Marketing campaigns are the cornerstone of a good content strategy. By telling the right stories to the right people, you can easily and effectively grab attention, increase awareness, and cultivate strong relationships for long-term brand success. In short, you can get fantastic results—if you know what you’re doing.
Unfortunately, not all marketing campaigns work. Whether it’s because of a lack of knowledge or bandwidth, there are plenty of pitfalls and roadblocks that can prevent a campaign from being as successful as it should. We know because we’ve made just about every mistake in the book. Luckily, we’ve also figured out what works, what doesn’t, and how to get from brainstorm to full campaign with less stress. And with that knowledge we’ve been able to help brands of all sizes craft effective marketing campaigns across a wide variety of industries.
Today, we’re going to show you how to craft and launch awesome marketing campaigns that help you achieve your goals. Before we dive in, though, let’s start with a little background.
What Are Marketing Campaigns?
You might hear the word “campaign” and flashback to those Mad Men ad campaigns. They’re somewhat similar, but in an era where engagement marketing is surpassing interruption marketing, marketing campaigns are a more effective way to get your brand’s message across.
Basically, marketing campaigns are a way to communicate a specific message to targeted, segmented groups—via content. Campaigns can be large or small. They can be crafted around a new product or existing service. They can tell a story across channels. Above all, they are a way to tell your brand story in a direct and measured way.
What Do Marketing Campaigns Look Like?
Marketing campaigns look different for different brands, depending on what they’re meant to achieve. But in general, they’re usually a batch of content under the umbrella of a specific message and story. We break it down in the following way:
- Your campaign idea: the big idea you’re reinforcing
- Messaging pillars: the main messages to deliver
- Content pillars: the specific stories that deliver those messages
- Content executions: the actual pieces of content
Together, the framework looks like this:
The Keys to Good Marketing Campaigns
A good marketing campaign helps you achieve your brand goals. But to ensure that success, the big idea needs to hit three specific criteria:
- Clarity: Strong campaigns have a clear message that supports a specific brand goal.
- Memorability: You want something that is meaningful and memorable, as this is the key to moving people along the buyer’s journey.
- Scalability: You want a message that can translate across mediums, whether it’s an Instagram ad, a billboard, or an interactive in-store experience.
- Value: A good campaign provides value to people in some sort of way, whether it entertains, educates, or inspires. An effective campaign doesn’t simply tow the line of your brand promise or value proposition. Rather, the best campaigns sit in the sweet spot of what people want to hear and your brand wants to say.
Not every marketing campaign has to be a global affair. Even if you’re a small business looking to run a local campaign, you just need to figure out what type of content will help you communicate your brand message most effectively.
How to Craft Marketing Campaigns
So you’re ready to dive into your next campaign, but how do you find the right idea? How do you execute it properly? Here, we’ve compiled our best tips, tools, and resources to guide you through the process step by step.
Step 1: Start Small
Some brands get excited and want to take on a big, ambitious campaign. It’s tempting, but you risk running a campaign that’s disjointed, especially if you have a bunch of projects happening simultaneously.
If you’ve never done a campaign before, or if you’re looking to do something new (or dramatically different than what you’ve been doing), we suggest starting small with a simple, strategic campaign (e.g., a Facebook or Instagram campaign). That way you can see what works, what doesn’t, and how you can improve—without blowing your whole budget. (Even a simple A/B test on a Facebook ad can provide major insight about your messaging.)
Step 2: Assess Your Content Strategy
It’s tempting to dive right into content, but you need to do some legwork first. Good campaigns start with a solid content strategy, wherein you’ve identified and articulated the information you need to succeed.
Before you start, make sure you and your stakeholders have a clear and unified understanding of your:
- Goal: You need to know exactly what you’re trying to achieve (e.g., newsletter subscribers), as every decision you make will be influenced by this larger goal.
- Budget: How much have you allocated? Again, starting small is an economical way to make sure your campaign provides a solid ROI.
- Personas: Who are you trying to reach? What are they interested in? What do they care about? If you don’t know whose attention you’re trying to get, it will be hard to craft a campaign that will actually work. We always recommend crafting marketing personas, which help you segment your targets and identify what they care about.
- Metrics: There’s no point in sinking time, money, and resources into marketing campaigns if you don’t know how to determine whether or not they’re successful. Make sure you identify your measurement approach before you start crafting campaigns.
- Channels: You want your campaigns to get in front of the right eyes, so it’s crucial to know the most effective channels to reach your personas. This will also influence the type of content you create (e.g., video for Instagram or articles for your blog).
Knowing this information will keep everyone on the same page and provide clarity through any confusion down the road.
Step 3: Find the Right Idea
Many marketing campaigns fail from the beginning, simply because the idea wasn’t quite right. To make sure your idea will hold up:
- Focus on what people need. Again, it’s all about finding something that is interesting and relevant to people. As you ideate, ask yourself, “How does this serve my personas?”
- Vet your ideas through your personas. If you can’t clearly identify how and why someone will be interested in it, you need to go back to the drawing board.
Example: The dating app Hinge knows exactly what their people are looking for: love. Thus, if Hinge does its job and delivers on its ultimate promise, people don’t need to use the app anymore. To convey this messaging, they launched their latest campaign around the idea that they’re “The dating app designed to be deleted.” This was a clever angle to capture interest and show that they’re invested in helping people find good relationships.
Step 4: Identify the Right Format
When it comes to marketing campaigns, the medium is just as important as the message. Remember: Just because you want to create a certain type of content doesn’t mean it’s the best fit for your story.
- Consider your personas. What type of content are they used to consuming? What do they prefer?
- Consider your channels. Some channels may not support the type of content you want to publish, while others may be particularly effective. For example, a stunning photo series is more compelling on Instagram than Twitter, whereas a 10-part documentary series is ideal for YouTube.
- Make the most of your content. Depending on the format you choose, you can easily turn one asset into multiple assets for promotion on different channels. For example, one e-book can be turned into an infographic, article, and microcontent for social. This is a smart way to recycle, reuse, or repurpose your content to make a lasting impact. (Again, this is why it’s important to think strategically and be intentional about your content plan—before you start creating it.)
Example: We collaborated with the New York State STOP-DWI Foundation’s “Have a Plan” a campaign to stop people from driving under the influence. Our content aimed to inform and empower young people to make the right decisions, while emphasizing the seriousness of the issue. Through video and infographics, we made educational content to help people make the right plan before a night of partying.
Step 5: Set Up Your Infrastructure
So you have a great campaign idea, and you know your format, but how are you going to get content from rough draft to final file? You may think it’s easy, but content creation challenges are one of the biggest problems marketers face today. This is usually due to a lack of skill, knowledge, or bandwidth, as well as a true understanding of what it takes to produce different types of content. To make sure the process goes smoothly…
- Write a strong creative brief. Follow our template to make sure everyone on your team has the info they need to do the creative work.
- Create a reasonable timeline. You don’t want to cut corners or get held up indefinitely. Craft a timeline that includes built-in approval stages, and make sure all stakeholders have signed off on work before it moves down the production pipeline.
- Assign the right roles. Make sure everyone knows who’s owning what, and who they can turn to with questions.
- Bring in support if you need. You can always use a freelancer or agency to supplement your content creation if you’re struggling in one area or don’t have the knowledge to produce something more time-intensive.
Remember: Things like video and animation take more time to create than infographics and static content. You don’t want to spend even more time and money fixing them if things go wrong.
Step 6: Create and Iterate
The actual content creation is one of the most enjoyable (but most challenging) parts of a marketing campaign. To create the best, most effective content possible…
- Apply your brand identity. Make sure it’s written in your brand voice and that the design reflects your visual identity.
- Write for the people you’re trying to reach. Avoid buzzwords, use terms they understand, and speak to their knowledge level.
- Use tools to work smarter. Whether you’re creating e-books, infographics, or interactives, here are 100+ content creation tools to make crafting campaigns easier.
- Follow best practices for design. Little tricks can make a huge difference in how people view your content.
- Craft a strong CTA. Don’t be too cheesy or too salesy, but make sure people know what to do after consuming your content.
- Proof for typos. Sloppy mistakes can erode your credibility; don’t send it out the door without a final look.
- Optimize for SEO. Use the right keywords to increase your traffic.
Step 7: Craft Your Distribution Strategy
You can’t just hit publish and expect people to find your content. You need to intentionally and strategically distribute it. Thus, one of the most crucial parts of any marketing campaign is the distribution strategy. To make your promotion more effective…
- Determine your hashtag beforehand. Make it something simple and easy to remember.
- Prep your assets. Gather all the assets you’ll need to promote content, including social content, high-res images, copy, ads, etc.
- Set up your tracking tools. You’ll want to know exactly how your campaign impacted the business, compared with past efforts and other concurrent. marketing activities. For this you’ll need attribution/tracking links, so set them up and test beforehand.
- Run paid promo. Paid social, native ads, influencers, and paid search can be effective ways to funnel people to your campaign content.
- Reach out to publications and influencers.
Remember: Experimentation Is the Key to Success
Not every marketing campaign may move the needle the way you hope it will; but the more you experiment, the more you’ll learn, and the more effective your campaigns will become over time. Also remember that even if you have a documented content strategy, it isn’t set in stone. A good strategy provides firm direction but is flexible enough to change, based on your campaign results.
To make sure you’re on the right track, regularly review and refine your strategy on a quarterly basis (or even a campaign basis), depending on what your larger goals are. What matters most is your ability to measure your results and grow as you go.
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