What are marketing campaigns?

Every day, millions of businesses are competing for the attention of customers. It is a challenge to cut through the plethora of messages found in digital and traditional media spaces. By regularly communicating with its target audience, a business can improve its visibility. This communication is primarily achieved through marketing campaigns. 

What are Marketing Campaigns?

Marketing campaigns are sets of strategic activities that promote a business’s goal or objective. A marketing campaign could be used to promote a product, a service, or the brand as a whole. To achieve the most effective results, campaigns are carefully planned and the activities are varied. Marketing campaigns make use of different channels, platforms, and mediums to maximize impact. 

A business could run campaigns that utilize print media, social media, online ads, email, in-person demos, and more. Each campaign will vary depending on the intended purpose. However, the messaging and tone of any given campaign will closely link to the tone of the business’s brand. The recent increase in marketing agencies means that some businesses sometimes outsource aspects of their marketing campaigns.

How to Run a Successful Marketing Campaign

To run a successful marketing campaign, a business should take the time to plan extensively. Businesses want to be seen as proactive in their niche markets. To portray a business in a positive light or to promote products successfully, marketers need to create and execute well-researched campaign plans.

Marketers need to know the end goal 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.

Before launching a marketing campaign, marketers must also gather information on the market. 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.

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, and look for extra marketing strategies that improve it.

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” campaigns. 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 “Like a Girl” campaign, run 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.