Ready to launch a social media campaign for your next release? Amazing! Have you got a structured plan in place and all the assets ready to go? No? Don’t worry, we got you! Look over these social media campaign steps to ensure you are prepared to launch your music into the world in the best way possible! 🚀

What is a social media campaign?

A social media campaign is a coordinated marketing effort that utilizes social media platforms to achieve a specific goal or objective. In your case, it might be to get as many streams as possible on your new track. Or, it could be to sell out your launch gig. Campaigns differ from everyday social media efforts because of their increased focus, targeting, and measurability.

Another key point to remember about a social media campaign is that it is all about organic, non-paid posts. That means that this particular part of the campaign should be creative, and authentic and really speak to your audience using your original and unique voice.

Why are social media campaigns important?

Overall, social media campaigns are an important part of a comprehensive marketing strategy as they can help musicians achieve a range of goals and objectives.

These goals can include:

• Increasing your brand awareness.
• Building relationships with audiences.
• Driving traffic to your music or website.
• Obtaining contact information from your audiences.
• Increasing your sales and streams.

Need more convincing? Here are some more reasons why social media campaigns are important!

• A social media campaign is more targeted and focused than regular social media activity.
• It is aimed at achieving specific goals within a shorter timeframe.
• Campaigns champion something exciting and obtain higher engagement.
• It’s a strategic way to launch a product.
• Campaigns garner publicity.
• Campaigns encourage higher audience activity.
• It shows you where you have room to grow.
• It teaches you what content and ideation your audiences respond to and what they don’t.
• Offers you benchmark metrics that you can aim to beat in the next campaign.

Know your social media campaign goals before you do anything!

Don’t jump into creating content and posts before you have sketched out a plan! You need to know what you are trying to achieve before you go ahead and put time into asset creation and scheduling. You can have more than one goal, but make sure these are realistic. Campaigns are just a small part of the bigger picture. Don’t set ridiculous goals that will leave you feeling like you failed.

Step 1 – Goals

Ask yourself, what are my goal/s for this campaign?

Example goals:

• Increase followers on Facebook by 200 people.
• Get 1,000 streams on Spotify.
• Get a write-up in a music magazine.
• Obtain a sync for the single.
• Sell out the launch party.

Step 2 – Tactics

Ask yourself:

• Which tactics make the most sense for my channels?
• Which tactics will resonate with my audiences the best?
• Will these tactics lead to me achieving the goals I’ve set out?
• Do I have the time and resources to fully execute these tactics to the best of my ability?

Example tactics:

• Competitions
• Sharing something personal
• Asking audiences to complete an action
• Re-sharing older content
• Sharing brand new content
• Going live
• Collaborating with someone bigger
• Doing a challenge

Step 3 – Metrics

Ask yourself:

• Which metrics am I focused on improving for this strategy?
• Am I looking for tangible results like conversions and sales?
• Or am I looking to build awareness, in which case, reach and engagements might be the focus?
• Which metrics align with the goals you set out?

Example metrics to focus on:

• Reach/Impressions
• Engagements/ Clicks
• Conversions/sales
• Saves
• Shares
• Retweets/ Re shares
• Likes

Step 4 – Track and measure progress

Ask yourself:

• Now that I know which metrics to watch, how will I track this?
• Will I check on these daily at the same time?
• Will I check every week?
• Every month?
• What does progress look like? How will I know when I have achieved growth?
• What am I comparing these metrics to?

Example tracking and measuring:

• Tracking engagements daily
• Ticket sales daily – this will tell you at what point in the campaign sales went up or down
• How much reach does a video get compared to an image?

Requirements of a social media campaign

You’re almost there! Now you need to gather the things that you need for the campaign.
At this point, you should have:

• A solid goal or goals.
• Fleshed out tactics for how to achieve those goals.
• Specific metrics that will help you measure if you are progressing towards your goals.
• A tracking sheet so you can keep tabs on how your campaign is going.

You now need to get your content together for your campaign.

This will include:

A content calendar

A content calendar is a planning tool used to organize and schedule content creation and publishing activities for artists and creatives. It is a tool used to plan out the topics, themes, and types of content that will be created and published across various channels, such as social media, blogs, email newsletters, and other digital platforms. This will help you keep track of what you have published on your socials and what is still to come. It will also help you time manage effectively as you will have to plot out your posts over a timeline and assign a publish date and time.

Having a content calendar is a great way to ensure a consistent flow of content and that you meet your goals.

A timeline

Timelines are useful for providing a visual representation of events or processes over time, helping to organize and communicate a lot of information in an easy-to-understand format. This can be really helpful especially when the campaign is long-winded. You can see an overview of when you want to be hitting certain milestones and when big events are set to occur.

Assets

Having all of the assets ready to go prior to the campaign can save an incredible amount of time and stress! Think ahead about which platforms you will be using and what sizes you will need to ensure optimization. Generally, it is safe to have a square asset 1:1 and a story asset 9:16. However, this entirely depends on your tactics and strategy. In either case, being more prepared is better than being underprepared! Free tools like Canva are great options for creating multiple sizes of assets.

Copy

Copy refers to the written component of your campaign. Don’t be fooled, copy is an important element of marketing and advertising. Effective copy can make a significant difference in the success of a social media campaign. Take care to think about the language you use and if this truly represents you and will really speak to your audience.

Be sure to tag relevant collaborators and geo-locations. Relevant and accessible hashtags are also an important inclusion for the copy. In addition, be sure to include subtitles for videos, captions for live, and image and video descriptions so you are being fully inclusive to audiences.

A theme

Having a theme that people can relate to is important for a social media campaign. You want to create cohesion so anyone can look at your posts at any point in the campaign and understand what is going on. No need to pick too many themes! Stick with no more than 2 for a campaign!

Things to note before starting your socials media campaign

Now that you have all of that ready, you can start your campaign! At any rate, you should still be asking yourself some key questions before, during, and after the campaign. Above all, you want to give your music the best shot you can for it to succeed and that means being flexible throughout the campaign.

• Are your goals realistic?
• Will you have everything ready in time?
• Have you allocated time for posting and scheduling? As well as reactivity?
• Did you calculate how much time it will take to make content?
• Is the copy ready?
• Do you have benchmark metrics to compare so you know what to aim for?
• Have you thought out all of the steps to your tactics?
• Do you have every link that you need for the entire campaign?

Things to note while a social media campaign is running

• Is the campaign rolling out the way that you planned?
• Are you behind on anything?
• Have your audiences been skewing toward a particular type of content? Is it worth switching and adding more of that?
• Are you engaging with audiences online?
• Have you been spending time being reactive enough to engagement?
• Did you put enough time aside to manage this or are you time-poor?
• Have you run into any dire issues?
• Is your planning holding up?

Things to ask yourself after the completion of your campaign

• Did you achieve the goals you set out to achieve?
• Were your goals realistic? Could you have aimed higher? Should you have aimed lower?
• Did you get good responses to your content?
• What would you change for next time?
• Were there challenges you faced?
• Did you see the metrics and growth you hoped to?
• Did you gain new followers?

Need some strategy ideas for your campaign? Read our blog >> 10 social media hacks you should know.