- Contest Factory
- May 17, 2022
What Exactly is a Marketing Campaign?
Let’s start with the basics of identifying what a marketing campaign is and why organizations use them to drive their goals forward. A marketing or advertising campaign is a media initiative to support a global organizational goal through strategic messaging, imagery, and actions. This initiative is then rolled out across platforms such as your own brand website, social channels, and news publications, if you’re lucky. A shortlist behind the goals of why companies have marketing campaigns are to build customer loyalty, decrease time between buys, increase conversion rate, increase lifetime value, decrease customer attrition, and increase sales, to name a few.
Common Campaign Tactics for Successful Marketing Campaigns
One of the most vague and hard to grasp but most successful makers of an excellent marketing campaign is that “clever” element. You need to find creativity that resonates with your audience, whether it be humor, clever, interesting practicality, etc. It’s this intangible that stops the scroll – bring in your A team for creativity when doing your brainstorming.
Time sensitivity is a well-known necessity in any marketing campaign. We as humans are very aware of time and that it’s one of those things we cannot delay, duplicate, or buy… it is now and we must respond to time-sensitive items before those that are not, it’s that simple. If you have been waiting for that fantastic swimsuit to go on sale and it goes on a holiday sale for the weekend only, you’ll probably make it a priority to get it on sale if you were eagerly waiting for a sale. You may push off the errand you had otherwise slated for this time in order to get the sale price. Be sure your campaign has a deadline – people care about time.
Ensure you make your campaign measurable by setting goals. You will only know if your campaign is a success if you set it up with goals to hit. For example, you may be rolling out a new product to replace an existing model. You may want to increase sales from the rollout of the previous product by 15% or you may simply want to sell more of this product than the existing SKU pending your inventory sell-through strategy. Regardless of your strategy, know what your goal is and track it – be sure it is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
Be sure to use UTM tracking on all of your campaign assets, so you have a 3rd party audit and tracking on your website for all of the traffic you are sending there. UTM parameters enable you to track detailed campaign data by using structured data. Google provides a free tool that is simple to use to configure your URLs. By simply using this tool, you will have visibility in Google Analytics to how each campaign is doing.
Types of Marketing Campaigns That Yield High Engagement
Contest Marketing: Everyone likes to win something – consider holding a contest where your users’ goal is to engage with your brand. Contest marketing is one of the more successful campaign types due to the fact that everyone has a chance to win – and with the laws, you cannot require a purchase to enter, so there is no barrier to enter for a consumer. Be sure you have all of your legalities checked out here as there are some legal requirements for alternate methods of entry, prize declaration, awarding the prize and how certain states handle the law.
Loyalty Marketing: There’s one thing about loyalty marketing that bakes in the interest for the user – it’s all about them. From the second you introduce the features and benefits, they are diving in with one person in mind, how am I going to benefit from this – what do I have in my account right now and what can I get for doing what? Imagine all that brain activity spent thinking about your brand. Be sure to make your program benefit-rich with small asks. Every give from the customer should be rewarded in some way or another. Often the reward can be added value content – creating uber-fans of your brand.
Customer Referral Program: Give your customers incentives to send their like-minded friends your way. On average you extend your reach by 400 for each share a fan provides; this means the average person has 400 friends and amplifies your reach with shares. Consider how much you spend to get a customer and now you can spend that money on someone that already likes and trusts you – it’s almost a gift to yourself to reward a customer for referring a friend. After all, word-of-mouth marketing is said to be the most powerful marketing tactic around.
User-Generated Content Campaign: Another fun way showing off who your customers are – rather than investing in an expensive photoshoot and assets – call your customers for these; challenge your customers to share what they love about your brand or how they use your product. These are some of the most successful campaigns out there. Goslings Rum recently ran a UGC video campaign doing just this – They challenged their customers to tell them how they like their dark n stormy drink. See entries here>>
Educational University: Taking content that may be more detailed or sophisticated can be arduous to find a way to cleverly educate your audience. Using an education approach is often the most straightforward. Consider marketing dog food for example, while it seems simple, there is a different nutrition profile you need to share while also deconstructing anthropomorphism tendencies we all have. Now consider Canine University where you can teach users everything they need to know about caring for their dog, including the exact nutrition they need and why your dog food may be superior. Now you have provided an immersive experience that is extremely engaging and you can use a very detailed format with reading, video, and even a quiz to get the information for you.
You have the foundation building blocks for a measurable, engaging, and successful marketing campaign. Gather your best and brightest to start the creative process for your next winning campaign and start impacting your goals with each campaign learning.
