How to Plan Social Media for a Launch Campaign
Whether you’re releasing a Marvel movie, a coaching service, or an email newsletter, a launch campaign is a crucial part of the rollout. Launch campaigns bring attention to a new product or service, generating buzz and spreading awareness. Social media can be an effective channel for your launch campaign, especially if you’re hoping to attract people who aren’t already on your email list.
We’ll walk through the process here.
Set a goal for your launch campaign
When you’re planning a launch campaign, the first step is to set a goal. Depending on your business, your goal might be a specific revenue, download, or sign-up number. Haven’t done a similar launch and not sure what your goal should be? Don’t get stuck deciding. Each time you do this, you’ll learn more about the goals that work for your business. It doesn’t need to be perfect.
Build out your campaign timeline and create content
Much like a movie trailer builds anticipation far ahead of time, your launch campaign needs to start before the product or service launches. Generally, four to six weeks before the launch is a reasonable timeline, but it’ll depend on your business. From that timeline, you’ll break the campaign into three phases:
Phase 1: Provide an anticipation-building teaser. Don’t give too much away in this phase. Just let your followers know that there’s something new coming.
Phase 2: Educate your followers on the problem that your product or service will solve.
Phase 3: Sell your new offering. In this phase, you can provide details on what your new product or service provides and testimonials from past customers.
Once you’ve planned out the phases, create the content and schedule it. Don’t plan to create content throughout the campaign. Reserve that energy for reviewing your progress and making tweaks to your campaign as needed.
Review performance throughout the campaign
Ideally, marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it situation. It’s important to look at how your launch campaign is performing relative to your goal. You may find it helps to make a plan for reviewing analytics. Before your campaign begins, schedule regular check-ins for yourself. These should happen at least once a week.
Here are some general tips for tweaking your posts:
If engagement is high on some posts and low on others, look at both the content and the time of day. You may notice, for example, that posts you publish around 12 PM have higher engagement than posts published at 6 PM. Use that information: reschedule the remaining posts in the campaign for times when your audience is more engaged.
If engagement drops over time, you could be posting too frequently for your audience. Perhaps, you need to post every other day, rather than every day. Try it out and see what happens.
If you’re not seeing as much traffic as you’d like, your audience may not be seeing your posts in their feed. Change up your cadence and post more frequently. Consider paid social media to promote your most popular posts.
If you’re seeing questions or concerns in the comments, take the opportunity to create some new posts that address these friction points.
As you review your campaign’s performance, think about both what’s happening on social media and how it relates to your goal. A launch campaign aims not to simply post about your new offering: it’s to meet your goal.
Improve your campaign results with paid social media
Successful social media campaigns leverage both organic and paid posts. Even for a campaign with a small budget, there are viable ways to use paid social media. The first and simplest is finding the most popular posts from your launch campaign and pay to boost those.
You can also use retargeting to get better results. Retargeting allows you to specifically target your posts at people who have already visited your site.
Social media can help you meet your launch goals
Whether it’s on social media or billboards, marketing is all about spreading your message, making sure that your ideal customer knows about your products and services. Unfortunately, it’s easy to spin your wheels, especially with social media. We can get stuck wondering what to post or posting inconsistently when we have a spare moment. Social media marketing doesn’t need to be confusing. Having a plan helps you build traction. When you plan and execute your campaigns using this structure, social media becomes a more effective marketing tool for launching your products and services.
