Social media platforms have been around for a while. They’re maturing, and it’s getting harder each day to grow on social media. Today growth on social is achieved by doing it better than your competition. And guess what: It’s not as hard as you think.

Today, social media continues to provide ample opportunities for business growth along with the many undeniable benefits. When your social media strategy is working, you can benefit from that online visibility to establish yourself as a thought leader.

Social media provides a fantastic way to share your expert knowledge and become the go to source for the information that your audience is looking for. This is one of the best ways to get customers to trust in your brand.

Marketing through social media is an essential source of fresh new website visitors. That helpful boost in website traffic as you can directly link to, and reference, blog and webpage content, brings interested new visitors to your website to learn more about your products or services. Some of this traffic plays a role in generating leads and even sales on your website!

The benefits that social media marketing can provide for your business are endless when executed properly. Be sure to check out our blog “25 Undeniable Benefits of Social Media for Business” to further explore our top recognized benefits of social media!

Ultimately, a relevant and strong strategy forms the foundation of great social media marketing. When did you last evaluate your social media work, conduct competitive benchmarking, and refresh your strategy? There can be a big payoff for going through this creative process with your team.

We are going to look at four social media campaigns that developed business growth for the companies that created them. However, before we get to that, let’s do a review of some best practices for social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Here are some great tips for upleveling your social media strategy from the experts at Asset Digital Communications:

1. Keep an Eye on Your Competitors

Overtime, your competitors’ strategies will change and some may even go entirely quiet on their social media channels. You can find growth opportunities by starting with a scan of the competitive landscape and how it has changed.

Determine the new strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, and don’t hesitate to think outside the box. Look at companies who are not exactly competitors, but who do great work on social.

Look for those great ideas and trends that align with your brand, and that your business could gain from. Make valid comparisons and find where there are holes or gaps in those strategies that your business can fill.

2. Maintain a Swipe File of Content Ideas

If you aren’t familiar with a swipe file, simply put, it is a collection of content samples that you find in your research. These are graphics, infographics, images, and writing …. all great ideas that you may want to consider for your business. So whether they are stories, headlines, blog posts or sales emails, keeping a swipe file will help get the creative juices working when you are ready to evaluate your current strategy.

A swipe file is a great way to keep a bank of top quality content, by you or others, that is known to be effective and has worked in the past. These ideas aren’t meant to be copied but rather used to inspire your content and can help with content improvement.

The goal is that as you start to understand writing techniques and how other successful writers write, you can use swipe files as templates to structure your work and save time.

3. Conduct a Team Brainstorm Session

A team brainstorm session can be a great way to generate new, creative ideas and solutions. Group discussion and interaction helps to motivate you and your team to think outside the box and build off of each other’s ideas.

Be sure to set an agenda for the brainstorm session so that discussions are focused on the task at hand – which is this case will be coming up with ideas to infuse new energy into your social media campaigns. There should also be trust created within the group so that ideas can flow freely and team members can be outspoken about new concepts. This is done by having a rule of “no comments” through the idea generation stage. When everyone’s contribution is valued, everyone will feel comfortable sharing their ideas without fear of criticism.

With that, we turn our eyes to some examples of successful social media marketing campaigns completed by four companies just like yours. We hope that these examples can inspire you to take a look at your current strategy and think about what possibilities are out there that could help your company to adjust and achieve growth!

Great Social Media Campaigns That Worked

1. Easy Lunchboxes Are Amazon’s Best-Seller – With $0 Spent On Traditional Advertising

Kelly Lester, the owner of Easy Lunchboxes brand, didn’t have a lot of money to invest in traditional advertising. So, she did something even better: she set up social media pages for her brand, coordinated her marketing efforts, and connected with influencers in her niche – moms, educators, and schools. Easy Lunchboxes were shipped to hundreds of people for a review – and it worked. These novelty lunch boxes now own their niche on Amazon with close to $0 spent on trade shows, cold calling, paper adverts, or digital ads.

Easy Lunchboxes Social Campaign Results:

• Hundreds of social media reviews from influencers.
• Raising awareness grants a significant boost in exposure and brand recognition.
• Social Media User-generated content that’s ready to be shared over social media channels.
• An improvement in organic search results (variety of backlinks and social mentions).
• Easy access to schools and educational facilities looking for food prep solutions.
• 275,686 Facebook followers and 77,000 Pinterest followers.

2. Repair Clinic – A Helping Hand When You Need It

This has to be our favorite small business social media campaign example and here’s why:

Can a small, Michigan-based part and repair shop hope to do business globally? That’s the dream of every small business owner, right? The answer is usually no, but not if we’re talking about Repair Clinic.

How do they do it? By giving away something that most customers pay for dearly – solid advice and repair tutorials.

Clinic Repair has been regularly updating their Facebook and YouTube pages with hundreds of tutorial videos aimed at helping people repair their small household appliances. These videos cover everything from replacing a cook top switch to doing a complete overhaul of your washer/dryer. Their digital marketing efforts were focused on brand awareness, and it paid off in spades.

Repair Clinic Social Campaign Results:

• 38,443 Facebook followers and 175,000 YouTube subscribers.
• A boost in engagement and social signals (typing ‘appliance name + repair’ in YouTube will almost certainly pull up one of their videos).
• Easy access to potential customers located hundreds (and thousands) of miles away.
• Established as a go-to repair company through helpful content and social branding.

3. Peel Phone Cases – When Brand Story Drives Revenue

Phone cases are a dime a dozen on Alibaba, which makes it pretty difficult to sell a good product in this niche. The Peel marketing wizards use their brand’s unique selling propositions in all of their social media materials in a fun way, weaving their story into everything they share.

In the video below, they wanted to let their buyers know just how excited they get when they sell a case. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, maybe even confirming that they know that phone cases are a tough sell. Still, videos like this humanize the brand, signaling that regular Joe’s and Jane’s work there, which may even be the deciding factor in someone’s purchase.

Peel Social Campaign Results:

• An easy way to highlight brand’s strong points in front of thousands of prospects.
• Providing the brand with a recognizable ‘human’ face.
• 31,900 Instagram and Facebook followers and 4,300 Twitter followers.
• An impressive 2-year increase in lead generation and revenue attributed to social activities.

Peel’s definitely has one of the best small business social media presences when it comes to ROI. In just 2 short years, they’ve increased their revenue 16X without investing a cent in traditional marketing.

4. Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium – Where Quirkiness and Customer Service Take a Front Seat

You can’t get much quirkier than a business that caters to cat lovers. Still, Lady Dinah’s manages to take things to a whole new level.

The company has at least 10 different Twitter handles, one for each of the owner’s cats. In addition to that, they share funny feline-oriented stories as a part of their Facebook and Instagram campaigns to connect with their target audience. They also excel at handling customer service (CS) and crisis management through their social accounts.

In fact, the way they handle their social media campaigns and overall presence, you would be hard-pressed to figure out that we’re talking about a single shop in London – it almost feels as if they’re running a huge chain!

Lady Dinah’s Social Campaign Results:

• Massive engagement on a multitude of social media channels.
• Social CS response – no need to employ more than one customer service rep.
• Lightning-fast communication with customers and partners alike.
• 64,000 followers on Facebook, 20,500 followers of their Instagram account, 21,000 followers on Twitter, 196,000(!) followers on Pinterest.
• Reach far beyond of what they would have normally with their brick and mortar location (cat-loving tourists actually add this place to their itinerary when visiting London).

Monitor Results, Measure Your Success, Improve Your Marketing Strategies

Achieving the results you want from social media requires a bit of hard work and dedication, but once you do, you will feel thrilled to reap the benefits of your success.

When you start to see those results, or even well before, it will be important to think about how to measure your success.

One of the ways to look at your success is vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are the metrics that are provided on the platforms themselves, such as the number of followers, likes, and shares. Their value is limited when it comes to measuring business performance. Vanity metrics are useful, however in pointing out the positive outcomes from your efforts. In other words, your growth in follower base and engagement with your content.

The more valuable metrics are those that measure the traffic coming from social media to your website. Not only is it possible to track this activity, there is some highly valuable information waiting for you when you do so. Essential to measuring your social media campaign success is an awareness of how much of your social media activity (and which activities) are bringing traffic to your website and accepting the offers that are available to them.

For example, when a social media follower visits your website and completes an email sign up form that follower is telling you that they want to deepen their relationship with your brand. When a social media follower completes a purchase on your e-commerce website, you have proof that your social media campaign is translating into revenue for your business.

Want To See Your Brand Become An Example of a Successful Social Media Campaign?

While developing a winning social media strategy can be challenging, you can test and put into action tons of new ideas available out there. These four incredible success stories undoubtedly motivate you to get started. Just remember that achieving success doesn’t always happen overnight.

In fact, some of even the most successful in history didn’t become overnight successes.

It took musical genius Mozart ten years before he finally produced something that became popular. Professional basketball star Kobe Bryant practiced deliberately for countless hours above and beyond his competitors in order to become a major success.

Remember that success is not a sudden event, but is something that emerges from consistency, discipline and creative energy. Re-evaluate your current social media marketing strategy, implement creativity in to your methods and practice consistency. And before you know it, your business payoff will be huge.

Suggested Reads For You:

• Lessons to Learn on Social Media Marketing for Oil and Gas
• Digital Marketing and Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry
• Top B2B Social Media Marketing Best Practices
• 25 Undeniable Benefits of Social Media for Business