With more and more channels and technologies emerging in the hands of marketers, today’s campaigns are, for the most part, highly innovative and impactful.

A successful advertising campaign can evoke emotions and stay in our minds for a long time, influencing our purchasing decisions, directly or indirectly.  That’s why we’ve put together this guide – to provide a clear and concise approach to your next marketing campaign.

Let’s dive into it, shall we?

Marketing Campaign 101: The Ultimate Guide

What is a marketing campaign?

Let’s get started on the basic thing. What is a marketing campaign? 

Marketing campaigns are well-planned efforts to promote a certain corporate aim, such as promoting awareness of a new product or gathering feedback from customers. They often use a combination of channels to contact customers, including but not limited to email, print advertising, television or radio advertising, pay-per-click advertising, and social media.

Here is a quick overview of some of the most common goals that drive companies to create campaigns:

  • Increase brand awareness

  • Launching a new product or service

  • Increase customer engagement and satisfaction

  • Increase sales and revenue

  • Increase Customer Life Value (CLTV)

  • Reduce customer turnover

Marketing Campaign Components

According to Hubspot, several components go into successful marketing campaigns:

1. Goals and Key Progress Indicators (KPIs)

This component defines the ultimate goals of your campaign, sets them into specific and measurable goals, and defines the metrics that will be used to track progress. For example, your content creation campaign might be measured by organic traffic, with each post aiming to drive 1,000 views per month and 10 new contacts, with metrics measured in Google Analytics and Looker.

2. Channels

Where will your content and messages be distributed? If you’re planning a social media marketing campaign, for example, you may want to focus on creating channels that are most relevant to your target demographic and avoiding channels where dedicated followers are unlikely to expand.

3. Budget

Not all marketing campaigns require an additional budget, but many still do. Consider agency, advertising, and freelance costs, where appropriate, and factor these numbers into your campaign’s ROI analysis.

4. Content Format

Select the type of content you will create to support the campaign. Marketers typically include multiple content formats in a single campaign. 

5. Team

Who are the people you rely on to get the job done? Before starting a campaign, make sure you assign people to work on every aspect of the campaign, from copywriting and design to purchasing and media reporting.

6. Creative assets

A great marketing campaign must have great creative assets. Whether it’s an elegant website design, a video ad, or an interactive infographic, make sure your design is professional and fits the purpose of your campaign.

Types of Marketing campaign

After knowing the components of a successful campaign, now you need to decide the most important decision in making your campaign: what types of marketing campaigns do you want to run?

There are more or less 12 marketing campaigns you can choose to run. They are:

1. Video marketing campaign

With the development of Youtube, Instagram Reels, and even Tiktok, video marketing is a powerful tool to utilize in marketing campaigns. From building awareness to conversion rate, Superpixel has done a lot of marketing campaigns videos with various objectives.

The beauty of video marketing initiatives, on the other hand, is their simplicity: they allow your audience to effortlessly assimilate your material without having to read or browse through a lot of text.

For example, you can see our Mandai Ranger Buddies video marketing campaign. 

2. Product marketing campaign

Product marketing is understanding a product’s target market and tailoring the product’s positioning and message to appeal to that market. It aims to increase existing consumers’ desire for and adoption of a product. It focuses on the processes customers take to buy your product so that product marketers may create an effective marketing campaign to support it.

Let’s look at Apple’s product launch campaign which just works so well. Apple is well-known for its cutting-edge technology and applications. Its items are not only beautiful to look at, but they are also really functional. However, Apple’s product marketing emphasizes user advantages rather than the numerous product features.

Apple doesn’t just list the remarkable features of its goods; the company utilizes them to inform customers who they might be and how they could function if they have those items. Apple uses its products to create a story, and in the process, it pushes consumers to buy.

3. Brand awareness campaign

Brand awareness marketing campaigns have only one goal – to spread the word about who your company is and what it does. It is an ongoing endeavor, a long-term goal, and one of the keys to success for any business today. In the online world, the competition for visibility is tougher, so creating a campaign can be a bit more challenging.

The campaign should go beyond introducing your brand or logo. If someone is interacting with your campaign, they need to know what your business does, the tone of your voice, and the quality of your product or service.

If you manage to make a successful campaign, the next time that person interacts with your brand, they will know not just who you are, but also what sets you apart from your competitors.

4. Rebranding campaign

The most successful companies always find ways to revolutionize their products and stay relevant.

This is what rebranding campaigns aim for: to relaunch a product they like or introduce a new set of your company’s values to customers.

Either way, launching a rebranding campaign should be more than just a change of font. It takes a total effort to update the product or show your customers that you are slowly moving towards something different.

To make your rebranding campaigns successful, one of the ways to do it right is to create a buzz. 

5. Search engine marketing campaign 

People use Search Engines all the time. That’s why you can target sales by using it to make a marketing campaign. When customers use search engines, you can target them with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or paid search.

The idea is that when people search for a term or ask a question, you can target them with paid ads in search results.

Since most new visitors now find websites using search engines, launching a search engine marketing campaign is a great way to attract potential customers to your site.

6. SEO Campaign

If you aim to increase website traffic, this campaign could be the one for you. Search engine optimization campaigns use search intent, keywords, and content to promote organic traffic to websites.

You must optimize several factors such as titles, metadata, and keywords to get your content to rank on a search engine. Other criteria, such as your domain authority and page load speed, will influence how high your content and site rank in a search engine.

7. Social media marketing campaign

Social media marketing campaigns are everywhere: from Facebook to TikTok, from Instagram to Twitter.

In addition to choosing the platform you will use for your marketing campaign, you will also have to decide whether you will post organic (free), use paid to advertise – or both.

Social media marketing campaigns can be used for a variety of different purposes. They can help you build brand awareness, retarget visitors who have bounced off your website, or even get customers to complete neglected cart deals.

8. User-Generated Content (UGC) marketing campaign

User-Generated Content Marketing (USG) campaigns are where you create content for sharing, not for business – you get your audience to do it instead.

The reason is simple: sometimes your audience dies if they think you’re trying to sell them something. However, if their friends or colleagues are talking, they are more likely to share the content.

Using this type of marketing campaign can increase the credibility of the campaign as it is informed by a relevant source – the users themselves.

9. Email marketing campaign

Email campaigns are an important part of inbound marketing, an ongoing process by which marketers meet buyers at any stage of their journey.

Inbound marketing recognizes that not everyone is ready to buy from you right now. 

With email, you can stay ahead of your interests by providing connectivity to their inbox, and you can do that at scale with marketing automation software. It is important that the recipients of the email campaign have chosen to receive this content and that each piece offers something of value.

Also read: Branding’s Importance: Why Does It Matter?

Steps To Make A Successful Marketing Campaign

Planning 

Planing is an important step of a successful marketing campaign. When things go wrong, the planning stage will decide how you gauge success and steer your team.

1. Set the goal & purpose of your campaign

Let’s begin with the basics. What is the purpose of this campaign? What do you want your campaign to achieve for your company?

Start wide if you’re having problems describing your campaign’s aim. Take a look at the following objectives. Which one is the most similar to your own?

  • Make a sales pitch for a new service or product.

  • Boost brand recognition

  • Obtain client feedback or material to generate leads and income.

  • Increasing user engagement

  • An impending event should be advertised.

2. Establish how you’ll measure your campaign.

Depending on the channels you choose and your final aim, you’ll measure your marketing campaign differently. You can measure success by email open rates, Facebook posts likes product revenue, or all of the above.

These responses will be determined by your campaign’s overall aim. Here are some examples of KPIs based on the above-mentioned marketing objectives.

  • Promoting a newly launched product or service: Pre-orders, sales, upsells

  • Collecting customer feedback or content: Social mentions, engagement

  • Developing revenue: Leads, sales, upsells

  • Increasing user engagement: Blog shares, post likes, social shares, email interactions

  • Boost brand awareness: Public sentiments, social mentions

It’s a good idea to establish how you’ll measure your campaign on each media if your campaign covers numerous marketing channels.

Consider setting up some milestones along the road when deciding how you’ll measure your campaign. Set up some benchmark notifications at 10, 25, and 40 mentions if your campaign entails increasing brand recognition and you aim to attain 50 PR mentions by the end of the year.

It will not only remind you to keep working toward your ultimate objective, but it will also increase team spirit and show you that your efforts are paying off.

3. Define your target audience.

Determine what stage your campaign is by defining your target audience. Are you trying to attract new customers, or are you trying to gather feedback from existing customers?

Your message will vary depending on whether your audience is in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage. Although your campaign may reach people outside of your target audience, you must design a campaign with a specific goal in mind so that you know who it is intended for.

4. Create a marketing concept and contact the right team.

Marketing campaigns need a mission, vision, and visual identity. A cool campaign is an offshoot of its parent brand, both visually and creatively – it stays consistent with the business brand but maintains its own identity.

When creating campaign assets, some businesses use internal teams while others choose agencies. Another alternative is to hire a freelance translator or contractor to complete a specific part of the project, such as a copy or a design.

Distribute your marketing campaign

This phase focuses on the campaign’s audience-facing elements, such as what your audience will see and when they will see it. You should have all the answers you need to take you through this phase if you read through the previous parts.

5. Choose the channel to run your campaign 

This choice depends on audience preferences, budget, and level of brand involvement among other factors.

Examine the existing media platforms you employ to advertise your business. Which is better performance? Which ones allow you to pay for advertising? Who has the best post? And most importantly, where do your customers hang out?

6. Set a timeline

You’ll have a far better sense of when, how, and how often you’ll advertise your campaign if you set a deadline for it. This is how you do it:

  • Make a general campaign timeline, then circle the start and end dates on a calendar.

  • Work backward from the campaign launch date, looking at your marketing assets and promotional marketing channels. How often can you afford to post and promote your campaign material, given your resources? Create a promotional calendar for each marketing channel using this information.

  • Decide on a rhythm for each channel and plan your posts, emails, and other activities on your calendar.

Visual mapping of your marketing campaigns will help you distribute your promotional campaigns evenly and spread them evenly across each medium. It will also give you an idea of where your time and energy are going so you can look back when evaluating the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Converting Customers Through Your Marketing Campaign

This step focuses on how your campaign may lead to a certain outcome.

7. Make sure your campaign leads users to the desired action

Even if your campaign is successful and generates a lot of visitors, it must still result in the intended action. Let’s take a moment to restate that objective.

Lead conversion assets, such as a lead form on a landing page or a call-to-action urging your audience to fill out a form, can be utilized independently or in combination with one another.

8. Monitor the right metrics

The metrics you’ll track for campaign performance will vary depending on the sort of campaign you’re running and the channels you’ve chosen. This section is only a starting point to help you decide what to watch.

It’s also tempting to get caught up in vanity numbers like traffic generated, click-through rate, and impressions. Although an increase in these areas is certainly beneficial, they cannot be used as the sole criterion for determining the performance of your campaign because they do not always imply an increase in income.

Steps To Make A Successful Marketing Campaign

Assessing Your Marketing Campaign

Now we have come to the post-campaign stage. This stage determines your success as much as the planning stage. Measuring and analyzing your campaign data can provide unique insights into your audience, marketing channels, and budget. It will also inform future campaigns.

9. Establish success numbers and metrics.

An easy way to find out is to understand whether your campaign is meeting the original SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). 

A worthwhile campaign yields a return on investment (ROI) that is proportional to the amount of time and effort you put into it.

While it’s OK to rejoice at any increase in pre-orders, leads, views, or interactions, don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s enough. There’s a reason why setting a campaign objective is the first step. Your campaign will be worthwhile if you stick to that aim and calibrate your investment.

10. Utilize the campaign data

This step helps increase your campaign’s business impact.

When you analyze and apply your data, its value increases tenfold – not only it will help you measure and evaluate the results of your campaigns, but it will also give you direction and clarity about your audience, marketing tactics, creative prowess, and more.

Whether you collect key information, pre-orders, social interactions, or offer downloads, your data can prepare you not only to achieve your campaign goals but also to expand your overall marketing efforts.

The campaign is not over after the final report has been withdrawn. Spend time with your team in retrospective meetings. Ask yourself questions like:

  • What could be done differently?

  • How can we save money?

  • For everything wrong, why do we think it is wrong?

  • What do we learn about our audience or our marketing channel?

  • What kind of feedback can we collect from participants or customers?

Also read: What is Creative Advertising and Its Processes

Examples of successful marketing campaigns

1. Tory Burch (Email marketing campaign)

Tory Burch launches an email marketing campaign that contains promotions. 

Did you see that? Did you see it moving? Fabulous, isn’t it? This small animation helps separate these Tory Burch emails from all of the static emails in recipients’ inboxes. They also benefit from exclusivity by framing promotions as “personalized” sales. This type of positioning often makes the recipient feel like they have been specially chosen, prompting them to take advantage of the special opportunity that is presented to them.

Email can be static, boring, and impersonal. This email spoils those expectations without exaggerating.

2. IHOP (Rebranding campaign)

When IHOP announced that it was changing its name to IHOb, it caught the world’s attention and quickly went viral. The restaurant, known for its pies, announced that its name would now be “International Burger House”.

The brand wasn’t too keen on being a burger chain – they were interested in making money, and they knew how to make the stunt work effective.

The name change inspired nearly 20,000 new articles and 36 billion views on social media. Their hamburger sales have even quadrupled because of the campaign. Brands quickly turned into trending themes, resulting in increased brand awareness and overall sales.

The moral of this story is? You don’t have to have a good story. You only need to sell one. Don’t lie to people by any means, as this will destroy any trust you may have built. Just make sure that if you’re going to do something, you’re creating a buzz about it.

3. Coca-Cola (Brand awareness campaign)

One of the best marketing campaigns is a brand awareness campaign from Coca-Cola. They use hashtag strategies and utilize social media as their best promoter.

Coca-Cola launched a “ShareACoke” program that urged users to share user-generated content. How does this work? The brand has added the most popular country names to its bottles, encouraging users to find their name and share it with friends and family. Users were encouraged to share their photos of the product on social media, using the relevant hashtag.

The result was a massive success, with over 500,000 photos shared within the first year. Takeaways? Connecting with users on a personal level and creating a strong call to action can help you achieve higher brand awareness.

4. Converse (Search engine campaign)

Converse uses a marketing agency that utilizes Google AdWords to capitalize on specific moments in culture by being relevant and leading to ‘conversation’ rather than selling their products directly.

They create campaigns that target the search terms that their potential customers might be searching for. Some examples are:

[first day of summer]

[spelling bee]

[How to talk to girls]

Rather than presenting ads to viewers, Converse initiates a dialogue through ad copy and several small, interconnected sites that engage users in a deeper, content-rich experience. This allows them to be there for their audience during cultural moments and one long way to their brand.

5. Changi Airport (social media campaign)

Changi Airport is the latest example of the use of social media campaigns in Singapore. The airport also brought in an innovative campaign during the SG50 event. With a shocking campaign, the airport launched the “I’m at home” campaign that stirred up the spirit of nationalism among the residents.

With the help of the campaign, the airport released a song and movie celebrating its commitment to service and attention to detail that defines the brand. Social media campaigns encourage residents to visualize the feelings of their homes through memorable images. The campaign not only helped create national pride but also allowed him to showcase the features and facilities offered.

6. ALS (UGC marketing campaign)

Have you ever heard of Ice Bucket Challenge? It is a challenge made by ALS as a part of their marketing campaign.

On social media, challenges spread like wildfire. According to Facebook data, videos of people engaging in challenges have been seen over 10 billion times by over 440 million people.

What is the source of its pervasiveness? It is made by the people, not the brand.

The ALS Association’s brilliant marketing strategy to raise awareness of neurological illnesses is hidden behind the ice bucket. The association fulfilled its objective of generating awareness and cash by using unique campaign hashtags such as #IceBucketChallenge and #ALSiceBucketChallenge.

The campaign’s effectiveness is evidenced by the fact that donations to the ALS Association have increased by approximately 2,000 percent!

Trust Your Marketing Campaigns With Superpixel!

Each marketing campaign on this list has a different superpower. While some will bring more organic traffic to your website, others can create a huge buzz around your product and potentially generate a lot of interest.

Also read: 5 Reasons Why You Should Collaborate with Creative Agency

From your product launch campaign to creating a brand awareness campaign, trust your video content with us. Superpixel Animation Studio is the actual creative and technical minds behind every job. With our focus on every client’s needs and objectives, what more could you ask for? 

Chat with us to know more, we are ready to create the best marketing campaigns with you!