Campaign marketing is a marketing strategy whereby a business sets out a series of very specific goals – raising brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, increasing sales (for example) – and devises a chain of individual campaigns to achieve them.
With careful planning, campaign marketing is an effective strategy precisely because it is so goal-oriented. With numerous campaigns running in unison – each of which striving to improve a very particular metric – the overall result can be very great indeed.
Many tech B2B companies have something truly brilliant and beautifully engineered to benefit the business world, but aren’t exactly sure how to market their technologies effectively. Campaign marketing is a great remedy for such hesitancy. By first listing your goals, effective campaigns will more often than not reveal themselves, and all you need do then is start putting them into action.
The trick with campaign marketing, however, is to think about how each of your individual campaigns will feed into one another. For instance, you might want to run one campaign which, in and of itself, will have the sole purpose of growing your social media following.
At the same time, however, you’re running a separate campaign to increase the readership of your blog. Naturally, you can make the success of one inform the success of the other – with lots of people now following you on social media, you have a primed and engaged audience ready to market your content to.
And the saga continues. With lots of people now reading your blog, your eBook campaign then becomes much easier, which, in turn, will feed into your lead generation campaign, and subsequently your sales campaign.
All of a sudden, you have a structured campaign marketing strategy that guides prospects neatly and efficiently all the way along the buyer’s journey – from awareness right through to purchase.
(Image source: redmoxy.com)
Single- or Multi-Channel
This is just one example, of course. There are many other uses for campaign marketing, and indeed, numerous marketing channels and methods can be used to gear each specific campaign towards success.
For instance – you might want to run a video marketing campaign that gives prospects a full demo of your tech product in action. The video will be hosted on YouTube – but, in order to generate as many views as possible, your campaign cannot begin and end on that platform alone. You’ll need to be running the campaign on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social network where you’ve built up a presence. You may also want to include the video on your website, perhaps in a blog post or landing page. And then there’s your email list – in order to generate as many views as possible, you’ll need to be hitting your contacts directly in their inbox with this video, too.
Innovative Campaign Marketing
Campaign marketing endeavours can of course be much more elaborate than anything we’ve described thus far. Indeed, in order for B2B tech companies to compete in the digital world, they need to make sure they’re right on the cutting edge of campaign marketing as much as they are on the cutting edge of developing innovative new technology solutions for the business world.
Utilising a string of campaigns to move prospects along the buyer’s journey is a great place to start – indeed, it will be the bread and butter of your campaign marketing efforts.
But today, many forward-thinking B2B marketers are turning to more innovative campaigns to achieve their various goals and get their messages out there. They’re launching podcasts, augmented reality videos, gaming apps, YouTube channels, discussion forums, and a whole lot more besides.
The point is, B2B marketing doesn’t need to be clinical, dry or just outright boring. The B2C world doesn’t have to have all the creative fun. So let’s now take a look at a couple of examples of B2B tech companies bringing a little excitement and innovation to their campaign marketing efforts.
Avaya
Avaya is a communications technology company, based in the US. In 2015, it launched a fun and truly original campaign based on the idea that the business and tech worlds are overloaded with buzzwords, clichés and jargon that nobody can make sense of half the time. Since Avaya is in the communications industry, the company decided it was time for a translator – and the satirical ‘Translating Tech’ campaign was born.
(Video source: youtube.com)
Translating Tech took a multichannel approach – there was a social media angle, which encouraged followers to poke fun at overused clichés, and a series of humorous YouTube videos called ‘Stuff Business People Say’.
The goal was to create a buzz among customers and prospects, drive industry engagement, and position Avaya as a “cool” tech brand. It worked. The campaign increased web traffic by 244%, and boosted online conversions by 18%. Brilliant campaign marketing.
Juniper Networks
Knowing your audience is an essential part of B2B campaign marketing. In the IT world, it’s a reasonably safe assumption to make that your average techy basement-dweller will have an appreciation for video games.
That’s the bet that network security provider Juniper Networks made in any case. In what turned out to be a brilliant B2B marketing campaign, Juniper launched a mobile app game called Deception Force, in which players have to fight off alien creatures, which are in fact embodiments of common network attacks, such as Trojans and SQL injections.
(Video source: youtube.com)
The idea was to gamify the Juniper Networks solution and help IT pros to learn how to “know, control, and expose” network security threats, let the techies be the true heroes that they actually are for a change, and raise awareness about Juniper Networks amongst those who matter most – i.e. IT professionals who will actually use the Juniper product. In three months, the game was downloaded more than 15,000 times – a great result.
Over to You
The central idea behind campaign marketing is that there is one goal in mind, and your campaign sets out to achieve it. For B2B tech companies, campaign marketing can be used to bring structure to an overall marketing strategy, or in isolation as one-off marketing blasts, as in the examples above. Either way, the goal-oriented focus of campaign marketing is ideally suited for all manner of growth strategies, and can achieve long lasting and meaningful results for all players in the B2B tech industry.
If you need help devising a campaign marketing strategy, get in touch with the growth experts here at Incisive Edge today.
