Nearly every brand is on social media, and if you’re not – you should be. But with so many brands active on all of today’s social channels, how can you stand out among the masses?

In order to make an impression on their followers, many companies are turning to social media marketing campaigns. These campaigns help to increase social media engagement as well as increase brand awareness. Unfortunately, not all campaigns are successful, and can result in wasted time and money.

To help you achieve success with your social media campaign, we’ve put together a list of top tips you can use to garner great results. Here they are:

Set Clear Goals

The first step to any social media campaign is to determine what it is you’re wanting to achieve. Are you wanting to promote a new product and have a certain number of users preorder before it launches? Do you want to gain more followers? You need to focus in on your objective so you can create an action plan of how you can achieve it.

Offer the Right Prize

Nowadays, everyone expects to get something in return for doing something. Make sure the prize you’re offering for your campaign is suitable for your target audience, and not just something big and flashy. The prize should align with your brand, and the value of it should match the level of effort it takes to enter.

For example, if you’re asking users to submit a homemade video, that prize would be larger in value than the prize for asking them to retweet something.

Choose Your Channels and Study Them

Not every campaign with bolster success on every social channel, so be sure you’re selecting the right one. Determine who you’ll be targeting, and select your channel based on your audience’s demographics. If you’re targeting stay-at-home moms in their thirties, you’ll find more success on platforms like Facebook and Pinterest rather than LinkedIn, so you’ll know where to hit the hardest.

When you know what channels you plan to target, take care to utilize SEO practices. Many social platforms can be indexed by Google, so make sure you’re targeting the appropriate keywords and search terms.

Promote Your Campaign

It’s been said that 75% of campaign success comes from promotion, so not actively promoting your campaign can cause severe impact. Promote your social media campaign actively across all your channels. Just because it’s a Facebook campaign doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to talk about it on Instagram or your website. Not all users check all their social media regularly, so the more you can put your campaign out there the more success you’ll achieve.

Engage with Your Participants and Share Their Content

It’s incredibly important to engage with the participants of your campaign. Liking and commenting on their interactions with your campaign with make them feel valued, and encourage others who haven’t entered or participated to do so.

Apart from liking submissions, you can also share users’ content, if applicable. If you’re encouraging users to submit a photo for your campaign, select some of the best ones and use them yourself (with permission, of course). Feature them on your social channels, post about them on your blog, or utilize them in some other way.

Analyze Your Success

After your campaign has ended, measure your success and evaluate your progress. You may find you were much more successful than anticipated, or than your campaign didn’t quite hit the mark. Regardless, you’ll be able to determine what worked, what didn’t work, and uncover important information you can use for your next campaign.

Author Bio: Jason Howard is a blog writer for Cynexis media and has many years of experience in writing quality article for social media marketing and web design.