How do you find success in marketing?
It certainly doesn’t happen on its own! As with most things in life, it’s all about preparation and follow-through. When you have a clear, repeatable plan for executing your social media marketing campaigns, you are more likely to find consistent success in your efforts.
That’s why we put together this social media marketing checklist—to help you understand what the process entails, and to give you a way to ensure you hit all the right marks, every time.
Read on to see the list of elements that come together to make a strong social media marketing campaign, then steal our checklist to keep your efforts on track!
Contents
- What is social media marketing?
- What is a social media marketing campaign?
- Social media marketing checklist: 5 steps to plan your campaign
- Social media marketing checklist template
- How to use this social media marketing checklist for success
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing encompasses all the organic tactics you employ on your social channels to build an audience, drive engagement, and contribute to sales.
These tactics include creating new content of your own or re-sharing content from others, replying to comments and DMs, and engaging in social listening, where you monitor what others are saying about your brand online.
You can, of course, engage in paid social media, too! But social ads are their own category of marketing.
What is a social media marketing campaign?
Everything you do on social media is ultimately part of your broader social strategy. Within this overarching effort, you may also run discrete social media marketing campaigns.
A campaign consists of a set of posts that all drive toward a specific marketing goal. For example, you may launch a social media campaign to promote the introduction of a new product, drive more website traffic, or tout an upcoming holiday sale.
Your social media marketing campaign will have a unifying theme, with copy and design elements that tie everything together.
📆 Get our free social media marketing calendar template to plan year-round social campaigns!
Social media marketing checklist: 5 steps to plan your campaigns
Now that you understand what a social media marketing campaign is, let’s drill down into the components that make a successful one.
1. Define your strategy and plan
Every good marketing campaign starts with a solid plan. That’s why your first step is to define your social media marketing campaign goal.
What are you trying to achieve with your campaign? SMART goals help you get specific. For example, if you’re creating a campaign to promote your July 4th sale, you might set a goal like this: “We want to see X% of traffic to our website’s sale landing page come via our social media channels, and we want to see X% of those visitors convert.”
With that goal in mind, it’s easy to identify your KPIs. In this example, you’d want to track website visits coming from each social platform and attribute online sales to those visitors.
The next step is to identify the right target audience and the social channels where it makes sense to execute your plan. These two steps go hand in hand. A retail brand touting a sale will likely gravitate to platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok to reach consumers where they are.
Once you’ve identified channels that are right for your purposes, think more specifically about your audience for this campaign. For example, if the segment you want to reach skews younger, you might rely on TikTok—rather than Facebook—to connect with them.
2. Set clear creative direction
Once you know what your campaign is about and where you’re going to share it, you need a creative direction.
This step begins with a brainstorm: What is the central theme for your campaign? Continuing on with our July 4th example, the obvious theme is patriotism. But what unique spin on stars and stripes works for your brand?
Once you’ve nailed down the theme, you can get into the specifics of setting slogans and design direction. (And if you’re looking for July 4th slogans, we’ve got you covered.)
3. Create your calendar and content
Your theme, messaging, and design are all ironed out. Now it’s time to get even more granular.
Start mapping out your campaign on your broader social calendar. Hold spots for campaign-specific content, which you can pepper in alongside your regularly scheduled programming.
Download this free calendar here
Once you know what posts you need, when, and on which channels, you can actually create those assets.
- Design your images, take photos, or film videos.
- Write any on-image copy, plus the copy for the post itself.
- Brainstorm hashtags, or potentially create one that unifies all the posts from your campaign.
- Identify any other accounts to tag in each post. For example, if you’re selling 4th of July tees made by a local brand, you can tag them in content featuring their products.
Your last step here is to get approval from the requisite internal stakeholders and get ready for the really exciting part.
4. Schedule and monitor
Your campaign is almost ready for prime time! Once everyone’s signed off on the content, you can upload it to your social media scheduling tool.
Ensure everything transfers over from your planning document properly. Did you include the right hashtags for each platform? Are the accounts you tagged in your copy showing up properly?
Once the campaign posts start going live, who’s responsible for monitoring? You should assign a team member to handle key tasks like:
- Replying to any comments or DMs
- Dealing with any negative comments
- Troubleshooting any technical issues with how the content has been posted
Depending on the size and scale of your campaign, you may also implement social listening. There are tools that can help you spot where others are talking about your brand. But you can also go old-school and simply keep an eye out for mentions and reshares from other users.
The volume and quality of attention you’re getting from people can tell you something about how your campaign is performing (and if there’s anything you need to adjust).
5. Evaluate and iterate
Your campaign may be up and running, but you’re not done just yet! You should continue to monitor KPIs as the campaign rolls out. Have a plan to check in on your stats at regular intervals—the timing will depend on the overall length and scale of your campaign.
By periodically checking your KPIs, you have the chance to catch things that are working really well or missing the mark. If there’s one headline that drove a ton of traffic to your site, you might reuse it in an upcoming post.
Alternatively, if a set of posts with the same style of imagery just isn’t catching eyeballs, you can swap it out for something different on posts that aren’t live yet.
You may even try running some A/B testing. Make little tweaks, like changing the language in a CTA, and compare performance between the two options. This is how you learn what really resonates with your audience—useful information for this campaign and beyond.
Once your campaign is wrapped, it’s time for a final debrief. Check your KPIs against your SMART goal, reflect on your processes, and discuss lessons to carry with you for next time.
Whether you absolutely crushed it or missed the mark a little, there’s always something you can learn from any campaign.
🌱 Make a plan to grow your business on social media with our free, easy-to-use growth strategy template!
Social media marketing checklist template
This social media marketing checklist distills the five key elements of a great campaign down to the essentials. Make a copy of the full version of our free social media marketing checklist template here.
How to use this social media marketing checklist to keep your campaigns on track
Ready to go out and create a killer campaign for your business? Awesome! To recap, the full checklist is below, and don’t forget, you can get more help with your social media strategy using our solutions!
Run through this checklist every time, and you’ll have a process to design, create, and launch well-considered campaigns.
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