Campaign marketing is all about focusing on specific outcomes that you want your marketing efforts to achieve, and devising specific campaigns to achieve them. In order to produce a successful marketing campaign, there are several things you will need to understand like the types of marketing campaigns and the one that fits your goals best.
The first step towards building a solid campaign marketing strategy is to list your company's goals. These may include (though are not limited to) the following:
To give you a couple of examples, in our previous article – ‘What Is Campaign Marketing?’ – we took a close look at two B2B campaign marketing endeavours by two different B2B companies, each of which had very different aims in mind with their activities and used different social media channels to promote it.
The first company, wanted specifically to generate leads and increase sales, while (GE) wanted to raise brand awareness. Thus, creating brand awareness campaigns was the best option – and so the two campaigns had very different tactics at their core.
Every marketing campaign strategy must be tailored to your goal. You shouldn't use most SEO practices on paid advertising campaigns. However, certain aspects of it might be beneficial. Like keyword research of SEO for an email marketing campaign.
The first company, Logicalis, wanted specifically to generate leads and increase sales, while General Electric (GE) wanted to raise brand awareness – and so the two campaigns had very different tactics at their core.
GE took to an elaborate advertising campaign that featured pop culture figures from famous movies, such as The Matrix and Back to the Future, thusly marrying something entertaining and recognisable with the complicated engineering solutions that GE provide. The overall message that the campaign wanted and succeeded to communicate to the general public was that GE is behind much of the software and machinery that make modern life possible.
(Video source: youtube.com)
Logicalis, on the other hand, was going after leads and sales for its complicated B2B solution, and so providing some light, video-oriented entertainment simply wouldn’t do. The company needed to prove to its potential customers that it had skills and expertise, and so it created a content marketing campaign that turned its executives into thought leaders – a campaign that generated quite literally millions of dollars’ worth of new revenue over a short space of time. (Read the full article here.)
Campaign marketing is all about goals. Whether you want to produce a social media marketing campaign or a brand awareness campaign, one thing remains the same. You will need a marketing campaign strategy that will bring a positive ROI. Define your goals, and often the campaign will reveal itself. All businesses have metrics that they need to focus on, and indeed, an overall inbound marketing strategy can be formed by identifying what your goals are, and then defining an equal number of campaigns that will strive to meet them.
Indeed, when it comes to campaign marketing, it often helps to think of how and where each campaign will impact the various stages of the inbound marketing and sales funnel – top, middle, and bottom – and how those campaigns nuture prospects along the buyer’s journey. Devise the right campaigns that are carefully mapped to this journey, put them all together, and pretty soon you’ll have a complete inbound marketing strategy that guides prospects from awareness right through to purchase and beyond.
(Image source: landerapp.com)
So let’s now consider some specific campaign marketing tactics that can be aimed at each stage of the funnel.
At the top of the inbound marketing and sales funnel, your primary goals will be to create brand lift and drive traffic to your website. We've seen how GE used an advertising campaign to raise brand awareness, but not every company will have the budget to mimic such an endeavour and produce successful marketing campaigns like those.
Content marketing is a comparatively much more cost effective strategy for companies with tighter budgets – in fact, according to DemandMetric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional outbound marketing, and generates three times as many leads.
From a campaign marketing perspective, B2B organisations can use the promotion and distribution of free, ungated content – such as blog posts – to start driving some big traffic to their websites.
The trick with content marketing is to be consistently creating content that you know will resonate and be of keen interest to your target audience.
Let’s take a look at two examples – first, Mint.
Mint is a personal finance app. Long before the app launched, however, the company created the MintLife blog, which produced (and still produces) a huge wealth of written and video content providing free finance tips aimed squarely at its target audience of young, busy professionals. The content was so good that Mint was able to acquire 20,000 subscribers before it even had an actual product on the market, providing the company with a primed and ready lead pool that it could subsequently target for conversion upon the app’s launch.
(Image source: blog.mint.com)
Similarly, Buffer – a social media management platform – was able to acquire over 100,000 new users in the space of just nine months solely through blogging on third party websites (a tactic known as guest posting). Co-founder Leo Widrich penned 150 blog posts in that time, catapulting his company into the history books in the process.
The stories of Mint and Buffer are two great content-oriented campaign marketing endeavours aimed right at the top of the funnel, but with remarkable, long-lasting results that drove prospects right through to the bottom of it.
Campaign marketing at the MoFU segment of the sales funnel is all about encouraging re-engagement from prospects and nurturing them towards to final stages where they will hopefully make a purchase.
At this stage, however, you need to be separating the wheat from chaff – which is to say you need to be separating casual web visitors from those that are genuinely considering investing in your product or service. Campaign marketing that focusses on lead generation is your answer.
Your goal will be to capture as many email addresses as possible, and the campaign will revolve around creating gated content assets – i.e. pieces of content that users will have to surrender their contact information in order to access (such as eBooks, white papers and research reports).
Much like the Logicalis campaign, the idea of using gated content for lead generation is to position yourself as an authority or thought leader in your niche. A good eBook which takes a serious look at the key industry challenges facing your targets and shows that you know how to solve them is the perfect vehicle for educating prospects towards conversion.
(Image source: toprankblog.com)
It’s a tactic that’s been used heavily by marketing technology provider DemandBase over the years. The firm uses white papers, infographics, webinars and SlideShare to source new leads. In one campaign of this nature, DemandBase created content that helped B2B marketers make the right technology investment by spotlighting certain tools in the market and detailing the pros and cons. The campaign generated 1,700 new leads for DemandBase, which led to over $1 million in new revenue. Now that is successful MoFU campaign marketing.
BoFU campaign marketing is all about making sales and closing deals.
Your campaigns at the top and middle of the funnel will have ensured that prospects at the bottom are well-versed in the benefits of your product, service, or solution, and indeed of the costs. The only thing left for them to do is make the purchase.
What BoFU prospects really need is to be absolutely convinced of your offer, and case studies are the perfect vehicle to achieve this. A case study campaign will involve you putting together a number of documents where the value of your solution is proven to be deliverable in practice due to the fact that you can show how your existing clients have benefitted from adopting it.
(Image source: blog.medialabs.in)
It’s likely that you will need more than one case study to execute a solid BoFU campaign, for you will need to show each opportunity that you have existing clients that face similar pain points, and that those clients have enjoyed success with you and are happy to talk about it.
It’s easy to see how delivering powerful social proof of your concept at precisely the right moment can do wonders for your conversion rate, which is precisely why 48% of B2B marketers rate case studies as one of the three most effective content types.
Case studies can of course be published and shared across any number of channels, but they are by far the most effective when distributed directly via email.
Campaign marketing is effective right across the buyer’s journey and at every stage of the inbound marketing and sales funnel. By building specific campaigns to achieve specific goals, a focus on campaign marketing can help you develop an overall strategy that nurtures prospects from the moment when they first become aware of your brand right through to purchase.
If you need help incorporating campaign marketing into your strategy, get in touch with the growth experts here at Incisive Edge today.