Marketing strategy and marketing campaign are the two most commonly used terms that marketers listen to a lot. As a marketer, you must know both. If you don’t know what is a marketing campaign and how it is related to your marketing strategy, you can’t excel. Similarly, if you don’t know what is a marketing strategy and how it drives your marketing campaigns, you can’t outperform your competitors.
Marketing campaigns are the basic building blocks for your business and marketing strategy. These are used to drive traffic, boost brand awareness, and generate sales. The success and failure of your marketing strategy depend on marketing campaigns.
Due to the immense importance of marketing campaigns, this guide will provide you everything you need to know about a marketing campaign.
What is a Marketing Campaign?
A marketing campaign is a systematic and organized set of activities that are used to promote a product or service to a target audience. The word campaign is defined as: An organized course of action to achieve a goal.
So, a marketing campaign is an organized course of action to achieve a marketing goal. A marketing campaign is focused and targets a single goal.
For example, a Facebook marketing campaign can be used to increase page likes. This might include both paid and organic techniques to increase page likes. All the marketing efforts in a single campaign have the same goal.
Here is an example of an SEO campaign that helped a blog grow from 126 to 121,883 visitors in less than 6 months:
This is what a marketing campaign is all about: Specific and focused that is aimed at achieving a single marketing goal.
Marketing Campaign vs. Marketing Strategy
A marketing campaign isn’t the same as a marketing strategy. Your strategy sets the long-term and high-level overall marketing objective.
For example, your marketing strategy might be to acquire 100,000 customers in a year. This is a long-term strategy that is then broken down into specific actions.
Then you’ll create and run several marketing campaigns simultaneously to achieve this long-term goal. For example, you’ll create an SEO campaign, content marketing campaign, social media marketing campaign, and so on.
So, marketing strategy is your high-level plan of action while marketing campaigns are means to achieve your strategic goals.
Components of a Marketing Campaign
Marketing campaigns have different components that are essential for development and implementation. If you want to create a successful campaign, make sure it has the following components:
- Campaign goal
- Buyer persona
- Budget
- Marketing channel
- Content format.
1. Campaign Goal
The campaign goal is the most important component that identifies the key purpose of the campaign. For example, if you are creating an email marketing campaign, you must have a purpose. Do you want to boost engagement with your campaign or you want to generate sales?
Setting a goal for your campaign has two key benefits:
- It sets the purpose of the campaign. The marketing team knows what is expected of them.
- You can measure campaign performance. If it achieved its purpose and goal, it is considered to be a successful campaign.
Just like you create SMART goals for your marketing plan, you have to use the same technique to define your campaign goal:
Each campaign must have one goal that it must achieve.
2. Buyer Persona
What buyer persona your campaign will target?
A buyer persona, as discussed here and here, is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer and it looks like this:
You need to identify the exact buyer persona you’ll be targeting. You can’t just create a campaign and expect it to work without defining its audience. When you define the audience for your campaign, it is its buyer persona (irrespective of whether you have formally created personas or not).
Let’s assume you have created a content marketing campaign with the following goal: To increase blog readership by 100% in 100 days. You’ll need to define the target audience that you want to attract, and this represents your buyer persona.
You can then identify keywords that your ideal customers use to search the content they’re interested in. Target these keywords by writing compelling blog posts. And optimize your blog posts to attract readers.
Each campaign must have at least one buyer persona that you’ll be targeting.
3. Budget
When you are creating several marketing campaigns, you have to allocate and distribute the budget smartly. There are several decisions that you have to make based on the budget and resources you have.
For a paid social media campaign, your daily ad spend depends on the budget you have for the campaign. If you have more budget, you can be aggressive with your ads. In case of a limited budget, you might have to run fewer ads with strict control and bid management.
Campaign budget is also an important component for proving campaign ROI. This means you have to efficiently utilize the budget to maximize ROI.
4. Marketing Channel
What marketing channels you choose for your campaign depend on all the components covered above.
The marketing channel must be relevant to the campaign goal, it is a channel that your buyer persona uses, and you must have enough budget to use this channel.
In most cases, marketing channels are clearly defined in the campaign goal. In fact, campaigns are created based on the marketing channels you are targeting.
Here is an example of types of campaigns based on marketing channels:
These are the different campaign types you can choose from.
5. Content Format
Most, if not all, marketing campaigns have a content format component. This defines the type of content you’ll be creating to reach your target audience on the desired marketing channel.
If you are running a content marketing campaign, you have to decide whether you’ll be creating blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, or a mix of all these. Here is a list of content formats to choose from:
The best way to decide the right content format is to hook it with the buyer persona. Choose the content format that your target audience loves interacting with.
Final Words
If you are a marketer, you must know what is a marketing campaign, its components, and how to create one. These are just the basics that are a must for digital marketers.
Having knowledge, however, isn’t enough.
What makes a campaign successful and how to convert poorly performing campaigns into successful ones is the key. You must know how to find bugs in campaigns that ruin performance. We will discuss these in another guide.
Featured Image: Pexels
