2025 social media content calendar: Key dates marketers need to know
Luke McCarthy
December 16, 2024
Social media campaigns, in particular, play a key role in growing brand awareness and engaging your audience in a fun and creative way.
It’s no secret that most of us spend a significant part of our days on social media. In fact, research shows that, on average, we spend about 147 minutes on social media every single day. Globally, six out of 10 people use social media, with Northern Europe having one of the highest penetration rates (83.6%) and Middle Africa having one of the lowest (7.4%).
In this context, social media campaigns can be an affordable and effective way to engage a global audience. Not only are they a great way to raise awareness of your brand, but you can use them to create a buzz around new products, advertise existing ones, and build rapport with your audience in an authentic and fun way.
It’s no wonder that social media advertising spend is growing and expected to reach over $207 billion by the end of 2023. If you’re ready to harness the power of social media campaigns for your own brand, you’ve come to the right place. Here we share how to launch your own campaign alongside some real-life examples of successful campaigns.
A social media campaign is a key part of your social media strategy (which aims to convey a unified message in order to achieve a specific goal). You can use a social media campaign to raise awareness of a specific product, reach a new target audience through their favourite format, keep existing followers engaged, and hit your marketing goals.
Unlike organic posts, you need to have clearly defined goals around what you want to achieve with your campaign and then settle on the platforms and content formats which best fit those goals. If you want to engage a Gen Z audience, for example, you may need to up the ante on TikTok, while YouTube may help to reach a more diverse demographic via longer video posts.
How you go about crafting your social media campaign will depend on your goals. For example, here are a few social media campaign types which could be part of your larger social media strategy:
These are just a few examples of the types of campaigns you can make use of. When drafting your campaign, you always need to consider the following:
This will help you decide if you should do paid advertising as part of the campaign, engage influencers or perhaps focus on user-generated content instead.
Social media has been around for a while, which means there are plenty of examples of what you should or shouldn’t do in order to reach your campaign goals. Below we share several examples of campaigns which have taken the world by storm thanks to their creativity and innovative thinking.
Focusing on a cause or one of your brand values is a winning approach to launching a successful campaign. Just take a look at Dove’s #ShowUs social media campaign, which focused on inclusivity and diversity among women. Dove partnered with Girlgaze, a community of non-binary and female-identifying individuals, and Getty Images in order to show an unfiltered and alternative view on beauty.
The campaign generated over 10,000 images depicting a more inclusive vision of beauty, which brands and advertisers can use via Getty.
Likewise, the campaign has garnered over 628,000 posts on Instagram and has had an immensely positive response from women across the world.
If you want an example of an effective campaign, look no further than Spotify Wrapped. The audio streaming giant launched Wrapped back in 2016 as a way to give listeners a personalised overview of their favourite songs and artists.
Since then, the campaign has exploded into a social media sensation with 60 million shares from 90 million users across the world. Spotify doubled down on the effectiveness of its campaign by giving select listeners an end-of-year-thank-you video from their favourite artists (the artists included in the campaign grew from 100 to 40,000 between 2021-2022).
Not all of your content needs to be personalised or user-generated in order for you to hit the lottery. Back in 2013, Purina, a pet food manufacturer, partnered with BuzzFeed to create a series of videos around one of our favourite things to watch online – cat videos.
The campaign, titled Dear Kitten, has grown since then into a collection of 13 videos which feature an older cat “imparting advice” to a new kitten in the household and has garnered almost 100 million views. Not only is the campaign timeless and able to be shared all year round, but it also makes great use of humour to incite engagement and shares among its viewers.
Now that you’ve had a look at a few well-performing social media campaigns, it’s time to start planning a campaign of your own. In order to do this, you need to have some things in place first:
Once you have these things at hand, you can start planning your campaign.
As mentioned earlier, all of your campaigns need to be grounded in a sound marketing strategy that uses data to decide how many campaigns you need to run, on what platforms and for how long.
First, think about the overall goal you want to achieve with your social media marketing strategy. Do you want to increase the number of followers, grow sales of your existing products or improve brand loyalty and customer retention?
Once you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, you can start thinking about the actual content format, platforms, and tactics you can use to achieve these goals.
It’s quite common to have your campaign run across several social media platforms. However, your content and approach should be different for each. Say, for instance, you’re using Instagram and TikTok to create a buzz around the launch of a new product.
While you may use exactly the same hashtag across both platforms, you may need to create slightly different content and post it at different times of the day depending on when your audience is most active.
Influencer marketing was worth $21.1 billion in 2023 and it shows no signs of stopping. If you want to increase the chances of success for your campaign, consider partnering with influencers who can promote your brand to their large audiences.
Choose influencers whose values and work is aligned with your own brand (for example, don’t get a wellness influencer promoting your juicy, fat burgers). Likewise, go for influencers whose followers are your ideal target audience. Bear in mind that influencers with a huge following can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds per post, so choose your partnerships wisely.
Once you’ve decided what content will be posted where, how do you monitor its effectiveness? Things can easily get out of hand, especially once your audience starts engaging and responding to your content.
Here, it’s instrumental that you add a social media campaign manager such as Vamp to your digital marketing toolbox to keep track of all of your posts and engagement. A good campaign management tool will have everything you need to make your campaign a success, such as an ROI calculator, flexible campaign workflows, and comprehensive analytics to understand how you’re doing at any given time.
To calculate ROI effectively, go beyond basic metrics like engagement and impressions. Track specific actions tied to your campaign goals, such as clicks, conversions, or sales. Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor traffic sources and measure the performance of each post. If working with influencers, apply unique discount codes or trackable links. For more in-depth ROI, integrate campaign data with customer lifetime value (CLV) and cost per acquisition (CPA) to understand long-term profitability.
When dealing with negative feedback, respond quickly and professionally to show that you value audience input. Acknowledge any valid concerns and offer solutions, but avoid getting defensive. Use negative feedback as an opportunity to improve and learn.
In terms of poor campaign performance, closely monitor metrics like CTR or conversions, and be prepared to adjust messaging, creative, or targeting mid-campaign. A/B testing can help refine your approach and salvage a struggling campaign.
Small businesses can compete by focusing on niche audiences, where they may offer a more personalised, authentic connection than larger brands. Leverage micro- or nano-influencers who are more cost-effective but have highly engaged audiences.
Create content that capitalises on trending topics or user-generated content to boost organic reach. Additionally, utilise cost-effective ad formats, such as Stories or short-form videos, and focus on platforms where your target audience is most active to maximise the impact of your spend.
Having a clearly defined template for your campaigns will help you stay consistent and follow through with your content plans. Here’s a simple campaign template to get you started, but feel free to add to it or amend it as you see fit:
