07 Apr
A Complete Guide To Marketing Campaigns
In this article, we’ll teach you how to plan, create, run and analyze a successful marketing campaign.
Marketing campaigns for a long time, after a purchase, is done will be alongside us.
But why is that? Well, campaigns make companies memorable. They set up a continuous and focused effort that leads consumers to the desired end. Campaigns also create identity, personality, and emotions.
Marketing campaigns can have the same effect on business. Because of this importance, we began to organize this guide – to provide a clear and practical approach to your next marketing campaign.
What is the marketing campaign?
Marketing campaigns are Strategic and organized efforts that are aimed at achieving specific corporate goals, such as raising awareness of a new product or getting feedback from customers. It is usually the case that campaigns reach consumers in a variety of ways, including a mix of media. These methods include but are not limited to: email, print ads, television and radio advertisements, pay per click and social media.
Marketing campaigns do not include all types of marketing efforts for a brand. The word “campaign” is defined as “a pre-defined set of operations designed to achieve a definite result.” That is why politicians campaign for a particular war or election campaign.
Great marketing campaigns follow a consistent theme and mark a centralized idea or purpose.
For example, we can not say that any Nike brand ad that you see and hear every day on the street is necessarily part of a campaign. But, if you get a promotional billboard, an Instagram post supported by Nike, or an email from Nike Corporation all focused on a particular product, you see a promotional campaign.
You probably have noticed that the word “campaign” is used both for marketing and advertising. But what’s the difference between the two?
Advertising is a part of marketing. Marketing means how to inform a brand company and convince customers to buy, while advertising is the process of creating persuasive messages in line with larger marketing goals.
In campaign languages, an advertising campaign can be an aspect of a larger marketing strategy. For example, if Nike is launching a campaign on announcing a new product, its advertising will only be part of a broader marketing effort that could include email, social media, and other methods.
Therefore, campaigns are focused and serious marketing efforts to achieve a unique goal. Despite this simple definition, marketing campaigns can do a lot. By reading this article, you learn how to set up a successful marketing campaign.
How can a successful marketing campaign be launched?
Creating a comprehensive campaign may be a bit complicated, but a straightforward process – of course, if you do it right. Planning to launch a campaign is just as significant as designing fun stuff like creative advertising.
Before you create what you want your audience to see, you need to specify precisely what to do when they see the campaign.
In this section, I will ask a few questions, and you should try to answer these questions as thoroughly and deeply as possible. On this basis, you will be able to successfully launch your next campaign.
Answer all the questions straight away and do not miss anything. Your answers to these questions will guide you well.
Planning for a marketing campaign
This step is crucial for the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. The planning stage determines how you envision your success, and also helps you when it comes to mistakes or deviations that will inevitably occur in your campaigns.
1. What is your campaign goal?
Let’s start simple. Basically, why are you running this campaign? Do you expect this campaign to do what for your business?
If you are having difficulty determining your campaign goals, look at the following intentions and choose a general goal. Which one is most consistent with yours?
• to promote a new product or service
• To Raise awareness of your brand
• To collect customer feedback information
• Earn revenue
• Increase partnerships and engagements with users
• Ads for an event that will be done soon
Of course, this list is by no means a complete one, but it gives you the general idea of a business goal that launching a marketing campaign can be an excellent solution to it.
To better show you what I mean, consider the third goal: gathering customers feedback or collecting content. We will use this example in this guide.
Consider this general goal and turn it into a smart goal. To be classified as smart, a goal must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. Smart goals make you accountable and responsive to the campaign and make it easier to access.
Let’s now turn the general purpose of the example above into a smart goal like the following:
“The goal of my marketing campaign is to collect 100 customer’s feedback, which is produced by the client itself with a special hashtag on Instagram, under our new product line, on December 31, 2018.”
This target is specific (user-generated content) measurable (100 clients), accessible (via an Instagram hashtag), relevant (including the new production line) and timely (December 31, 2018).
See how we quickly turned the campaign’s overall goal into an achievable and accessible goal. Determining these distinct actions for a campaign can be difficult, we know this. But taking tight decisions at this stage will make life and your campaign very easy in the future.
2. How do you measure your campaign?
The answer(s) to this question would be different for everyone. Answers may include: “Email Rate,” “New Facebook Page Likes,” “Product Pre-orders,” or all.
The answers depend on the goals of your campaign. Here are some examples of the appropriate measures for the campaign mentioned above:
• To advertise a new product or service: pre-orders, sales
• To increase awareness of your brand: Sentiment, social mentions, press mentions
• To collect customer feedback information: social reminders, participation
• To earn revenue: sales, Leads
• For boosting user engagement: Blog shares, social shares, email interactions
• To advertise an event that will be held soon: ticket sales, social mentions
If your campaign involves multiple marketing efforts (such as social media, direct mail, and radio advertising), it’s wise to tell yourself first how you can measure your campaign in any media. (You will read more about these specific metrics.)
For example, let me say that I launched the User-generated Content (UGC) on my social media, email, and blog.
First, I’ll highlight Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each medium that can be something like this:
• Interactive engagement (likes and comments) and profile tags
• Email open rates and click rates
• Number of views, clicks, and social shares
Then, I define my original KPI: the hashtags mentions with my brand on the Instagram
The above KPIs show how my campaign is reaching out to my audience, while the original KPI tells me how close I am to my smart goal.
Finally, let’s think about another question: what does success mean for your company? Undoubtedly, achieving a predetermined goal is very exciting, but this is not always possible. What (except your main goal) can be a success or perhaps a milestone for you? What do you feel if you do not achieve the goal by launching this campaign?
When determining how well the campaign is running, consider some simple checkpoints along the way. If your campaign is to raise awareness of your brand and your goal is to reach 50 PR by the end of the year, set a few reminder tokens for 10, 25 and 40 PR events.
It not only reminds you to continue to your ultimate goal but also to increase your team spirit and remind you are investing your time and money.
3. Who is your target?
Again, talk about audience. This is one of my favorite things to talk about because your coordination with your audience can lead to the success or failure of marketing or sales, and especially the campaign.
Imagine creating a bullet-proof marketing campaign just for the sake of encounters with crickets.
In this case, you may think that you have chosen the wrong media or that your creativity has not been enough. Regardless of what the reality is, all these decisions come back to one thing: your audience.
The first step in answering this question is what are your buyers’ campaign audience? Are you trying to attract new customers or want to collect feedback from your previous consumers? Do you want to market your brand to those who know it or introduce a brand with a generally new identity?
Your marketing message will vary depending on whether your campaign audiences are at the stage of Awareness, Consideration, or decision making stage. It is essential to note that a marketing campaign can include many targets for people at different stages of their journey. I mean your campaign can involve the audience at different stages. For example, your campaign may target current customers, but it can also bring new customers to your market at the same time.
Next, identify the benefits and pain points of your audiences. Here are some prototype questions that you need to ask yourself and your team to better understand your audience.
• What is the general interest of my audience? What kind of magazines do they read? What do they watch on TV? How do they spend their free time?
Where does my audience hang out online? What is the purpose of your Instagram, Facebook, or other social networks? Do they really interact with you or the are just browsing?
• What kind of content attracts the attention of my audience? Do they respond to direct sales messages or like comic and funny content? What is their culture?
• What kinds of problems can my products, services or brand solve for them?
Getting to know your campaign audience will help you answer these questions and other things that may come up during your campaign.
4. What is your campaign concept? How do you want to do your marketing?
It’s time to talk about the campaign itself. At this point, you know why you run the campaign, how you can measure it, and who the target market is. So let’s see what the campaign itself is? Literally.
Marketing campaigns are like their brand. They need a mission, visibility and visual identity. Big campaigns are an offshoot of their parent brand, both visually and creatively – they are compatible with their business brand, but they retain their identity.
Some businesses use a home team when creating their campaign, while others may choose an agent for this purpose. Another option is to hire a freelancer or contractor who completes a specific part of the project, such as copy or design.
Depending on the specific goals of your campaign, I suggest starting with a home team. They are likely to be experts in that part of your business and can tell you that the campaign needs what to succeed?
Again, let’s go back to the example of the UGC Instagram used above; I’ll start with consulting my social media team. They know more than anyone about how Instagram works and what Instagram visitors like to see. For this reason, I can give them the campaign, or give the creativity section to a freelancer or advertising agency.
This step is likely to be the longest step because you want to create the concept of your campaign from scratch. Here’s how to distribute your advertising assets and connect with the audience.
Distributing your Marketing Campaign
This step is entirely about how to deal with people through the campaign, including what the audience will see when. If you look at the previous section, you should have all the answers that are required for routing in this step.
5. How can the audience see you?
Let’s talk about the type of marketing you want to use in the campaign. Choosing this, along with other things, depends on your priorities, budget, and the number of your brand’s engagement.
Take a look at the media channels you are currently using for your company ads. Which one works best? Which one do you have permission to pay for ads? What are the best engagements with users? Most importantly, where do your customers spend most of their time?
Although the use of multimedia platforms is highly recommended, it is likely that it will not be useful to publish your campaign on a new environment that you have not yet been in. So, just stick to those marketing channels that you’ve already tricked into.
Need an idea? Take a look at the PESO Model which breaks up marketing distribution channels into four sections: Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned.
This model enables us to carefully study marketing channels and, if necessary, add more channels. Also, using this model, channels that are currently investing can be organized.
Start by choosing two or three channels for your campaign. For example, I will launch my Instagram UGC campaign through social media (of course, Instagram), my email and my blog. I will then pay to make the social media postings on the campaign to be viewed by more audiences.
Depending on the purpose of the campaign, specific channels may not be meaningful. For example, for the UGC campaign I’ve launched, it does not make sense to invest in print or direct mail. Because this campaign is purely digital and my audience is online. On the other hand, multinational product campaigns are likely to include more media, or perhaps all of them. As a result, you will have access to a wide range of audiences, both personal and online.
Keep in mind that you must modify or expand your marketing assets to suit any media channel you choose. Your pictures, videos, and copies may be different from social media, email, print, etc.
Finally, even if you do not want to actively launch your campaign in a specific environment, you can at least have an optimization to hang your campaigns. For example, you can update your social media, change your email signature, set a notification bar in the header of your website, add small call-to-action’s at the bottom of blog posts (you’ll read more about it below). These efforts do not require additional effort and money but promote your campaign.
6. How and when do you publish the campaign?
This section is all about campaign timing. Defining a deadline for the campaign (the smart target timely property we mentioned earlier) teaches you how, when and how often you upgrade it.
First, create a general timeline for the campaign. Mark the start date and the end of the campaign in a calendar. It gives you the parameters you can work with.
Then, take a look at marketing assets and advertising marketing channels. Given your people and your financial resources, how often can you spend on posting and content for the campaign? Create a calendar for each separate channel. Schedule each channel and posts and emails on the calendar.
Why do you need to visualize your campaign? This will help you distribute and publish your advertisement equally in any media. It also helps you when you evaluate your campaign’s impact, and you can figure out how you spend your time and energy.
Do not worry if your promotional calender is full. Social media and email marketing tools reduce the stress of daily posts. The AvangEmail marketing platform helps you plan and manage your promotional programs.
The expansion stage of advertising is entirely about your campaign and your audience. But how can you attract the attention of your audience to pursue the goal of your campaign? We want to discuss how to optimize the campaign to make a viewer to become a customer.
converting customers through a marketing campaign
So far we have found that campaigns are a series of connected operations designed to reach a particular result. We used the words “connected” and “operations” in this sentence. This stage – the stage of convert into a customer – is entirely about how to achieve that particular result.
7. How will your marketing derive your desired action?
Even if your campaign is effective and active, you still need to complete the operation. I mean the smart goal, which is the original purpose I defined at the beginning of the article. Let’s repeat this purpose again.
The samrt goal of my model campaign was to “gather the content generated by 100 users about the production line of a new product from my brand, on Instagram, from December 31, 2018.
To drive marketing efforts and advertising channels and reach the smart goal, use tools such as Call to action, landing pages, and registration forms.
These tools can be used either individually or together: for example, a registration form on a landing page, or a call to action to fill out a form.
Call to action
CTA is a direct call for your audience and is a picture or line that invites visitors and customers, and is a very necessary part of the campaign’s success.
The CTAs present a clear invitation to the audience. But CTAs, especially in marketing campaigns, are not universal.
The CTA in your campaign cannot merely ask the audience to pursue your goal. You also need to consider what the audience will do to benefit from the action and this should be mentioned in the CTA.
Although this CTA is compatible with my UGC campaign: “Send a picture of our product with this hashtag,” my campaign will look a bit bossy and disappointing. CTAs must be straightforward, but they should be as encouraging as inspirational and convincing.
In this case, a CTA like this would be better: “Share a photo with our product along with this hashtag to show up on our Instagram in the our next video.”
The same benefit-driven CTAs also apply to other goals like launching products, brand awareness campaigns, promotion efforts, and other types of campaigns. Your audience will not act “in your favor” unless they understand what this will do for them.
Landing pages
The landing page is like the home and the destination for your campaign. Landing pages are an exclusive space for visiting your audience to get more information about what your campaign is and why they should join your campaign. Landing pages also distinguish your campaign from the rest of the website and content.
Your landing page should be professionally designed along with the benefits of your audience, especially the unique value proposition (UVP) of your campaign. Do not forget to repeat the CTA and specify exactly how audiences can attend (for example, by downloading or filling out a form).
The landing page, which has the most conversion, includes social proof and a variety of marketing essentials such as images, attractive text, and video (explanation: social proof means users can be influenced by positive comments and consent of other users).
Leads forms
A lead form is an online form specializing in getting information from visitors. Lead is a new audience that you have not already bought, attracted attention to your brand or product, and at least one communication channel with whom you are connected with their desire and satisfaction. In other words, in the marketing world, Lead means a potential customer. By filling out the form on the landing page, the visitor becomes a lead. The lead form is not necessary for all campaigns (for example, for our UGC campaign is not suit), but for the most goals, such as pre-ordering products and offering content downloading, it can be a very useful tool.
The Anonymous Visitors who fill Lead forms, transform into valuable data that you can use to sell and learn more about your audience. You can use the site builder of AvangEmail to create your landing page and lead forms for free.
8. What criteria can you monitor?
The effectiveness of your campaign depends on the type of marketing campaign you are running and on the communication channels you chose. In this section, we’ll just give you an essential list to know what to watch.
It’s tempting to use some basic criteria such as generated traffic, clicks, and impressions. A brief look at these criteria is good, but since they do not necessarily represent revenue, you can not just select them as an indicator to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
Here are some benchmarks to be observed for each communication channel
Email metrics
• Click rate
• bounce rate
• conversion rate
Social media metrics (paid)
• Click rate
• conversion rate
• Cost per click
• Cost per conversion
Social Media Criteria (Organic)
• Passive engagements ( likes and sharing)
• Active engagements (comments)
• Fallowers
• Click rate
Content metrics and optimization
• Click rate
• bounce rate
• Time on page
• Depth page scrolling
• conversion rate
The number of these criteria may look a lot, but a glance at these criteria can help you evaluate your campaign carefully and figure out how to improve it.
Evaluation of the Marketing Campaign
This stage, just like the planning stage, determines your success. Measuring and analyzing campaign data can provide a unique insight into audiences, marketing channels, and budgets. It can also tell you exactly how you should (or should not) run your next campaign.
9. How can you find out if your campaign has worked properly?
Well, it depends on what you mean by working. The easy answer to the question is whether your campaign has reached the smart goal or not. If it’s reached, that’s great! If it is not, you can still consider it successful.
For example, if your goal is to increase the organic views of the blog to 100k, then seeing any jumps in the number of views is a success. But there is a difference between a campaign that works, with a worthwhile campaign. A worthwhile campaign will give you a return on investment (ROI) which is appropriate for your time and energy.
Although it is perfect for celebrating any jumps in the number of pre-orders, views, leads or engagements, that’s not enough. There is some reason why the first thing we need to do is determine the purpose of the campaign. Relying on this goal and calibrating investment is a guarantee of the worthiness of the campaign.
10. What do you need to do with campaign data?
This step helps maximize your campaign’s business impact. When you analyze your data, it’s worth ten times – because it not only helps you measure and evaluate campaign results, but also leads you towards audiences, marketing methods, and creativity.
Let’s go back to the example of the UGC Campaign on Instagram. The images shared by my customers are helpful because they help me collect user content for social channels and introduce my product to fans and audiences. But these “data” also provide an insight into the audience, the time of visiting and the time spent on my Instagram channel, the language they use, and how do they use my product.
See how the “data” of the campaign has produced more value than the campaign’s goal. Whether you collect lead data, pre-orders, social engagements, or downloads, your data can help you not only to the main goal of the campaign but also to broaden your marketing efforts.
Finally, review your campaign with your team and discuss about it. Ask each other such questions:
• What could have been done differently?
• How could we save money?
• For anything that went wrong, why do we think that something went wrong?
• What did we learn about our audiences or marketing channels?
• What kind of feedback can we collect from participants or clients?
Ultimate thoughts
Therefore, marketing campaigns include a lot of data, decisions, ideas, and observations. But the process of creating and achieving it, is not as scary as you think, don’t you think so?
Now that you know what to do start building a campaign and boost your business, according to the steps listed in this article.
