Six Reasons Social Media Campaign Fail (and What to Do About It)

18Nov, 2017

Seventy-three percent of adults know that you depend on your social media campaign for success. Are you engaging them successfully?

In the last two years, the vast majority of brands’ social media campaigns have failed. They could not or refused to understand the “psychology” of the platforms. That’s because unlike traditional distribution media, social media is about social engagement.

Your Social Media Campaign and the Rules of Engagement

Consumers on social media know that you’re depending on them. So, why do only one in four businesses have confidence in their customer engagement?

Their failure can become your advantage. We found six reasons social media campaigns fail throughout social media campaign lifecycles. Here’s what you can do to overcome them.

Failure to Understand How Social Media “Works”

Your social media campaign should run alongside any traditional marketing channels. It should target the same overarching marketing KPIs. But social media an entirely different animal than television print.

Unlike traditional marketing, a winning social media campaign requires a long-term approach. Social depends on your successful interaction with consumers or prospects. That means you will have plenty of opportunities to build up your presence.

Many companies can’t maintain these conversations, establishing short-term goals that don’t stay afloat. Brands who succeed to energize those relationships drive success.

Here’s What to Do

Begin with an exploration into what other brands are doing in your space. Come up with a pros/cons analysis of how their campaigns are working before building yours.

Avoid becoming lost among brands with similar brands and strategies. Your social media campaign depends on differentiating yourself. Becoming part of social ‘white noise’ leads to poor engagement or no engagement at all.

Failure to Establish a Social Media Strategy

Don’t build your social media campaign around product placement. Instead, make your campaign about trust, adaptation, and responsiveness to your target audience. Misunderstanding your target audience is one of the biggest cause for failure. Failure to offer a unique perspective and a memorable brand voice is another.

Here’s What to Do

Identify the value proposition you would like to offer customers. This should be an invitation to use your products and services. Insulate that with a strategy for engaging customers, on a long-term basis and in a meaningful way.

Forbes notes, “When you do something innovative, you’re also presenting your followers with something they’ve never seen before. This interests most people, and makes you more memorable at the same time.”

Failure to Engage Customers in a Meaningful Way

Integrity is one of the most important qualities in business today. If you don’t have a deep understanding of your core values, you can’t communicate those values to customers.

As Brian Tracy of Entrepreneur puts it, you will be only “temporarily successful.”

Social media is essential for propagating customer loyalty, with proven success across verticals. If your primary goal is to drive conversions at point of contact, you could be missing out on long-term benefits to your bottom line.

Here’s What to Do

When you publish engaging social content, it’s critical your approach is customer-centric. Don’t focus only on your product. Creative content should focus on not only the values and priorities of your customers, but a means to engage them in these areas on an ongoing basis.

For example, user-generated content drives trust and a sense of community among your customers. It also provides valuable, customer-centric content that you can curate to fit your initiatives.

Failure to Communicate the Value of Your Brand

To revisit Brian Tracy: If you’re not providing visitors with a “unique perspective and memorable brand voice,” take a look at your content.

If you center your marketing content around product features, you’re not successfully engaging customers in the long-term. Customers may not be shopping, but they are always interested in things they value.

Here’s What to Do

There are key dimensions of people’s lives to which your product or service contributes. This includes family, lifestyle, and financial security. Build a value proposition around enriching high-level benefits in these areas.

Engage consumers on a personal level and nurture that aspect of your engagement strategy. This will increase the long-term value of your social media campaign.

Failure to Develop an Editorial Calendar or Publishing Strategy

Your social media campaign should be about communication, building relationships, and long-term value. This depends on good, interactive, and actionable content, as well as publishing regularity.

Maintaining consumer interest requires regularly published material and innovative ideas. Use an editorial calendar or publishing strategy that both evolves and thinks ahead.

Here’s What to Do

Build a year-long editorial calendar that is flexible enough for new ideas. This can include running themes that you can adapt or replace as the market changes.

Both originality and some degree of familiarity are important to consumers.
Remember, outages don’t go unnoticed. Plan what you’ll publish well in advance, with room for adaptation.

Failure to Link Your Social Strategy To Key Marketing KPIs

Your social media campaign depends on internal support to keep moving. Are you achieving your team’s KPIs?

Marketing teams are now responsible for contributing their fair share to overall revenue. Accountability can seem like the enemy to creativity. But there are plenty of examples of measurable social media campaign success.

Here’s What to Do

Ensure your campaign KPIs reflect the unique benefits your company. Volume, reach, engagement, influence, and share of voice as the best metrics for success.

Show key stakeholders how your social media campaigns contribute to the long-term success of the company. You can do this using key social metrics even if the frequency of conversions seems a little flat.

Finally, take what’s working and incorporate it into your editorial calendar. Share it with stakeholders and show them you’re creating a clear path to greater success.

Next Steps to Success

Finally, you don’t have to do it alone. Partner with a third-party social media services provider to ensure you run a creative and engaging campaign. Continue to align with overarching business objectives.

Chat with a social media services expert about improving the performance of social media campaign. Contact Washtone Media for a short, friendly call, with no obligation.

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