What’s involved in creating a social media campaign schedule?
Plan the message – Refer to the campaign strategy where the key messages are listed, and decide what each post should talk about.
Choose the platforms – Plan which platform every piece of content will be placed on – again refer to the platforms identified in the campaign strategy.
Outline the target audience – Who are you trying to reach with each post? Ensure all target audiences defined at the strategy stage are being reached.
Decide on advertising aims/formats – If this is an advertising post, choose the ad objective and format now.
Plan your content format – For each post, will you need an image? Or a video, or a graphic? If so, what size, and what messaging or visuals should the content include? Prepare a content list to share with the design time, make sure they are clear on the deadlines, so that all the content is ready in advance of the post go live date.
Copywriting – Write all the post captions, tailored for each social platform. For advertising posts, plan the text, headline, description etc.
Spend – Allocate the spend budget between all your advertising posts.
Post date – When will each post be released?
What does creating a social media campaign schedule achieve?
Campaign Visualisation
A key benefit of mapping out your entire campaign in a schedule format is campaign visualisation.This means you know exactly how your campaign is going to pan out over the coming weeks; this is especially useful if you are planning a multi channel, integrated campaign. Your social media marketing schedule can be integrated with any other marketing channels for your campaign including digital, out of home, radio, and press, and make sure your message is consistent.
Hit all your key messages
One of the benefits of this campaign visualisation is you can ensure you are hitting all of the key messages you identified at the marketing strategy development stage. It’s all well and good identifying the messages that you want to communicate throughout your campaign, but by planning every post, you can be confident that your posts are hitting all of your target messages.
Bulk scheduling
By creating a road-map of content for a campaign, where you’ve planned exactly when each post will be released, you can schedule your content for the week in bulk, which saves valuable time throughout the campaign process.
Plan advertising effectively
Part of the campaign schedule process is planning your social advertising content, and it’s the most effective way of dividing your spend between your chosen advertising messages, deciding what formats to use, and planning how long each ad will run for.
Integrate your social and digital marketing
We’ve been discussing campaign schedules with particular reference to social media marketing, but digital activities such as Google Search, display advertising and programmatic can all be incorporated into the schedule to give you an integrated social and digital campaign schedule that maps out all your online activities.
Compile a content list
When you’ve finished your campaign schedule, you’ll have decided exactly what content you need for each post. Now you’ll be in a great position to compile a list of the graphics and videos you’ll need to carry out the schedule. Read more about creating platform specific social media content. By having a content list prepared for your design team they can then work efficiently through the list to create a full suite of bespoke creative content tailored for each platform.
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If you want to chat to us about a social media campaign, feel free to call us, send an email, or message us on Facebook
