the challenge to encourage your audience to pass the torch to friends and family, you have the potential to create a viral campaign.
Think of the Ice Bucket Challenge, which invited people to dump freezing cold water on their heads to raise money for ALS research. After a participant had doused themselves, they tapped friends to do the same. The challenge spread across the globe, attracted dozens of celebrity participants, and raised $115 million for the cause.
While some challenges are designed, others are born organically. When McDonald’s released its Grimace Shake in 2023, TikTok users created an impromptu challenge by drinking the frosty treat and recording their reactions. In the videos, people pretended the electric-purple drink had caused harm (or perhaps even had summoned Grimace himself to do violence).
McDonald’s could have distanced itself from this slightly bizarre and off-color trend. Instead, it leaned in, posting winkingly about the online challenge. That fueled the Grimace Shake fandom and kept the challenge going.
3. Create a branded hashtag
A branded hashtag is a powerful way to build connections between related content. Every post you tag with a specific hashtag is linked on the social media platform. When someone clicks that hashtag, they’ll see all related content.
That’s why creating a branded hashtag can be especially effective for a social media campaign, where everything works as part of a whole toward a specific marketing objective.
You can use branded hashtags in any social media campaign, including the two types we’ve already discussed: user-generated content and challenges. By encouraging participants to tag their content with your branded hashtag, you can see all of their output—and so can your followers.
4. Tap your influencer partners
Engaging influencers as part of your social media campaign can expand your reach to a wider audience.
Influencers work hard to cultivate a network of devoted followers. And because many smaller influencers focus on a specific niche—whether it’s vintage jewelry, vegan cooking, vehicle maintenance, or something else entirely—if you work in the same space, you’re likely to find a highly relevant audience when you partner with that influencer.
Plus, an influencer partner can lend you instant credibility. Nearly 70% of consumers say they trust influencer recommendations more than information a brand publishes about itself.
You can engage influencers as part of a brand awareness or lead generation campaign, where all of your focus is on expanding your reach into their networks. You may also choose to work with one or two influencers for a larger branded campaign.
5. Build your campaign around an aspirational message
Marketing campaigns can do many things. Some may hope to drive a specific business result—like an increase in sales. But others have more general brand-building goals. Boosting brand awareness or creating a lift in social mentions is also a worthy objective.
If your social media campaign is about attracting a new audience or capturing more attention, leading with an aspirational message is often quite effective.
Paint a picture of what people will be like, feel like, or look like if they engage with your business. What could they achieve if they only used your product or service?
Aspirational campaign messages invite people to reach for their biggest, wildest dreams. Slogans like Nike’s “Just Do It” and Apple’s “Think Different” epitomize this type of campaign.
6. Highlight your brand’s heart
Does your brand give back? If so, consider building a social media campaign around your good works.
45% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from a brand that gives back. Sharing your charitable efforts with your audience can raise awareness for the causes you support and give your business an edge in consumers’ minds.
This tactic is very popular with social impact brands that have giving built into their model. Take a brand like Bombas, which donates an item of essential clothing, like socks or underwear, for everyone who purchases from the business.
But you don’t need to be a social impact company to highlight your good deeds in a campaign. Small businesses that work within their communities to give back can also share this with their audience. If you sponsor a local event, regularly organize team volunteer days, or donate a percentage of proceeds to a beloved cause, these are all potential messaging points.
7. Tout your vision and values
Many consumers say that brands’ social values matter. Research from McKinsey shows that businesses that discuss their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-related product benefits (like “cage-free eggs” or “cruelty-free makeup”) see a demonstrable lift in sales. In a study of retail sales growth from 2018 to 2022, McKinsey found that products making ESG-related claims accounted for 56% of all growth.
If your business sells products with ESG ties, consider crafting a social media campaign to let your audience know about your do-good bona fides.
8. Share what sets you apart
What is your brand’s unique value proposition? Why should someone buy from you and not your competitor? What benefit are you offering that they won’t find anywhere else?
You can build an entire social media campaign around your answers to these questions. Defining your unique value proposition is foundational branding work that every business should undertake as part of its broader marketing efforts.
Best Made Company shared its first care label on Instagram and used it to discuss the brand’s value proposition.
An added benefit is that you can use what you learn as part of your branding exercise to build a campaign touting your value proposition to the wider world.
As an example, say your business is known for its exceptional customer service. You can build a campaign that features individual members of your customer service team. This makes your team feel celebrated and connects your audience and team members before they even call into your service line.
9. Engage in seasonal marketing
Seasonal marketing campaigns are built around a specific seasonal event: a holiday, a time of year, or a meaningful period to your business (e.g., “back-to-school” season).
Crafting a campaign around a season that’s meaningful to you and your customers can break up your regular messaging and drive specific seasonal goals.
For example, a ski rental business might run a seasonal campaign at the start of the fall, inviting early birds to enjoy a discount on its winter rental subscription. Or, a restaurant could create a campaign around its two-for-one dinner specials during the slow January months to drive foot traffic.
10. Design a limited-time offer
Great marketing elicits feelings and action from the intended audience, and a limited-time offer can inspire both.
A limited-time offer is inherently a “here today, gone tomorrow” event. And FOMO (or fear of missing out) is a tactic marketers have long used to drive consumer action.
You can build your limited-time offer in several ways—it’s all about picking a strategy that works best for your business. You might:
- Offer your most popular product at a discount for a limited time, encouraging those “on the fence” shoppers to finally buy.
- Create an offer designed to clear out end-of-season inventory and make room for new products.
- Design a limited-time service package available to early birds at the start of your busy season to jump-start your highest revenue months.
11. Celebrate a holiday (or create your own)
Plenty of brands build campaigns around their holiday offerings. This tactic is most prominently on display during the winter holiday season, with countless retailers taking part in events like Black Friday and Small Business Saturday.
However, there are myriad holidays throughout the year you can leverage to create a successful social media campaign. Besides actual holidays, there are hundreds of “national days,” many of which will have clear tie-ins to your business.
Take Dunkin’ as an example: It offers a free donut with any beverage purchase in honor of National Donut Day.
You might also dream up a holiday just for your brand. Perhaps you choose to create a promotion on the anniversary of your first day in business. Or you might dream up a celebration in honor of a local event—like the pub that hosts a post-race party for runners in the town’s 10K.
12. Spread the word about a new product or offering
Social media campaigns are also an incredible way to get the word out about your latest offering. Whether it’s a product or a service, social media is the place to create buzz and draw attention from a wide range of people: existing fans, new potential customers, local press, and more.
Rolling out a new offering requires a thoughtful marketing plan, of which social will be a part. The key to any new product launch is to generate excitement in advance. Tease your new offering and tell your audience what day you’ll make the big announcement.
On the day of the launch, share a variety of content on social media. This might include:
- Video of your team building the new product.
- An interview with your founder or brand leader explaining why they’re excited about the new offering.
- A giveaway of your new product to a lucky follower.
- Endorsements from any fans who had early access.
- Detailed product photos and/or video so your audience can see all features and benefits.
- Clear, benefits-focused copy that lets your audience know why to get excited.
And the marketing campaign doesn’t stop there. Continue your promotional efforts beyond launch day, using social media to promote your new product.
Use these social media campaign ideas for viral success
If you’ve been sitting on the social media sidelines or find that you’re in a rut with your campaigns, let 2025 be the year you try something new!
A great social media campaign is part of a healthy marketing strategy, and it can work in service of just about any broader marketing goal you have. If you’re not sure where to start, why not give one of these campaign ideas a whirl?
A well-designed campaign allows you to track results and learn from your efforts, so no matter what direction you choose for this campaign, you’ll be learning something valuable about how to approach the next one.
Here’s a recap of the social media campaign ideas we shared:
- Encourage user-generated content
- Host a challenge
- Create a branded hashtag
- Tap your influencer partners
- Build your campaign around an aspirational message
- Highlight your brand’s heart
- Tout your vision and values
- Share what sets you apart
- Engage in seasonal marketing
- Design a limited-time offer
- Celebrate a holiday (or create your own)
- Spread the word about a new product or offering
