Sales are low? Frustrated by the reach of your company? Want more people to talk about your products? Why not jumpstart your enterprise with a fast-paced, attractive, and effective marketing campaign?
What Is a Marketing Campaign?
A marketing campaign, like marketing itself, is dynamic and expandable in terms of meaning. It can stretch from simple price discounts to demonstrations through various channels. Fundamentally, marketing campaigns refer to increased promotional activities of an organization to make customers know about the brand, get them interested in purchasing the product, or sometimes just reinforce the positioning in customers’ minds. In the modern age of marketing, companies often use campaigns to resonate with their brand identity and fortify the relationship they have with existing customers.
Why Are Campaigns Important?
To quote the marketing great David Ogilvy, “Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith, and perseverance to create a brand.” Creating and communicating a brand is a vital aspect of today’s incredibly competitive market.
Brand Value and Mindshare
Through content marketing and campaigns, not only brand messages are reinforced, mindshare of the company and its products are also influenced. This greater amount of mindshare can be translated into greater market share.
Campaigns are a great way for brands to follow through on their promises. For example, Unilever initiated the ‘Dove Effort for Real Beauty’ Campaign in 2004 as a global marketing campaign aimed at instilling self-confidence in women and young children. The incredibly successful venture helped the brand differentiate itself, build emotional connections with its target segment, and most importantly, hold integrity in its core brand promise-
Every body is beautiful.
Brand Recognition
If your brand is a newcomer in a competitive industry, surely you’ll want more people to know about it. Campaigns help with people recognizing your company and making associations you want them to make.
For instance, Volvo as a brand prioritizes safety as its core promise. Now if Volvo sponsors a campaign spreading awareness regarding road safety (which it frequently does), they manage to strengthen the association of safety and the Volvo brand with its products.
What happens now? When a customer looks for a safe family vehicle, he inadvertently turns to Volvo. Campaigns help you establish and differentiate in customers’ minds, eventually safeguarding the prominence of your brand and its promise.
More Reach, Leads, and Conversion
From a sales standpoint, campaigns are significantly useful for generating interest in the offerings of a company. Major discounts associated with marketing campaigns often attract customers. Remember, everyone is looking for a good deal, and through campaigns, you’re offering exactly that. One study showed that commodities sales can boost as much as 73% for bundle discount offers.
The 11.11 sale by Asian marketplaces is another remarkable campaign. In 2021, Alibaba group reported an 85 billion USD sales figure during this signature campaign. Alibaba’s two-week shopping bonanza already eclipses all other retail events on the planet, but this year’s edition was by far the biggest ever, with at least 900 million Chinese customers and 290,000 companies in attendance. The exposure increased the visibility of over two thousand shop owners along with their portfolio of nearly half a million products.
Campaign Planning: Know Your Audience
Even though the audience you’ll be campaigning to is likely to be arbitrary, you still can classify them into three broad groups to prepare content more specifically-
People who don’t know so you make them know
These people do not know about your company, the products or services that you offer, and how do these offerings stand out. For this particular segment, you have to introduce and reinforce product knowledge and brand promise so that the purchase journey can begin.
People who know but you need to incentivize them to act
These customers are knowledgeable but are not willing to act. Through promo discounts or other incentives, these people can be impacted as well.
People who have acted and you want them to keep on acting
These are basically the consumers you intend to retain. They have made a purchase of your product and it is likely that they will be interested in the same or other offerings of yours. Hence you need to make sure they have a smooth experience. These leads are important because loyal customers often act as ambassadors of your company, and we all know how much that matters in the extremely competitive markets of today.
Envision Your Campaign: The OKR Model
OKR Model can be a great framework for you to sketch up your campaign idea and the microenvironment of the initiative. It consists of two parts-
Objective
Here you’ll have to define exactly what goals you are trying to attain and the purpose of your campaign. You also have to think about your long-term goals and whether the campaign you have contemplated aligns with the long-term principle of the company.
Key Results (and Initiatives)
In this step, you have to define the objectives you’ll fulfill to attain the goal of your campaign. The objectives need to be SMART- Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timebound.
It is also important to identify the leading and lagging indicators that may come into play once you execute the campaign. Leading indicators are actions that are in your control. Lagging indicators are events that you cannot manipulate. For example, in social media campaigns, the number of posts, influencer marketing, etc. are leading indicators whereas the number of followers, comments, engagement, sales, etc. are lagging indicators.
EZAssist: A Perfect Companion for Campaign Management
EZAssist, along with its many functionalities, offers a spectacular campaign management tool. Through the campaign management feature, business owners can create customized blast messages for a vast lead database and offer discounts for specific customers and purchases. A complementary tool to social media campaigns, EZAssist provides momentum to your promotions and lets you reap the full benefits of these marketing endeavors.