All You Need to Know to Create a Successful Marketing Campaign

marketing campaigns

In the day and age of the internet, visibility is crucial to a company’s success. It is no secret that success does not only depend on the quality of a product or service, but also on the ability to reach your target audience with the right marketing campaign.

Therefore, a creative out-of-the-box campaign requires thorough planning and preparation. And if you manage to tick all the right boxes, the results will bring your business to the next level. But what are the important steps for setting up a successful marketing campaign?

In this article, we are going to show you how to plan, structure, and drive a successful marketing campaign for your brand and products. 

What Is a Marketing Campaign? 

A marketing campaign is an organized course of action that promotes a specific company goal, such as raising awareness for the brand or selling a product or service. 

As our marketing operations guide reveals, marketing has become a very rich and demanding job description. Oftentimes, marketing managers are responsible for multiple marketing campaigns at the same time.

As a marketing campaign depends heavily on creative input, the content and marketing collateral varies — not only across industries, but also across companies within the same industry.

Marketing campaigns can be categorized according to the distribution outlet being used:

  • Digital marketing campaigns usually involve digital advertising via search engines or social media.
  • Radio and television campaigns involve advertising via traditional mass media.
  • Direct mail campaigns are usually employed to boost sales.
  • Customer referral campaigns let your customers spread the word for you.
  • Print ad campaigns use traditional marketing outlets, such as magazines, newspapers, brochures, and flyers.

Every marketing campaign needs all important approvals before it’s ready for publishing. Here are five tips on how to speed up your marketing approval process for any marketing campaign!

In addition, marketing campaigns can be categorized according to the campaign goal. A typical campaign involves multiple distribution outlets, in order to maximize the specified goal. 

What Are the Goals of a Marketing Campaign? 

When thinking about the goal of a marketing campaign, most people would probably cite increased sales. Even though this goal is the most common one, marketing can serve a series of different purposes. 

In the following list, we provide the most common objectives of marketing campaigns:

goals of a marketing campaign by filestage

Increased sales

Remember, whether your company is planning to launch a new product or a current product to expand its customer base, an increase in sales is the most common goal of any campaign. Depending on your budget and target group, a sales campaign usually involves multiple distribution outlets, such as social media, digital ads, TV, and print media.

Build brand awareness

Even if you think your product or service speaks for itself, a company needs to be credible and have a good reputation, in order to be chosen by customers. For instance, Red Bull is sponsoring multiple sports and music events, which puts the brand in the spotlight.

Increased market share

At first sight, this goal sounds similar to increased sales. However, an increased market share means that the market as a whole prefers your product or service over your competitor’s. While the goal of increased sales may include reaching out to untapped markets, aiming for a higher market share usually involves convincing the customers of your competitors to switch to your product or service.

Improved ROI

Return on investment measures how well a marketing campaign is paying off. Increased sales are useless if your campaign budget exceeds the profits. Especially in digital marketing, there are clear ways to measure ROI, such as costs per click.

Internal objectives

A marketing campaign might solve other purposes, which are not related to your customers or products. For instance, digital campaigns on LinkedIn help attract talented employees. 

How to Create a Marketing Campaign

Now that we’ve covered all the important basics of a marketing campaign, it is time to create your own. 

Therefore, this section will teach you the key marketing campaign steps to deliver successful results — from setting goals for planning and creating the content to the distribution.  

To facilitate the process, we recommend making use of marketing campaign management tools and creating your own marketing workflow for every single campaign.

1. Set your marketing campaign goals

First of all, you need to define your goals for your marketing campaign. All subsequent steps are based on your goals. Therefore, it is crucial to put the necessary time and effort into this stage.

Keep in mind that all your goals need to be in line with the overall marketing compliance strategy. In order to define a goal, we recommend making use of the SMART goal template. The SMART method helps you define your goals by making them…

smart goal template

Specific: The more specific you are, the better you can implement your project. In order to be as specific as possible, you need to ask yourself exactly what you want to achieve. “Increased sales” is too vague, since there are a million ways to achieve this goal. So “increased sales from SEO content” is a more workable objective.

Measurable: How can you measure your success? If your goal isn’t clearly measurable, it’s hard to evaluate the success of your campaign. So in the previous example, a higher sales conversion from SEO backlinks would be a measurable outcome of the campaign.

Achievable: Keep your expectations realistic. If your goals are too high, your campaign is doomed to failure.

Relevant: Why is your goal important for the campaign? For example, increased sales from SEO content would equal increased turnover at low costs.

Timely: Set a realistic timeframe with clear deadlines and milestones, in order to track the progress of your marketing campaign timeline. 

2. Define your marketing campaign strategy

After your goals are clear, you need to outline your strategy. The main question is how to achieve your goals while using up as few resources as possible. Project management tools can help you during your entire marketing campaign strategy.

The following points need to be considered:

Define your budget 

Your budget will determine your entire strategy. If your budget is too small, video campaigns cannot be implemented, let alone TV commercials. In order to plan a campaign, you need to have a good overview of all the possible campaign costs involved.

Define your target groups and distribution channels 

In most cases, the target group of your campaign is the same as your product’s. However, you might be more specific according to your distribution channel: Magazine ads might talk to a different subgroup of your target market than TV commercials or social media ads do.

Define the kind of content you need 

Content needs to be created for all your campaign outlets. During this step, you need to define which types of content need to be produced for each distribution channel.

3. Create and prioritize marketing campaign ideas  

Since nobody can just come up with creative ideas on cue, there are multiple ways to make the ideation process fruitful, fun, and inspiring. In order to bring structure to the creative process, you can take inspiration from our idea generation article.

There are many approaches that may help you and your team unleash your creative potential — from approaching your problem from a different angle and using different media to stimulate other areas of your brain to mind mapping, art, and music. Creative ideas blossom in a creative setting. 

The ideas that will most likely achieve or exceed your goals at the lowest possible costs should be prioritized in the next step. 

4. Creation of your marketing campaign content

After your goals are clear and your approach has been outlined, you need to create the content for all distribution channels. Depending on the channel, your content can include product videos, product pages, pictures, or written content.

Recently, ASUS Republic of Gamers launched its new ROG Phone 3. Due to the current pandemic, the event was held online in the form of a prerecorded video, which was streamed on YouTube

For this campaign alone, the presentation contains numerous graphics, videos, and written content. Further, the product page needed to go live after the presentation, and influencers worldwide were allowed to release their reviews. 

asus rog phone 3 marketing campaign content
Source: YouTube channel ROG Global

Creative tools can further help you unlock and boost your team’s creative potential.

It is important that the key message of your campaign is recognizable across all distribution channels. Further, you need to think about a call to action (CTA) (i.e., what you want your customer to do next). Visiting your homepage or buying the product are typical CTAs of marketing campaigns.   

5. Marketing campaign content review and approval

Most people think that content creation is the process that is most prone to bottlenecks. But as it turns out, it is the content review and approval process, which leads to headaches among marketing managers across all industries and companies. 

Therefore, you need the best online proofing tools to create a clear and streamlined review process, which adds value and consistency to your content while keeping the time and effort low. 

Your marketing department is not a silo. Usually, the content produced by this team needs to be approved across multiple departments and decision-makers. When it comes to giving feedback and approving content, email chains are very ineffective.

Filestage offers one single content review and proofing platform for a wide variety of different content, which allows team members and stakeholders to add suggestions and comments in one intuitive interface. 

With Filestage, the content review and approval process is kept simple, clear, and efficient. Also, it’s time-saving and can speed up the feedback process by hours, days, and even weeks (depending on the marketing project and company structure). 

filestage content review and approval process

6. Marketing campaign tracking and evaluation

Before you launch your campaign, you should decide which KPIs you want to track. Here, it helps to have a look at your goals for the campaign. In the next step, you need to decide  ways to track these numbers. There are several marketing workflow software out there that will support your tracking. While the campaign is running, you have to make sure that the tracking for all channels is working properly.  

After the campaign, it’s time to collect, analyze, and evaluate your collected data. The reason why SMART goals are so important is because they enable you to evaluate campaigns according to their measurable goals. In the next section, we are going to provide you with more details on how to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign by using measurable KPIs. 

7. Marketing campaign distribution

No matter how good your content is, you need to find the right distribution channel to reach a broad audience. Choosing the correct distribution channel is as important as creating the content itself.

There are numerous ways to distribute your content. First of all, you can distribute your content on your own channels at no additional costs. This tactic is especially lucrative for companies, who attract a lot of visitors to their website or social media channel. 

Besides, you can choose paid distribution channels to reach a wider audience. But the most elegant way is to get others to talk about you. In the following section, we introduce examples of all three distribution methods.

Owned channels 

Owned channels include all media that is owned by you. They may include:

  • Your own website
  • Blogs you run
  • Social media channels, such as Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram 
  • Email campaigns 

For instance, every Christmas, the Coca-Cola Company launches its ‘Holidays Are Coming’ campaign on a global scale. According to each region, the campaign assets used on the local home pages are customized without diluting the key message. 

coca cola great britain and ireland youtube channel content
Source: YouTube channel Coca-Cola Great Britain & Ireland

Paid Channels

Depending on your budget and target market, you need to determine which paid distribution channel reaps the best outcomes. From ads on TV, radio, social media, or search engines to influencers who promote your product on YouTube or Instagram, there are numerous choices for distributing paid content. 

For instance, the British baking firm Warburtons chose the famous actor Sylvester Stallone for its TV commercial, in order to appeal to a wide audience.

jared carey youtube channel content
Source: YouTube channel Jared Carey

Earned Channels 

There is no question that positive word of mouth is the best marketing campaign for any product or service. Even though positive word of mouth is hard to control, there are ways to steer the public discussion (such as product review sites of social media campaigns) that transmit a positive image.

Apple’s approach to green manufacturing led to various discussions and media publications across multiple countries. 

apple green manufacturing marketing campaign
Source: USA today

Marketing Campaign Checklist from Filestage

As you can see, creating a marketing campaign needs time and effort. But the results will pay off! We created a short and concise checklist that summarizes all our information  about planning and implementing a marketing campaign in 7 steps. Feel free to download the file here

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Campaign

Congratulations! The first milestones are set! But how do you determine whether the campaign was successful? 

You’ll need the help of KPIs, which were determined alongside the goals you established. Keep in mind that your KPIs need to be established before the campaign launches, and they should be tracked throughout the entire campaign. 

To get an idea for analyzing your results, you can take a look at our marketing report sample for social media and SEO-related projects.

Before the campaign: Define the right KPIs 

As already mentioned, one of the most important steps in the entire marketing process is establishing SMART goals and defining KPIs that help you evaluate the success of the campaign.  

The most common KPIs of a marketing campaign include: 

  • Sales revenue
  • Cost per lead (CPL)
  • Cost per mille (CPM)
  • Traffic to the webpage/ blog/ landing page
  • Conversion rate (CVR)
  • Social media: post reach/ likes/ clicks/ comments/ shares 
  • Impressions/ reach/ interactions

If your goal is to increase sales, you can take a look at the sales numbers during the specific period your campaign is running. If your goal is to raise brand awareness, you should take KPIs such as ‘number of views’ or ‘number of interactions’ into account, in order to measure the success of your campaign.

It is important for your KPI to directly relate to your campaign. If your TV commercial is supposed to increase sales, a second radio commercial during the same period of time would make it difficult to distinguish which of those commercials added to the bottom line. 

During the campaign: Track your KPIs 

Some marketing managers make the mistake of establishing the KPIs before the campaign and analyzing them afterwards — without looking at what is happening during the actual campaign. Taking a look at the KPIs during the campaign can help determine whether you are on track, and it allows you to make ad-hoc adjustments if necessary.

Therefore, depending on the duration of your campaign, you should analyze your progress at predetermined points in time while your campaign is still running.  

You can use numerous tools, such as UTM parameters for Google Analytics. If you create a digital advertisement that refers to your website with a URL containing UTM parameters, this information is sent back to Google Analytics for tracking purposes.  

Further, business tools for social media channels help you get insight into how successful your campaign was regarding the number of views or shares (alongside demographic information about your viewership).

For instance, Google offers a guide for learning how to link Google Analytics to Google Ads.

google analytics marketing campaign insights

Even for TV ads, you can check the increase in sales during the time your ad is running. 

After the campaign: Analyze and evaluate your KPIs 

Once your campaign is finished, you need to evaluate the campaign as a whole. What was successful? What went wrong? And what did you learn for future campaigns?

If your goal is ‘increased sales’, you need to determine how much your sales increased during your campaign. If you ran a TV commercial, you can use the percentage increase of the previous campaign as a reference.

In case your goal is ‘brand awareness’ and your KPI is impressions and new followers of your social media channel, you can find out how much your post impressions have increased and how many new followers your account has gained during your marketing campaign. But take into account that some of the new followers might come through organic growth.

Keep in mind that your KPIs need to be in line with your budget. Therefore, ROI in the form of costs per click or customer acquisition costs are equally crucial ways to determine the success of your campaign.    

Key Factors to Create a Successful Marketing Campaign 

By looking at all this information, it might be useful to take a step back and focus on the key factors of a successful marketing campaign. In the following, we summarize five key points that are crucial to any marketing campaign.

key factors for a successful marketing campaign filestage infographic

1. Defining your goals 

Having a measurable goal is crucial for getting started. A goal does not only help you measure the success of your campaign, but also gives you a structure and direction. 

For instance, after losing more and more market share in the 2000s, Nintendo decided to shift its focus by targeting a different kind of customer group that was overseen by its competitors.

By introducing the Nintendo Wii, the company started advertising to women, kids, and the elderly. This bold move eventually paid off, and it’s brought Nintendo into a special market position, which it upholds today. 

Youtube channel vaultNYC nintendo marketing campaign
Source: YouTube channel VaultNYC

2. Knowing the needs of your target group

A marketing campaign needs to have a well-defined target group in order to be successful. Many marketers make the wrong assumption: that the campaign has to have the same target group as the products or services the company offers.

However, certain marketing campaigns can specifically target a subgroup of your target market. For instance, Nintendo specifically targeted girls with the Starcom+ cross-media deal by positioning the Game Boy Advance Pink as a summer fashion accessory. 

nintendo gameboy amazon marketing campaign
Source: amazon

In order to accomplish this goal, you need to know your target group inside-out. What do they need? How can you address these needs? 

3. Be creative and stand out from the competition

Marketing is a creative job. You have to inform, capture, entertain, and inspire people within a short period of time. Further, competition is everywhere. As of today, Americans are exposed to around 4,000-10,000 ads per day. And this trend is still increasing. So you have to make noise and be memorable, in order to be successful!

To stand out from the competition, you need to both be creative and use a structured out-of-the-box approach, which will enable you and your team to come up with exceptional and unique ideas. With the help of content marketing tools, you can facilitate this process. 

4. Have a clear and easy review process 

A part of the structured out-of-the-box approach consists of the review process of your content. No matter how creative your ideas are, if your team or superiors disagree with the content, it will never see the light of day. 

Most review processes take up too much time, as people forget to answer email chains. As a result, projects get delayed, and there is a high risk of miscommunication throughout different communication channels. 

With content review software such as Filestage, all content types and communication can take place on one single platform. 

This advantage both saves time and fosters communication and the creative output of the entire marketing team. It also ensures that no feedback gets lost. 

5. Learn from previous campaigns

You don’t have to start from zero every time you plan a new campaign. Instead, you should use insights and takeaways from previous campaigns to constantly improve your next campaign. 

Don’t look at your results in isolation. Instead, take important lessons for future projects. Why was the campaign not as successful as planned? Was it because you targeted the wrong customers, or because your content did not engage them?

Unless you do not conduct an in-depth analysis of your results, you will not be able to grow as a marketer and improve your upcoming projects. 

Five Content Tactics for a Successful Marketing Campaign 

In order to create a fruitful offline or virtual marketing campaign, you should take inspiration from some common advertising techniques that are used throughout all regions, industries, and companies. In the following section, we summarize the most commonly used advertising techniques, which will help you enhance your marketing campaign. 

Slogans and puns 

Your product or service gets even more appealing if it is backed by a catchy slogan or pun. If your word creation resonates with your audience, you have a much better chance of not being forgotten and standing out from the crowd.

There are tons of successful examples. McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” was a global success and has been translated into most local languages. 

deviantart mcdonalds marketing slogan
Source: deviantart

With the slogan “The Happiest Place on Earth,” the Walt Disney World Resort perfectly summarizes what families are looking for in their vacation. Like all other examples, it is important that your slogan both sounds good and speaks to your target market.       

Scientific and statistical claims 

If you have any scientific proof of what your product or service can offer, translate it into simple English and let your customers know about all the benefits. But be careful: Do not use misleading data or claims to paint your product into a better light. This tactic can backfire.

For instance, Colgate UK claimed that 80% of all dentists would recommend Colgate. While this statement itself was not wrong, the way they communicated it was misleading. It turned out that the dentists could choose several toothpastes in the survey (not just one). So 80% of the dentists recommended Colgate besides other toothpaste but didn’t prefer it. As a result of this misleading campaign, the advertisement was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority in 2007. 

colgate misleading marketing claims
Source: Slideshare

Real-life situations 

By displaying people in real-life situations, the product or service is perceived as a necessity that can enrich everybody’s life. Obviously, this benefit alone is not enough, since a lot of companies have gone this route. People have developed a good sense of what is promised and what can actually be delivered.

The Uber commercial of 2018 came up with the slogans “Opportunity Is Everywhere” and “Doors Are Always Opening.” It shows different people with different goals and ambitions, who could all reach their destination, thanks to Uber. 

uber marketing commercial slogans
Source: YouTube channel Uber

Celebrity testimonials

In 2020, it seems that YouTube or Instagram influencers are more and more frequently replacing traditional celebrity testimonials. Whether your company opts for a celebrity testimonial or a social media influencer, you need to make sure the person’s integrity is in line with the values of your company and target audience.

No event presents the power of celebrity testimonials better than the Super Bowl. Budget constraints seem not to be an issue, and marketers spend about six months getting ready for the spotlight. 

In 2020, Audi (Volkswagen) was endorsed by Game of Thrones superstar Maisie Williams, who is singing Frozen’s “Let It Go” while driving an E-Tron Sportback.

audi let it go marketing campaign
Source: YouTube channel Auto Urban

Transmitting a positive feeling 

Marketing is not all about your product or service. It is also entertainment. A lot of times, people do not buy the product because they actually need it. They buy it because the marketing campaign transmits a positive feeling, which the customer has started associating with the product.

Coca-Cola has a track record of creating touching and positive commercials. The “Happiness Starts with a Smile” commercial shows a day-to-day situation in a crammed subway. All of a sudden, a man starts laughing, which spreads among all passengers.  

coca cola happiness marketing campaign
Source: Coca-Cola

15 Best Examples from Different Types of Marketing Campaigns

Having covered all the basics of how to plan and implement a successful marketing campaign, let’s take a look at some real-life marketing campaign examples.

Email Marketing Campaign by Netflix

We all know how annoying marketing emails are. Most of them land in our spam folder for a good reason. Commercial emails are boring, and they are considered to be an intrusion into our personal space.

Netflix has changed this trend by sending out an automated email, which allows customers to make a purchase within less than a minute. Therefore, they skip all the unnecessary content. 

For this campaign, Netflix only used one informal sentence. But its tonality and style are perfectly in line with all other marketing assets of the streaming service.

netflix email marketing campaign
Source: Sendpulse

Social Media Marketing Campaign by WWF and Make-A-Wish Disney

Social media campaigns are full of heartwarming and inspiring stories that generate a lot of views, subscriptions, and positive word of mouth. 

The WWF foundation made use of the Emoji craze of 2016 by encouraging its users to donate ten cents for every emoji of an endangered species they posted via the @WWF Twitter account. Not only could WWF increase its follower base by 200,000, it could also gain more than 59,000 donations in the first two months of the campaign alone. 

wwf emoji donation marketing campaign
Source: SearchEngine Journal 

Another inspiring social media campaign comes from Disney and the Make-A-Wish foundation. With the hashtag #ShareYourEars, Disney and the Make-A-Wish foundation asked their audience to share a picture of them wearing Mickey Mouse ears. Disney Parks would donate $5 to the Make-A-Wish foundation for every post. 

The campaign was so successful that Disney even doubled the original amount they intended to donate to Make-A-Wish, as the number of participants was much higher than expected. 

These examples show that successful marketing campaigns often result in win-win situations for the company, customers, and charitable organizations involved.  

disney make a wish share your ears marketing campaign
Source: YouTube channel Disney Parks

Influencer Marketing Campaign by Microsoft and Boxed Water

Influencers do not always have to be famous to make a successful influencer campaign.

In 2016, Microsoft cooperated with National Geographic to show inspirational women working in STEM fields. Thirty pictures were posted under National Geographic’s Instagram channels with the hashtag #MakeWhatsNext. Microsoft gained over 3.5 million likes, as well as over 1,000 fan posts. 

microsoft boxed water national geographic marketing campaign
Source: SENSEI Marketing

Another successful influencer campaign came from Boxed Water, which was a rather small player in 2015. The water company commits a lot of effort to reducing its environmental footprint as much as possible. 

With its “Retree Project,” the company promises to plant two trees for every post (with the hashtag #Retree on Instagram). With this campaign, Boxed Water reached out to famous Instagram influencers, which shared the message across their followership. As of today, the company has planted more than 600,000 trees in Sierra National Forest, Stanislaus National Forest, and Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. 

retree project marketing campaign
Source: SENSEI Marketing

These examples show that social media is not only about creating content on your own, but also about finding the right partners and distribution channels to spread the message. 

Video Marketing Campaign by Google Android and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams

Thanks to YouTube, video marketing campaigns are amongst the most popular marketing campaigns. YouTube is known for its famous animal videos, which are viewed and shared by millions of people.

Android made perfect use of this fact by putting together a video of animal friends playing around. Everybody is touched by seeing an elephant and a dog becoming best friends or a parrot feeding spaghetti to a husky. With over 6.4 million shares, Android’s “Friends Furever” video was the most-shared video ad of 2015. 

Just as WWF used the Emoji craze on Twitter, Friends Furever is a calculated effort to produce viral content by knowing about habits — not only of the target market, but also the population as a whole. 

friends furever dog with a blog marketing campaign
Source: YouTube channel Dog with Blog

The example of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream shows that video campaigns do not necessarily require a huge budget to be successful. Sometimes, it’s enough to just do a raw behind-the-scenes video, in order to show what you are best in. 

This midsize ice cream business uses its YouTube channel to promote its business by sharing lovely ice-cream recipes. For example, the video “Build Your Own Ice Cream Sandwich” alone could reach 23,000 views, which is great marketing for a local business.

video marketing campaign Jeni's splendid ice cream
Source: YouTube channel Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream

For a smooth video production workflow, you can make use of numerous video production tools.

Viral Marketing Campaign by ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and Red Bull

Most people associate successful viral marketing with famous video campaigns on YouTube. However, this comparison does not always have to be the case. The most successful viral campaigns are started by companies, but they spread and build, according to the audience.

The ALS ice bucket challenge is the best example of a viral campaign that just needed an engaging idea to be shared millions of times. The campaign was created to raise awareness about Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a type of motor neuron disease. With over 2.4 million videos created and countless views across the globe, we are pretty sure the campaign goal was reached. 

ALS ice bucket challenge viral marketing campaign
Source: Quertime.com

Another famous viral campaign came from Red Bull. As the main sponsor of Felix Baumgartner’s impressive jump from the stratosphere to earth, Red Bull could make its slogan “Red Bull Gives You Wings” turn into a reality.

The campaign made worldwide news, was covered across various media, and appeared in innumerable TV stations around the globe. The video on the Red Bull YouTube Channel alone has over 46 million views.

red bull stratosphere jump viral video marketing campaign
Source: Quertime.com

These examples (and many others) show that the key factor of viral videos is that they evoke emotions in their audience. 

Digital Marketing Campaign by Strava

If you want your page to appear on top of the search results, you need to create relevant and high-quality content. 

Strava, a running and cycling app, accomplishes this exact goal. Its blog does not only create a lot of content for its audience. Rather, it is a platform full of user-generated content and podcasts, and it includes features of famous athletes. Strava achieves a high ranking in search results, and it brings loyal customers back to their homepage through engaging and relevant content. 

Source: Strava blog

A good blog campaign takes time and effort, and it is not created in one day. But the efforts will pay off in the long run. 

Television Marketing Campaign by Coca-Cola

In 2016, health concerns had become more and more prevalent, and they resulted in a loss in sales throughout the soft-drink industry worldwide. 

Coca-Cola launched a big TV campaign, which was aimed at combining the previously separated brands of Coca-Cola, Diet Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Zero, and Coca-Cola Life under one slogan. 

The message of the global “Taste the Feeling” campaign was that Coca-Cola makes the moment more special. Instead of focusing on one specific target market that each of the individual drinks catered to, Coca-Cola took an emotional approach with its entire audience.

business insider coca cola taste the feeling marketing campaign
Source: Business Insider 

Brand Marketing Campaign by New York Public Library

How can a library rebrand its boring image and make it appealing in the day and age of video games and social media? New York Public Library accomplished this exact goal with its famous Instagram brand marketing campaign

Instead of waiting for its customers to come to the library, the NYPL published famous novels such as Alice in Wonderland, The Metamorphosis, and A Christmas Carol in full length on its social media platform. To make the stories more appealing to the target audience, illustrations and animations were added. 

The so-called “Insta Novels” campaign was a great success. NYPL’s follower base grew by an astounding 75%, and the novels have been read more than 300,000 times. 

This example shows how social media can transform an old-fashioned business model, in order to appeal to a younger audience.

nycpl insta novels marketing campaign
Source: Nypl blog

Integrated Marketing Campaigns by The Old Spice and GoPro

Integrated marketing campaigns make use of different marketing techniques and distribution outlets.

The Old Spice “Smell Like a Man” campaign is even famous among people who had never heard of the brand before. The campaign focuses on an overly exaggerated masculine man, who promotes the benefits of the products while talking to the camera. While staring at the camera, the man walks through various locations and activities. Usually, the videos have a surprising and humorous ending. 

Even though the videos play the main role throughout the campaign, the content goes far beyond YouTube by extending through all popular social media outlets and making use of on-point copywriting. 

gopro old spice integrated marketing campaign
Source: thinglink

Another successful integrated campaign comes from GoPro. Their campaigns originate from user-generated content, which is made with a GoPro camera. The campaigns both feature extreme sports enthusiasts, but attract people who want to share their own personal adventures with the audience on YouTube. Next to user-generated content, GoPro uses outdoor ads and sponsorships to boost their campaigns. 

The approach of GoPro is a great example of engaging with their audience and appreciating their loyal fans while receiving authentic content for their marketing purposes. This is a real win-win situation. 

Source: GoPro

Offline Marketing Campaigns by Spotify

When it comes to offline marketing campaigns, Spotify has taken a leading role over recent years. Its billboards are both visually appealing and inspired by internet meme culture. 

In mature markets (such as the US), the campaign deepens the bond with its millennial user base while in the emerging markets the campaign aims at making music a part of the life of the target audience. 

spotify offline marketing campaign billboards
Source: musebycl

Conclusion 

We hope we could not only give you a thorough understanding of the key marketing campaign steps, but also give you an idea of how much fun it is to bring a creative marketing campaign to life. 

Marketing requires distinct skills from different fields. You need to be a creative out-of-the-box thinker, who knows how to capture your audience. And you need to possess marketing project management skills, such as a bird’s eye view of the entire project, scope, and deadlines. 

Further, you need persuasion and people skills, in order to bring everybody in your team onboard. 

We are looking forward to seeing your marketing campaign go viral!