Why you need a campaign strategy

Creating a campaign-specific strategy is a vital first step in deploying a social media campaign. This should take the form of a document made accessible to all key stakeholders through a collaboration tool such as Google Drive or DropBox.

The purpose is making sure the campaign is focused on pushing the social media channel goals as set out in your ‘social media channel strategy’.

Many social campaigns can be heavily idea-led, the temptation could be to execute an interesting idea or exploit a new social platform functionality. But, ensure you maintain your focus on your set objectives.

There could also be some other marketing activity external to social media which the campaign has to remain connected to.

Common examples include:
Public Relations (PR): If a campaign has some element of innovation, vitality or research findings, it may have PR value. This has to be considered ahead of the campaign, as well as maximised after.
Above the Line Advertising: If this is concurrently running, how does this non-conversational media manifest itself and turn into conversational media on social media platforms?
In-Store: If the social campaign is driving a particular action or promoting specific content, how can this live in a physical retail space? Taking the above into consideration, think about how your social media campaign can assist your other channels.

Over the next steps in this activity, you will have the opportunity to create your own example campaign strategy document, which you would submit as an Excel document. Please note that in a real-life scenario we would encourage use of Google Drive or DropBox.