What is Marketing Campaign - Definition, Types, Ideas & Examples

What is Marketing Campaign?

Marketing campaign is a process through which a product or a service is promoted using various forms of media. These media include common resources such television, radio, print media, and in recent times the use of online media as well. Almost all businesses are absolutely dependent on marketing campaigns to let people know about their products and services and thus a sizeable portion of resources are spent in developing marketing campaigns.

What is Digital Marketing Campaign?

As the name suggests, a digital marketing campaign uses digital media to promote a product or service instead of traditional media. Current digital marketing uses various portals on the internet such as social media platforms, emails, paid advertisements, etc. Digital marketing helps brands reach out to target markets by using platforms on which specific customer bases exist. In such terms a digital marketing campaign can be called the most preferred form of marketing in the 21^st century.

Advertising Campaign vs Marketing Campaign

Advertising is an important component of marketing. It is a process that involves different forms of mediums such as TV, radio, magazines, billboards, social media, etc. to promote a product or service in a unidirectional manner.

A marketing campaign will use the entire spectrum of resources to reach out to target audiences and create brand awareness. For example, Adidas want to launch a new product, their adverting campaign will be a part of their entire marketing campaign, which might include pricing, positioning, paid searches and many more.

Types of Marketing Campaigns

There are 7 primary types of marketing campaigns that brands use to reach out to their potential customers. Find details about each of them below.

New Product Launch

When a brand announces a new product, they extensively promote it with the help of all possible media. Such marketing campaigns are developed in close coordination with the distribution chain and even include localized campaigns.

Branding

A brand launch involves the launching of multiple products and therefore it uses a combination of multiple marketing campaigns. But it also makes use of a central marketing campaign to create a brand presence by providing a solid statement about the business.

Rebranding

Rebranding refers to a company changing their outlook through usage of visual media that allow the customer base to know about the new company motto and added service provisions. This process also involves techniques such as merchandising and rethinking the customer experience. Rebranding is most common after a company merger.

Improve Customer Experience (Turnaround)

When a company faces a downfall in demands due to unhappy customer experiences, they are most likely to develop a marketing campaign that concentrates on redeveloping the brand image. Such marketing campaigns involve heavy usage of testimonials. Turnaround based marketing campaigns are also used as a means of answering to stiff competition.

Brand Awareness

When a company has multiple brands under it that are of high valuation, they will use marketing campaigns to maintain the valuation of the brand. In case the brand comes under fire due to fall in quality of products then such campaigns help in redeveloping consumer trust on the brand.

Seasonal Campaign

Products that are season based such as school products or winter products will be campaigned for during those specific seasons. Seasonal campaigns also involve discounts and other offers based on seasons such as Christmas or other festivities.

Revenue Boost

When a brand has set a short-term goal on one of its products it will use extensive and highly targeted marketing campaigns to provide the necessary boost in sales.

Types of Digital Marketing Campaigns

Acquisition Campaign

One of the primary goals of a digital marketing campaign is to raise awareness. Such campaigns aim at creating a good subscriber base and thereby develop dedicated followers for the brand. Acquisition based campaigns are less concentrated on converting leads and are more relevant towards creating a huge number of leads itself. Social media is one of the primary platforms on which acquisition related digital marketing campaigns are developed. Content marketing and brand value-based campaigns are heavily used to develop acquisition campaigns.

Monetization Campaign

Once a business has developed a solid number of leads then the marketing campaigns are targeted at converting those leads into long term customers. Such campaigns already take into consideration that the brand value has been established and thus concentrate solely on product valuation and customer pain points. Digital marketing is one of the best forms of monetization campaigns since it can lead to a singular customer purchasing more than one product and developing an acute sense of brand loyalty. Video campaigns and email marketing serve as a primary means of monetization campaign. Such campaigns also make use of paid platforms to reach out to their existing leads.

Engagement Campaigns

The point of providing engagement to your audience is to build up a dialog with them that will allow them to understand why they require a certain product. The two-primary means of engagement campaigns are video adverts and testimonial based campaigns.

Engagement campaigns are the last stage of a product marketing journey in the sense that they provide the existing customers with a way to show their appreciation for the product and thus allow potential customers to develop trust in both the product and the brand.

These three digital marketing campaigns – acquisition, monetization, and engagement; represent the buyer journey in an acute sense. If done right they can develop a massive number of leads, convert them, and also turn them into solid promotional channels. Most brands use digital media to develop all these three marketing campaigns thus making them solid statements of the power of digital marketing.

Marketing Campaign Ideas

Below, I will provide you creative marketing campaign ideas that will help you to run effective campaigns for your business time and time again to achieve the overall objective of the campaigns.

Always Try Multichannel Approach

Multichannel marketing approach can increase your brand awareness and it can positively affect the success and performance of any marketing campaign. Keep in mind the budget and relevancy factor, invest you resources as many channels as possible for example:

Create Diversify Content

Since it is necessary to have a multichannel marketing approach, you also need to diversify your content to see the desired results of the campaign. For example, you can create videos for YouTube and Facebook, audio file for podcasts and infographics for different social media platforms.

Collaborating

Building your brand needs to Collaborate with other brands, influencers and satisfied customer. There are different social media platforms and blogging sites where influencers will review you product and happy customer will offer testimonials. Spotify is music streaming app while Uber is a ride-hailing app, both these brands created a collaboration where former creates a sound track for the Uber customers.

Create Urgency

Every marketing campaign should have focus on specific goals and objectives. It is better to create an urgency and deadline and tell your audience or customer to take action in the next 24 hours. Sometimes customer are interested in what you are offering, but they might not take action until you remind them that the campaign will not available forever.

Suspense

To grab customers’ attention, creating suspense should always be an integral part of any marketing campaign strategy. The launch of Pinterest is a good example of suspense marketing strategy. When the site launch it was invitation-only, visitor had to register and wait for invitation to test the beta site. This grab the attention of people and they started talking about it.

Free Giveaway

Everyone loves free giveaways and it is an important part to achieve your market goals. For example Netflix.com offers first month free and give you three reminders before they charge you. Another good example is free trial of software that is helpful to generate lead and potential sales.

Monitor and Track Results

How you will know which marketing campaign tactics delivered the desired results? The simple answer is monitoring and evaluation. Being a marketing manager and business owner you should focus on tracking metrics at the time campaign is developed. This will help you the track campaign progress, look at your approaches and modify if necessary.

Examples of Marketing Campaigns

Below are few examples of marketing campaigns to give you a better understand of the topic.

Viral Marketing Campaign

Burger King: Burger King made use of their customers’ pain points to develop a campaign that clearly went viral. One of their primary competitors, Wendys chose to discontinue one of their best-selling products, and Burger King used the opportunity to promote a similar product and capture the existing market.

Integrated Marketing Campaign

Super 8: Super 8 is one of the primary examples of video campaigns and the power of social media. The brand was able to deliver carefully curated content through social media channels which provided them huge turnovers.

Social Media Marketing Campaign

Samsung: Samsung used their ‘make my idea work’ campaign to develop a huge number of leads. This campaign invited young people to submit their technology-based idea which the brand would then bring to life. As a result, a huge number of applications were sent in, generating massive leads which could then be monetized.

Final Thoughts

Marketing campaigns are not easy to launch yet valuable and play and important role in building a success brand and business. Campaigns are far better than general promotions and inform your target market in a perfect way and allow them to take action. Stick to your target market and customers because both these element play a vital role in the success of campaigns and business.

Image by Mudassar Iqbal