A social media campaign can be the most effective way to engage the interest of your target audience. A well-designed campaign can increase brand awareness and prompt sales. To be impactful, a campaign must be genuine. Particularly in the pet industry, buying decisions involve a lot of emotion. Building a connection with pet owners requires an authentic approach.
Step 1: Know your audience
You can’t build a genuine relationship without knowing your audience. You know they are pet owners, but what else? What is important to them? If your audience cares deeply about the environment, then ensure you incorporate information about how your packaging is recyclable. Conversely, if your audience is primarily worried about food safety, a campaign about recyclable packaging may make them worry about food storage and packaging reliability, negatively impacting your brand image.
Many companies focus primarily (or solely!) on the features and benefits of their products. Product information will not compel your audience to engage with your company unless it is addressing a significant need or solving a problem. Knowing your audience’s pain points and what is crucial to them can help you design a campaign that addresses what’s important.
Develop Customer Personas
These fictional representations of your ideal audience can help you hone your message based on demographics, where customers go to get information, and their needs and interests.
Build your customer personas:
Making general assumptions to get started based on your previous customer experiences
Confirm (or correct) these assumptions with market research. Research may also uncover new opportunities.
Interview your top customers to understand what is important to them.
When building your customer personas, include gender, age, income, location, pain points, favourite social media channel, hobbies, and interests.
Step 2: Choose the right channels
Once you’ve defined your target market, you need to identify where you can find them online. No brand has the resources to be effective on all the available channels. Determining where you can find your audience will help you choose which platforms on which to focus.
When choosing which social media platforms to run your campaign on, review these 4 features:
- Which platforms have sufficient audience to expand your reach and grow your brand?
- Where will you find your target audience demographics?
- Which channel has features that best showcase your products? (i.e., photos, short videos, longer videos)
- Which social media channels have the most active and engaged user base?
Despite new entrants into the social scene, Facebook remains the largest single platform with the most users. Instagram has grown into a force to be reckoned with. The new option of Reels allows you to highlight features or address your audience’s concerns in short, fun videos. TikTok is rapidly gaining popularity and can be a great platform to engage with users looking for a fun brand experience.
Step 3: Set your goals
What do you want to achieve with your campaign? Do you want to increase traffic to your website? Generate new sales leads? Sell products? Establish your brand as an authority? Your goals will define your campaign. Using SMART goals will give you a straightforward way to check-in and determine whether your campaign is working. Marketers who set goals are an astonishing 376% more likely to report success!
Step 4: Decide on Promotion Tactics and Budget
Organic reach is great, but if you’re promoting a new product or building a brand, you will likely need to invest in social media ads to get the word out. You can target your ad to a specific geographic area and a customer demographic, making your sales dollars work efficiently.
Start out small and evaluate the response. See what ads resonate with your audience. See which audience parameters help you reach the right people. Measure the response and adjust, then increase ad spending.
Step 5: Build a Calendar
A calendar will help keep you on track, ensure you don’t miss any “special” days, and identify the content you need to create. A calendar will also help you continue to post even when your days get busy, and other urgent issues crop up.
Step 6: Always include a CTA
Anything you post should have a clear call to action (CTA) to compel your audience to engage, respond, post, share, purchase….whatever suits your campaign!
Step 7: Monitor and Respond
Monitor the progress of every post you make, particularly those that you boost with ads. Continually reevaluate your strategy and course-correct as necessary. Your best-designed content might fall flat because it isn’t a fit with your audience, don’t be afraid to abandon it and move on.
Reviewing results will also catch the surprise wins, the posts you didn’t anticipate gaining significant traction. The only way you can know what is landing well with your audience is to track performance.
Step 8: Get Expert Help!
The team at StreetDog can help you build a strong campaign, design the content you need, and build suitable ads. Talk to us today about how we can help you grow your pet business.
