A Beginners Guide to Launching a Successful Marketing Campaign
Red Bull, one of the most powerful brands in the world is a household name. Its brand management campaigns have time and again proven that it has its marketing fundamentals in place. When the company launched its Summer Edition energy drink for the Australian market, it took to Instagram to promote it with summer-themed images, videos and hashtag #thissummer. The results were amazing – it reached 1.2 million customers!
The marketing world is replete with many more such successful campaigns. When demonetization was announced in November 2016 in India, the brand that perhaps made the most out of the situation was Paytm. Its marketing campaigns with a tagline ‘ATM nahi, Paytm karo’ (No ATM, Do Paytm) made an instant connect with customers. It registered 700% rise in traffic and 1000% growth in the value of money added to its e-wallets.
How did these brands manage to accomplish such successful marketing campaigns? It takes a combination of many factors behind the scenes. Here is your 4-step handy guide to launching successful marketing campaigns.
- Plan Your Goals
The goal can be anything – create brand awareness, sell your product, generate leads or launch a contest. But, they should be based on business goals. You need to define what you want to achieve from a marketing campaign. At the same time, marketing goals should not be left loose, they should be specific. For example, ‘we want visitors on our site’ is a poorly defined goal. The smart goal would be ‘we want 5000 visitors every week on our site’. A survey has revealed that 80% companies believe that goals that are limited in number, specific and measurable have more chances of success.
- Identify the Scope of Campaign
By its definition, a campaign means a project that has a time limit attached to it. It can be one month, one year or even two years. But, setting ‘validity’ is important to understand the scope of the campaign. It will then help you to plan what resources to allocate, which sales channels to use – online, offline or both and brand communication that needs to go across.
- Decide the Distribution Channels
The distribution channels are of two types: Traditional (PR, billboards, print advertisements and television commercials) and Digital (website, emails, content, mobile, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc.). Your marketing campaign can deploy either of these channels or a mix of both, depending on the audience you want to reach. If your target customers are in the age group of 18-24 based in metro cities, it would make more sense to adopt a digital campaign. However, if you sell a product suitable for rural customers, traditional marketing will be more effective.
The scope of digital marketing channels is vast, so you need to have sub-strategies within that also. Let’s take a look at them.
Website
- Post the campaign details on the website.
- Use important keywords related the campaign on the website.
- Create a landing page specifically for the campaign.
Email Marketing
- Send email campaign to only the subscribed list. Or else, they will get dumped in the spam folder!
- Keep the email short and relevant. If the information is long, give a link to a landing page.
- Give a call-to-action to encourage the customer to take an action. For instance, ‘Offer valid for 24 hours only’, ‘Start your free trial today’ or ‘Get 10% discount’.
Content
- Promote campaigns through blogs, videos, webinars or podcasts.
- Promote the campaign content on all social media platforms.
Social Media
- Open discussion threads around campaigns on your social media pages and other forums to engage the audience.
- If your budget permits, boost your campaigns through paid advertising.
Mobile
- A research shows that 51% of all digital ad budgets were spent on mobile in 2016. So, mobile marketing should be integral to your campaign.
- Build a mobile-responsive website and content.
- Monitor and Measure Campaign
The ROI on traditional campaigns is challenging to monitor because you can’t track the buyer’s journey. You use general estimates pertaining to the amount spent and results achieved. However, in digital marketing campaigns, there are analytical tools available which can measure everything – number of clicks, visitors, impressions, conversions, lead to close ratio, etc, from each channel individually.
The monitoring of the campaign should be done on a regular basis – weekly, daily or monthly, depending on the duration of the campaign. You need to evaluate the deliverables against the expected goals. If there is a deviation, then find out the reasons. By doing this exercise, you can ensure that you can revisit your campaign strategy and improve it, if the need may be. The learning from existing campaign should be implemented in the future ones to avoid possibilities of similar mistakes.
If you have the clarity of marketing goals and charted out a well-defined marketing strategy, nothing can prevent the campaign to be successful. Get this clarity by registering for digital marketing online certification and put your career on the fast track. Taking up a digital marketing course will equip you with the requisite skills to lead in this domain and also boost your resume for better career prospects.
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