Chapter 13: Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Chapter 13 of Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing covers social media marketing campaigns. One of the approaches to social media marketing campaigns is the AIDA approach. AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire and action. The attention step refers to grabbing the audience’s attention. This can be done through any interesting method, whether it is a fascinating picture or a funny video. The goal is to get the attention of a viewer. Once attention is attained, you have to make the viewer interested in whatever you’re marketing. Getting someone’s attention is easy compared to making them interested in the campaign. Anyone can scream and have people look their way, not everyone can scream and have people walk over to them. Once interest is achieved, desire must be generated. The viewer needs to have desire to participate in the campaign, whether that is sharing posts, commenting or buying the product. Similar to transitioning from attention to interest, moving from interest to desire is hard. It’s important to keep it easy for the viewer to maintain their desire as you move from creating the desire in the viewer to convincing the viewer to take action. It is important to keep taking action as easy as possible. There will be plenty of other campaigns competing for the viewer’s attention as well.

It is easy to list the steps of AIDA, but those steps don’t mean much if you can’t measure the results of the campaign. It might be tempted to wait until the campaign ends to measure the results, but one of the unique benefits of social media is that you can measure the impact of different approaches in real time. This will allow you to fine tune your campaign in real time to minimize the impact of any errors in your approach. It is also important to measure the results of your campaign after the campaign to avoid making the same errors in future campaigns so you don’t need to correct them reactively again in the future.