A successful marketing campaign makes a company memorable.
It creates a long-lasting impression by promoting a brand’s products or services and guiding consumers to the desired action.
From Nike’s Just Do It to Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke marketing campaign, creating brand awareness campaigns have a huge impact on influencing a consumers’ decision.
They trigger emotions and enable consumers to recognize a brand.
In this guide, we have compiled comprehensive details about what a marketing campaign is, including its types, components, and how to create an effective marketing campaign.
What is a campaign?
In marketing, a campaign is a set of tactics and strategies that you leverage to hit a given target.
Any activity ranging from email to TV or billboards is referred to as a marketing campaign.
What is a marketing campaign?
Marketing campaigns are a set of organized and strategic activities that promote the marketing goals of a business through various forms of media.
Some of these media include television, radio, print media, and digital media (email, online ads, social media, digital marketing, and more).
A marketing campaign is often used to promote the company’s products or services to the target audience, reach and acquire more customers, reinforce the brand’s position, and more.
Most marketing campaigns are strategically planned to achieve the most impactful results.
On most occasions, a marketing campaign isn’t performed by an in-house marketing team.
Instead, the business can outsource the marketing campaign to a third party, such as a marketing consultant or an agency, as they’re likely to have more marketing campaign ideas.
Because they’re specialists, they also make use of various marketing channels or platforms to communicate a message that resonates with the audience and maximizes impact.
The message often varies on the intended purpose. The tone and style of the message align with the values of the brand, thereby making it consistent and authentic.
A great example of a successful marketing campaign is the “Share A Coke” campaign carried out by Coca-Cola where the company introduced the product while mentioning the country’s popular names.
The campaign became renowned as many individuals went out to find a bottle that had their name on it.
5 types of marketing campaigns
When developing a marketing campaign, it is important to decide on the type of campaign you intend to run.
By choosing the right type of marketing campaign, you work towards your marketing objectives and reach your audience with ease.
That said, here are five types of marketing campaigns.
1 – Brand awareness campaign
Brand awareness marketing campaigns focus on the brand and its values to improve its recognition among the audience.
Here, your campaign communicates what your business does and how it stands out from the competitors.
It also makes use of emotional and behavioral triggers to influence the purchasing decision of your customers.
This enables your customers to know not only what you sell but also what your brand is all about the moment they come in contact with the brand.
2 – Email marketing campaign
Email marketing campaigns take place on the email channel.
It is an effective marketing strategy that allows your brand to communicate directly with your customers in their inboxes.
With email marketing campaigns, you can onboard users, generate traffic, send newsletters, update customers about the latest or existing products or services, nurture leads, and more.
Besides, you can also automate the workflow process by automatically engaging your audience based on specific triggers.
For instance, you can create a list and an autoresponder for customers who abandoned their carts and engage when necessary.
3 – SEO campaign
The focus of SEO marketing campaigns is to improve the search engine ranking of a website.
When you improve the search engine ranking, your website can get to the first page of the search engine result page (SERP) and, subsequently, get organic traffic.
Before you can achieve this goal and enjoy the benefits attached to it, search engines like Google utilize many ranking factors which you must consider.
Some of these ranking factors include:
- Backlinks
- Page speed
- Search intent
- Topical authority, and more.
4 – Social media campaign
What distinguishes a social media marketing campaign from other marketing campaigns is the use of social media platforms to reach the target audience.
It allows you to interact directly with the audience that follows your brand. With this, you can spread messages quickly while reaching a large audience at once.
If you don’t want to reach your audience organically, you can send your messages with paid advertising (paid ads).
To do this, you take note of different factors such as age, location, interests, and more.
Social media campaigns offer varieties of benefits and can achieve various marketing goals, including:
- Raising brand awareness
- Generating traffic
- Building a community
- Generating revenue, and more.
5 – Video marketing
Video marketing is another powerful tool every marketer should consider for their business.
With about two billion people watching videos on Youtube, you stand a lot to gain from video marketing.
Thanks to its simplicity, your audience can digest content with ease without having to scroll through tons of information.
Some of the benefits you gain from video marketing campaigns include raising brand awareness, selling products or services, building a community, and so on.
What are the key components of a well-thought-out marketing campaign?
A stellar marketing campaign requires various components to deliver the best result. These components include:
- Goal
- Target audience
- Channels
- Budget
- Content Format
- Team
- Creative assets
Goal
This is the ultimate objective of a marketing campaign.
It describes what the campaign intends to achieve and quantifies the result in a measurable goal through a specific metric.
For instance, you can decide to have 100 new subscribers and increase your open rate by 10% through your email campaigns.
Target audience
The target audience is the specific customer segment the business intends to sell its products or services and direct other marketing efforts to.
For instance, you can decide to advertise to your existing customers or attract new ones.
The target audience often influences other components, including the goals, communication channels, messaging, and more.
Channels
This is where you distribute your content or marketing messages.
For instance, if you are running an email marketing campaign, you can consider sending welcome emails to your new subscribers or sending an abandoned cart email to your customers that didn’t check out their carts.
Budget
When crafting your marketing campaign, it is essential to factor in the advertising budget.
Consider the size of the business, freelance costs, or type of campaign to run, and other factors before crafting the campaign.
Content Format
Content formats involve planning and determining the kind of content needed to fuel the campaign.
Most times, it is common for marketers to plan multiple pieces of content for a single campaign.
For instance, an email marketing campaign can include newsletters, lead nurturing, cart abandonment, or sales promotional emails.
Team
Before you begin your marketing campaigns, ensure you assign people to work on each aspect of the campaign.
Whether it is writing, editing, designing, or publications, designate people to handle the roles.
Creative assets
A stellar marketing campaign should have great creative assets that match the marketing message.
Whether it is an interactive infographic or a video commercial, ensure the design fits the purpose of the marketing campaign.
How to create effective marketing campaigns
Creating an effective marketing campaign can help you to achieve your marketing objectives.
Here are five steps to help you create a stellar marketing campaign.
1 – Set a goal for your campaign
Before you begin running any campaign, you need to define your marketing goals first.
Identify what you would like to achieve for your business.
Some typical marketing goals include:
- Promoting new products or services
- Building brand awareness
- Obtaining customer’s feedback
- Driving leads
- Generating revenue, and more.
2 – Define your target audience
When crafting your marketing campaigns, ensure that you design them with a specific target in mind.
Identifying your target audience helps you to place your marketing efforts in the presence of those who truly recognize your brand.
To achieve this with ease, consider identifying the stages of your buyer’s journey.
For instance, do you want to acquire new customers? Or perhaps, you want to focus on the existing ones.
Identifying your target audience enables you to craft appropriate marketing messages for your customers and tailor content that suits their needs.
3 – Select the appropriate marketing channel
After identifying your audience, you need to choose where you can reach your audience effectively.
Select two to three channels where your audience is.
Also, remember to select a channel that helps you to achieve your marketing goals.
If you don’t know the right channel to use, here are a few ideas for you.
You can consider any of the channels in the Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned (PESO) model.
Source: Ceralytics
4 – Set a timeline for your marketing campaigns
Sometimes, marketers forget about setting a timeline for their campaigns, thereby affecting the campaign’s effectiveness.
To prevent this, set a deadline for your campaign. Determine when and how you intend to promote it.
You can do this by setting up a calendar and scheduling the content to publish and the channels to use on selected dates.
5 – Monitor the metrics
Monitoring the metric helps you gauge the effectiveness of your campaign.
Here, you can determine whether you have made a success or your campaigns need improvement.
The metrics you will monitor will depend on the type of marketing campaign you’ve chosen.
For instance, if you are running an email campaign, you will have to track metrics such as the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, number of unsubscribes, conversion rate, and spam complaints.
Or if you run multiple social media marketing campaigns, you can track the engagement rate, the number of DMs or leads.
Three examples of successful marketing campaigns
Want to run a campaign but don’t know where to start? Here are marketing campaign examples to inspire yours.
1 – Dyson
In this example, Dyson shows us how to carry out a cart abandonment campaign.
It reminds the customer of the product they forgot to check out and urges them to complete the I’m not transactions.
It also gives the customer reasons why they should choose the brand over their competitors.
Source: Really Good Emails
2 – Slack
This Slack email is another example of a marketing campaign.
Here, Slack encourages users to try out the new feature, which involves using emojis to communicate.
Alongside this message is an educational video they can watch and simplify the consumer’s process.
Source: Really Good Emails
3 – Litmus
In this email campaign, Litmus intends to obtain feedback from the audience. They intend to use the feedback to provide suitable content for their audience.
Source: Really Good Emails
Key Takeaways
- A marketing campaign is a set of organized and strategic activities that promote the goals of a business through various forms of media.
- You must set up a well-defined goal for your marketing campaign.
- Identify your target audience and select the appropriate channel to distribute your marketing message.
