Small businesses are guilty of avoiding planning social media campaigns, and there really is no reason to. A ‘campaign’ might sound quite high level and scary, but in essence, they’re just a clear plan of action to promote a single product, service or event.

From experience, I’ve seen many small businesses and even larger organisations take a ‘post and hope’ approach to social media. I work in the field every day, so you do come to recognise the brands that have a plan of action in place, and those that don’t.

Christmas is an excellent example of this – I urged one of my clients to be prepared with their Christmas campaign for September 1st. They’re a live music venue and restaurant, and come September, I was able to post about Christmas straight away. I’ve seen other venues this week (end of October) starting to post now – they’ve missed out on the 400 people who have already booked with my client.

Christmas is a clear period to turn into a ‘campaign’, especially if you feel that the word campaign itself is scary. Other examples would be Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Halloween.

Let’s focus on Christmas for your campaign

Most seasonal events like Christmas and Mother’s Day are applicable to all small businesses and campaigns – so let’s use Christmas as a timely example on how to plan a social media campaign.

This blueprint, as it were, can apply to any campaign. Let’s start with this list of questions:

  1. What are you wanting to promote? Is it one product? Is it all of your products? Event dates in the diary?
  2. What are the goals for the campaign? To beat sales from 2021? To increase sales by 10%? To get x amount of bums on seats?
  3. When will the campaign start, and end? This is important to help us curate that important and clear message, so set out those dates in your content calendar. Start early, and as the campaign reaches the middle and end, ramp up the marketing. For example with Christmas, I didn’t post every day about it for my clients in September – but I will in November.
  4. Which platforms are you using? If you know your audience, you may find that elements of your campaign will be better suited on Facebook rather than Twitter – it will all depend on what you are looking to promote, and what your goals are. Just be clever with how you utilise your profiles.

I am a big fan of keeping things simple – and I feel that with these 4 questions you can quickly start to see your campaign taking form. I like to write things down, or pop it on a whiteboard.

You have what you want to promote, your goals, and when you’re going to start. From here, you can begin to brainstorm the types of content and what you want to say straight away.

It could be as simple as sharing a picture of one of your festive candles and a caption saying “Psst… Christmas is coming”. Brainstorm your content and start filling out your content calendar for the length of the campaign.

Remember to vary your content – pictures, carousels, videos, boomerangs.

Campaigns through the year

There are a lot of different ways that you can plan your content and campaigns in advance. Here at Gwe Cambrian Web, what we tend to do is sit down at the start of the year together and as a team, think about our goals for the business for the year.

This then gives the marketing team a really good outline of where we want to go over the next 12 months – and how we can promote that.

We know for example that January, February, September and October are our busiest months for website development enquiries. So, we want our marketing to push that – time for a new website?

We basically bitesize our business goals into marketing campaigns.

It’s the same if you sell products, you probably have very clear dates in the diary to aim towards: Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day, Summer Holidays and so on – very quickly you are creating and working towards campaigns for these key dates.

If you’d like to have a chat about your marketing strategy and campaigns – please get in touch! We’d love to help you feel more confident about your marketing.