5 Types Of Marketing Campaigns You Can Run Today
When we talk about digital marketing or even marketing in general, what is the first thought that comes to mind? Do you imagine yourself hiring a company to do video adverts for your product or service? Maybe you think of your team of copywriters coming up with some brilliant content that will go viral and suddenly make your brand the talk of the town?
Oddly enough, you’re not too far from the truth there. While it is not plausible to keep churning out viral content every single day, that is one portion of marketing. Good marketing should have one goal in mind - to get potential clients going from bored to interested in your product or service.
It is rigorously researching, promoting, selling, and distributing your product. You have to study consumer behaviours, analyse their habits, wants, and needs, and then attract, acquire, and retain them.
What we will be looking at in today’s article is a powerful tool that all marketers can use to drive customers to engage with and even fall in love with your brand - the campaign.
What Are Campaigns?
We all know the 4 Ps of marketing campaign wisdom as said by E.J. McCarthy - Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. It is that last one, the promotion, that we are interested in studying today.
Promotions refer to marketing and communication carried out to showcase the benefits of your product or service to the market. Simply put, it’s how you drive sales.
How It Benefits
Marketing campaigns can bring about a range of benefits. The main 5 that we’ve identified in our experience are:
1. Raising Brand Awareness
Marketing can be a rather sublime form of networking. A marketing campaign helps get people to know your brand and the product or services you provide. This translates into potential customers who will remember you. When they do become loyal customers, they will also tell their network about you.
2. Generating Traffic
Campaigns can have the goal of growing the number of visitors to your site which translates into getting better quality leads and eventually will help increase your sales.
3. Increasing Revenue
Email direct marketing, SEO optimisation, content marketing, through strategies like these, and more, you can increase your sales. Streamlining your strategy and testing them to find out which one suits you best will increase your sales. This translates into increased revenue in the long run.
Generally, a business plan lays out how your business will run, how you will get the funding for it, who your audience is, how you are going to market your product, and how you plan to succeed.
4. Building Trust In Your Brand
Repeated exposure to your brand leads to increased trust in your brand name. In addition to increasing revenue, great reviews will also roll in. Good social proof, both online and via word of mouth, is still one of the most powerful and effective forms of promotion.
5. Tracking Your Metrics
Data is important. It is the difference between a brand that takes the time to understand its target market and a brand that has lost its way in the weeds. Marketing campaigns can have the end goal of also collecting data on your customers which helps inform your marketing team as well as yourself to track how a certain campaign is performing. This means that your campaigns can be tweaked continuously to get you more bang for your buck.
What Types Of Campaigns?
There are infinitely many types of campaigns you can run, but for today’s article, we will look at the five main ones you can do digitally.
A. Social Media Marketing
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn. We’ve all heard of these platforms before. These platforms have been around for quite some time now and more are popping up every day. In the fourth quarter of 2021, Facebook saw an average daily user count of 1.93 billion users, according to Statista. Imagine that, even if you could reach just 10% of those users, that’ll be 193,000,000 people.
That said, we now look at two things: which platform do you start with and how.
The first question is rather simple, look at your brand, your product, and your core target audience. If your product is a sugar-free soft drink and your target market is teenagers and kids, you might want to go for an Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok combo. These three platforms have video playback options in the form of shorts or reels and allow captions that can provide more detail to your posts like elaborating on some specials or promotions when the video just doesn’t say everything you want.
Also, these platforms fit the demography best as the average user age distribution of Facebook as of January 2022 is as follows 18-24 years of age at 9.3%, 25-34 years of age at 12.6%, 35-44 years of age at 7.9%, and 45-54 years of age at 5.2%. Since we’re aiming at teenagers and kids, having just 9.3% in the upper range of our core demographic isn’t a good incentive for using Facebook as our platform.
Now, we look at the how. There are either organic or paid posts. Organic social media postings are content that you post regularly for free and is shown to anyone that views your page. Paid ads are posts that you pay for and they reach just specific target audiences and show up in selected feeds.
Whichever way you look at it, this way of marketing is cost-effective and a highly powerful tool to have in your marketing arsenal.
B. Content Marketing
Heard of blogs? How about YouTube videos? What of podcasts? These are all forms of content. Content marketing is, at the very core, to give information and solve problems through high-quality, useful content.
In what is known as the awareness-building approach which helps you plug in your brand to the uninformed of your target audience about you. Imagine that you run a brick-and-mortar business and you are looking for ways to transition or transform your offline business into the 21st century by bringing the whole operation online. What do you do?
You’d probably start by looking online through Google if there are ways for you to bring your business online or digital. Chances are, you’d come across blog articles and/or YouTube videos that outline how such a process is possible.
Then you’ll be exposed to certain brand names like Shopcada which can be a solution to help you with all your setup and will provide you with everything for you to go digital! From an integrated POS to inventory management, and even updating in real-time with other online marketplaces like Shopee & Lazada, their ultimate all-in-one solution makes it all possible for you to get started without technical headaches.
See what we did there? It’s brand awareness and exposure through content. It’s also important to note that there is a fundamental rule in content marketing - “Content is king”. There is a reason for this. If you keep using click baits with no substantial content to back up your articles or videos, people will avoid you like the plague.
A quick tip we will give you here - focus on your content first and you’ll find better success across the board.
C. Influencer Marketing
This one is a double-edged sword, in our humble opinion. The first benefit would be that if you engage influencers who are highly credible and popularly adored, then your brand would benefit from their paid form of word-of-mouth referrals. This occurs because influencer marketing is just you paying successful influencers to ‘influence’ their audience/followers to go try out your product.
Of course, there are several caveats to this one that we do have to warn you about beforehand. One, be careful of the influencers you decide to take on. We have all heard of PewDiePie and even Ninja, to the unfortunate scandal of disgraced Guitar Hero streamer named “Schmooey”.
They were highly influential names and gamers who have since been on the decline and even got wrapped up in scandals to allegations of racism.
While we understand that not everyone reading this will have heard of them, our point with this is, we repeat, you have to be careful about which influencers you decide to hire.
Also, please hire influencers who are in the sphere of your target audience. If you’re Shopcada and your business is in providing a service to transform physical shops into online commerce powerhouses, you might not want to hire any of the influencers we’ve mentioned who are gamers and whose audience would be those who are interested in gaming, not ecommerce.
Likewise, if you’re dealing with FMCG or you are part of the fashion industry, you may be familiar with Wang Lei and its target audience.
This then brings up an interesting wrinkle. We have all heard and seen the rise in popularity of the “Streamer” phenomenon where even platforms like Facebook and TikTok let people go live.
That’s right, we’re talking about live stream marketing. However, while this does make influencers more accessible to audiences and they can interact in real-time, this type of marketing requires you to have some level of serious star quality personality as there’s no second take nor editing magic to fix a lousy performance in post.
This is a particularly powerful tool for any marketer to use as it can help drive hype and grow brand awareness which are two things that can be particularly difficult to achieve in this highly competitive and digital world we live in today.
D. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the extension of the influencer marketing mentioned above. This is known more commonly as referral marketing. Your influencer or even your friend can just place a link to your product in their social media post or YouTube videos and for every purchase made via their link, you give them a commission.
It also is a form of content marketing, if you stretch the word slightly because it encourages content creators to produce original content for your brand and you only pay for it when a sale takes place.
E. SEO Search Marketing
We can’t discount the power of search engines and how you optimise your content. When people talk about Search Engine Optimisation, it’s optimising your online content to show up higher in search results or Search Engine Results Pages(SERP). The best part of it is - it’s free!
You’ve read about content marketing. SEO has an organic branch that looks at content as well as technical aspects which will influence your digital marketing.
Say that you are using content marketing like a blog and you want to couple it with SEO. This will boost your website traffic and search engine marketing. The basic tip we can give you for this combination would be the same as in our Content Marketing point - deliver users a quality experience that is relevant to their questions(and, crucially, answers them), and builds authority for your brand.
Closing Words
When it comes to digital marketing, the possibilities are infinite. There are different platforms for endless combinations for you to test out and more are growing up every day.
It may be difficult to know exactly where to start, but we recommend that you start with social media marketing first as it’s the most accessible and is cost-effective while delivering results quite quickly.
At the end of the day, it is up to you where you want to start. What is most important is that you get started today!
