Page 99 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Execute for influence

Traditionally, most campaigns have focused on getting a potential customer to
take a specific action or to view a specific brand message. The focus has always
been on that individual engaging with the brand in some form. However, with an
SMM campaign, you need to design for sharing, influencing, reciprocity, and
social currency.

Unlike most other campaigns, an SMM campaign needs to accomplish two objec-
tives concurrently:

» It needs to engage the individual who’s being targeted via the campaign.
This is similar to any other type of digital marketing campaign. You want to
engage with your target audience in a specific fashion and solicit a specific
response.
» You also need to design the campaign so that the target person shares
or discusses it with someone else.
Sharing is the social currency element. The person should feel that by sharing
the campaign with someone else, he derives greater value from it. This
greater value could be something as tangible as further discounts or some-
thing as intangible as status among his peers. The point is that the more
people the person shares the campaign with (or discusses it with), the more
value he generates from it. In this sense, the campaign takes on a network
effect, with its value growing each time someone participates.

Create partnerships

Few SMM campaigns are successful in isolation. A more traditional digital cam-
paign, which is based on display and search advertising, comes together through
a series of partnerships between the agency, the advertiser, and the publisher, and
the same is true of an SMM campaign. However, in this case, the participants vary
slightly. Rather than have a regular publisher, you have the social platform to
contend with. Your campaign must be in compliance with that platform’s policies;
otherwise, you can’t run on that platform. For example, Facebook (https://www.
facebook.com/terms.php) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/static?
template=terms) have strict terms of service regarding the type of advertising
that can appear on their platforms.

The platform players aren’t the only things you have to take into consideration.
With most large brands, ad hoc user groups that have a sense of ownership over
the brand or product category spring up on the social platform where you’re plan-
ning to run the campaign.

CHAPTER 4 Launching SMM Campaigns 83