Every day, millions of different companies compete with one another for the attention of their target audience. It is difficult to cut through all the marketing noise. Engaging and interesting marketing campaigns can help companies stand out. They are the primary way of communicating with your audience consistently across multiple channels – online channels, social media accounts with engaging content and visual content.
Let’s dive a little deeper in the concept of marketing campaigns:
What are Marketing Campaigns?
Marketing campaigns are coordinated marketing activities across multiple channels that aim to achieve a certain business goal e.g generate leads, delight customers, or brand awareness.
Campaigns are carefully planned out, and a wide variety of operations are performed, all to achieve the best possible results. There are various ways to optimise a marketing campaign’s effect.
A company can conduct marketing campaigns that make use of a variety of channels, including but not limited to print media, social media, internet advertisements, email marketing, pop up shops and in-person demos. The objective of each campaign will determine how the campaign is run and results. It’s important that the language and tone of any particular campaign will closely identify with the tone of the company’s brand.
Marketing Campaigns vs. Advertising Campaigns
Marketing is how a company raises awareness of its brand and convinces customers to make a purchase, while advertising is the process of creating persuasive messages around these broad goals.
In terms of campaigns, an advertising campaign can be part of a larger marketing campaign strategy.
Say shoe brand Nike launched a campaign surrounding the release of a new product. Its advertising would only reflect one facet of its marketing strategy.
The brand might also leverage email newsletters, social media, and paid search to meet its goal.
Now that we understand the difference between advertising and marketing campaigns, here’s a list of a few more types of marketing campaigns you might run.
The following is a list of other types of marketing campaigns that you might launch now that we’ve clarified the distinction between advertising and marketing campaigns for you.
Types of Marketing Campaigns
- Digital marketing campaign
- Social media marketing campaign
- Lead generation campaign
- Product Marketing Campaign
- Brand Development Campaign
- Email Marketing Campaign
- Content Marketing Campaign
- User-Generated Content Campaign
- Public Relations / Awareness Campaign
- Direct Mail Campaign
- Affiliate Marketing Campaign
- Social Media Campaign
- Acquisition Marketing Campaign
- Pay per click campaign
- Business to business B2B marketing campaign
How to run a Successful Marketing Campaign
A successful marketing campaign happens when the business goals are aligned with the marketing strategy. It needs planning, careful implementation, and data analysis of the results.
Goals
Marketers need to have an end goal in mind for their campaign. Is the campaign aimed to generate leads? Perhaps it’s designed to boost engagement on social media channels or to promote a new product? Sometimes a marketing campaign is used as damage limitation after some negative press. A marketing campaign needs to have one key goal as its reason for existing, in order to succeed.For example, your content creation campaign might be measured by organic traffic, with each post aiming to drive 1,000 views per month and 10 new contacts, with metrics being measured in Google Analytics for example.
Target Audience
Before launching a marketing campaign, marketers must gather a deep understanding of their target audience. They should know everything relating to their product, the customers, and the competitors within their niche. Using this information, marketers can choose suitable messages and calls to action within their campaign.
Digital Channels (and other relevant channels)
Digital Channels include social media, email, pay per click ads. It’s what ever channel is both cost effective but also relevant to the target audience. There’s no point advertising in newspaper supplements that your audience don’t read. Where will your content and messaging be distributed? For example, if you’re running a social media marketing campaign, you might specifically prioritize growing the channels most relevant to your audience and omit those where you’re least likely to grow a loyal following. try to be creative and think outside the box. Where are your customers spending their most time? And see if theres a way to grab attention in an interesting way. A lot of brands such as Brennan’s Bread or adversise in the airport arrivals hall, as this is the time where you’d be thinking about what is at home or in your fridge.
Budget
This is always the first question we ask. How much do you have to spend? This along with your goals will help us determine the correct strategy and cost effective channels to launch your campaign. Not all marketing campaigns require an incremental budget, but many still do. Factor in the agency, advertising, and freelance costs, if appropriate, and factor these numbers into any ROI analysis for your campaign.
Content Creation
Determine what kind of content you will be creating to fuel the campaign. It’s common for marketers to include multiple content formats in a singular campaign. For example, a branding campaign could include video ads, press releases, and guest blogs.
Marketing Agency or In House Team
Who are the individuals you’re relying on to get the job done? Before kickstarting your campaign, make sure you designate people to work on every aspect of the campaign, from copywriting and design to media buying and reporting.
Creative Assets
A great marketing campaign should have great creative assets to match. Whether it’s a sleek website design, a video commercial, or an interactive infographic, make sure your design is professional and fitting for the purpose of the campaign.
While planning, it is important to decide on a timeframe for the marketing campaign. How long should it run on various channels and how much will that cost? The aim is to ensure the campaign should reach the largest amount of people in the target demographic. The marketing team can then determine appropriate metrics to assess the success of the campaign.
Measure your Marketing Campaign the SMART way
Even if your campaign is effective and drives a ton of traffic, it still needs to complete its desired action. By “the desired action,” I’m talking about that SMART goal you initially defined. Let’s take a moment and reiterate that goal.
For my sample campaign, my SMART goal was “to gather user-generated content from 100 customers via a branded hashtag on Instagram featuring our new product line by December 31.”
This step is all about calibrating your marketing efforts and channels to lead your customers to complete your desired goal. This is done through conversion assets like calls-to-action, landing pages, and lead forms.
Pro Tip: Lead conversion assets can be used separately or in conjunction with one another, such as featuring a lead form on a landing page, or creating a call-to-action asking your audience to fill out a form.
Monitor the right metrics
The campaign effectiveness metrics you’ll monitor will depend on what type of marketing campaign you’re running and what channels you’ve chosen. This section merely serves as a baseline list to give you an idea of what to watch.
Also, it’s tempting to focus on vanity metrics like generated traffic, click-through rate, and impressions. A bump in these areas is definitely a good thing, but since they don’t necessarily indicate a bump in revenue, they can’t be the only metrics used to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
Useful Tools for Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns bring together several kinds of marketers. Some may specialize in inbound marketing, others may focus on outbound marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, or other areas.
Today, much of this collaboration between different marketers can be achieved using cloud-based applications and tools. As such, it is increasingly common for businesses to have remote marketing staff or hybrid working business models.
Marketing teams can have a mixture of on-site marketers working from the office, and others working remotely. Numerous effective marketing collaboration tools help remote and local marketing teams to achieve the highest level of productivity while working in tandem.
Other marketing tools increase the efficiency of the marketing department through other means. There are many tasks of a marketing campaign that can be time-consuming if done manually. Thanks to robotic process automation (RPA), it is possible for marketing teams to save time on these repetitive tasks and free up resources.
Today, there are also platforms as a service (PaaS) applications that simplify many tasks within the marketing department. It is easy to gauge the impact of your marketing strategies using tools like Google Analytics. You can find customer relationship management tools that automate certain interactions with customers in your sales funnel. Other tools, too, assist in automating email marketing.
Examples of Good Marketing Campaigns
Every year, there are many successful marketing campaigns. Few would be more successful than Nike’s long-held Just Do It campaign. Those campaigns have successfully earned the company billions of dollars by leaning into the feelings people experience before exercise. The phrase works as a call-to-action while empathizing with people’s exercise experiences.
The Run Like a Girl by Always, was another hugely successful campaign. Always decided to lean into a hot social topic to push girls’ empowerment and address issues that teenage girls face. Always came off as authentic in the campaign, and had pushed for puberty education for decades, ensuring the campaign would resonate with its audience.
Final Thoughts
Marketing campaigns are used to achieve many different results. It is easier to create memorable marketing campaigns when you research thoroughly and discover what your customers want to see. No campaign is perfect, but with focus you will achieve great results.
