Six Real-Life Examples of Successful Social Media Automation Campaigns (And How We Did it)

I have been doing automated marketing on social media for more than a decade. I have tested all kinds of offers and messages to cold, but targeted prospects.

I have as much experience doing prospecting and free lead generation through social media as just about anyone, both for my own products and services, as well as for hundreds of clients around the globe. And I have made an awful lot of money doing it, to the point where automation has enabled my dream lifestyle of traveling around the globe and working whereever/whenever I want to.

In this article, I want to take you behind the curtain and show you exactly how these campaigns were created and set up using a simple formula that I follow for every single marketing campaign that I am creating.

Every single campaign that I ever create is based on these “three M’s of marketing:”

Market
Message
Media

While having a good offer and message is very important, your targeting (market) is always the first step to work on and get right.

There are billions of people online, and if you are not targeting correctly, then you will never get any results no matter how good your message is because you are targeting the wrong people to begin with.

And the best way to do research about who to target, is to simply go online and has a look around to see where your prospects actually hang out.

Narrow down your targeting in one easy step

Whenever you type something into any search box on any platform, you will always get these lists of auto suggestions.

So for example, if I go on to Instagram and I start typing in the hashtag #fitness, we can see that there are hundreds of millions of posts, which means that trying to target everyone using this hashtag is way too broad and won’t get us any results.

But if we look at the list of auto suggestions that Instagram gives us, we can see no down hashtags like #fitnessmodel, #fitnessmom, and so on.

Clearly, these are not the same and cater to dramatically different demographics. And we can continue to go down the list, to find more sub niches until we land on our dream prospects. With that said, it’s always important to take one more step and actually look through the posts and the profiles just to do a final confirmation that we are reaching what are truly our ideal prospects.

When you have a short list like this of 10 narrowed down hashtags, or communities, or groups, or posts, this can be actual gold when it comes to narrowing down your targeting and finding your ideal leads. It doesn’t cost a thing and you don’t require any software to do this research.

How to Bring Local Clients In the Door Using Instagram

One of the most successful prospecting campaigns that I conducted was for a brand new dance studio in Hong Kong. They hired me to grow their Instagram presents where they shared their dancing videos and also to fill up their classes with fresh students.

To start off with, I needed to find the ideal clients on Instagram that would fit them perfectly. They are so many users and so many different types of generic, on targeted posts, that it wouldn’t make sense to Target too broadly. I had to make sure that everyone we targeted with our marketing efforts was based in Hong kong, was interested in things like fitness and dance, and were females.

And so for this reason, any broad generic hashtags like #HongKong, or #fitness, or #women, would simply be too broad to be of any use to us by themselves.

When I started to type in the hashtag #HKfitness, I got the suggestion of the hashtag HK fitness girl, and clicked on it so that I could research the posts and see what type of people were using the hashtag.

Lo and behold, I saw from looking over the posts that this hashtag fit our target market perfectly.

All told, there was just shy of 20,000 posts which is both narrow enough and abundant enough, to give us all of the potential leads that we could ever need.

And so using my growth hacking software, I was able to quickly scrape a targeted list of thousands of women in Hong Kong who love fitness using this hashtag.

Then we went to work to prepare messages to connect with these people, and build rapport over common interests, and offer them a free pass to come check out the dance class.

And so with just a single afternoon of work, I was able to schedule and send out dozens of messages every day and this client received new, warm and targeted leads in their Instagram inbox every single day.

If anything, the only mistake that I made was that I helped to fill up their classes too quickly, to the point where they quickly reached capacity and couldn’t accommodate any more students in their dance studio.

Here are examples of actual direct messages we sent, along with the offer:

Building an Email List of Targeted Users with Instagram

Using a very similar strategy, I worked with a good friend and a fellow digital nomad who owns a very successful and popular podcast for Airbnb hosts.

For targeting purposes, I went back to Instagram and started to type in hashtags into the search box to see what kind of different suggestions I could get. When I started to type in #airbnb, I got many different hashtags related to Airbnb hosts, and doing some research I could find perfect hashtags for targeting such as #airbnbsuperhost.

It was very easy to target these accounts and interact with them, in a way that created engagement and grew my friends account. We also sent out dozens of comments and messages to these Airbnb hosts through Instagram, to create all kinds of conversations and business for my client.

In a direct message, we followed the same format:

Connect with them, share some positivity, build some report, and extend a friendly offer.

In this case, rather than sending a free pass to a dance class, we sent them to a landing page where they could get a free listing check and a score to see how well their Airbnb listing is doing.

This allowed my friend to collect their email addresses, and promote his podcast.

Further Examples — Market, Message and Media

Client: Guesthouse in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Market: Backpackers in Thailand – #AmazingThailand, #ThailandTrip, #KohSamui, #KohTao, etc.
Media: Instagram
Message: “We love your photos of Thailand! If you’re ever in Chiang Mai, please visit us and have a free coffee on us. We would love to meet you!”

For this campaign, we had to target travelers and backpackers who were currently traveling in Thailand. There was no shortage of hashtags and photos for which to target with; the important thing was to set a filter to only target recent posts of people who were currently in Thailand.

So using my software, I set a filter of recent posts within a week or so and use a variety of hashtags such as #AmazingThailand and #ThailandTrip as well as a number of hashtags pertaining to islands in thailand, such as #KohSamui, #KohTao, and so on.

I was a bit taken aback by the efficacy of this campaign because only one or two days after we started the campaign, people started to show up at the guesthouse, commenting that they found the place through Instagram. They saw the comment offering a free coffee and immediately wanted to come to the guest house, have breakfast or lunch, and even book a room to stay there.

Client: Parenting App in UK
Market: Parenting bloggers / influencers: #Mumbloggers / #Mummybloggers
Media: Twitter
Message: “We’re recruiting parenting bloggers in the UK to curate emails. Commission based role. Care to discuss?”

For this campaign, I needed to target parenting bloggers and influencers, specifically mothers, and only in the United Kingdom.

With Twitter it’s not so easy to target via geolocations in the same sense that you might with Instagram and it’s tagged locations. For this reason, I decided to settle on hashtags using the word “mum” instead of “mom” as this is a British slang word that mothers in the United States would not use.

Just this simple change in spelling allowed us to refine our targeting to a specific location and perform a successful outreach campaign to hashtag such as #mumblogger.

Client: Hipster Neckties
Market: Hipsters into Unique Fashion – #Dapper
Media: Instagram
Message: Follow, like, comment: “Love your style, it’s an inspiration! Do you follow trends or prefer to set your own?”

A friend of mine wanted to start a business creating hipster neckties and wanted to raise some funding through crowdfunding. The trouble was that they didn’t have anyone that they could promote their neckties to outside of their extended network of contacts.

For this campaign, we really had to look through a lot of fashion and hip fashion related hashtags to try to find the exact demographic that would be interested in these types of neckties.

By going through different hashtags, and seeing what hashtags the content creators were putting on their own posts, we could see 30 different suggestions every time that we opened a new post and this opened our eyes to a bunch of unique hashtags.

Eventually, we spotted the hashtag #dapper, and after clicking through and going through the types of posts that were being made, we could see that this was the exact demographic that we wanted to target for this type of product.

Conclusion: You can do this too

And so in this post I have given you six examples of how we have set up successful social media automation campaigns only using hashtags on Instagram and Twitter.

I have many other unique methods that I use for targeting ideal prospects beyond just these examples, but from this article you should get a good understanding of the basics and how the process works. I will cover more methods of targeting in future articles, as well as growth hacks to create killer messages that get responses.

If you want to learn all of my secrets, I highly recommend that you check out the 10x your profit and income: growth marketing and lead generation strategy masterclass. I have more than 40 tutorials just like this one and screen recordings so that you can learn from my years and years of experience and start getting results and earning money and clients right away using these methods.

You’ll also get a sneak-peek at all the software and tools I use to automate everything — I don’t hold anything back 🙂

Just click the image below (or this link) 🙂 We are also offering a special offer: if you buy one course (such as this one), you can also receive a coupon code for a second one 50% off. Thanks for reading this all the way to the end, and wish you lots of success in your marketing journey!