Marketing Campaigns Guide [6 Best Campaigns of All Times]

Marketing campaigns are an effective way to set your business up for success. In fact, a well-executed marketing campaigns guide gives your business that competitive advantage.

A one that sets you apart from similar brands, boosts brand recognition and translates to a positive return on investment.

In this article, we’ll be answering the what, whys, and hows of marketing campaigns.

What’s a Marketing Campaign and Why do You Need One?

A marketing campaign is a series of steps a business takes to build awareness or gain publicity for a particular goal.

Whether that’s unveiling a new product or service, getting customer feedback, championing a cause, or simply spreading brand recognition.

Campaigns employ methods such as advertisements, fun challenges, social experiments, and surveys to drive this publicity.

To create a successful marketing campaign, you must focus on reaching one goal at a time. As a new brand, for example, your goal may be to unveil your first product to your target audience.

And your campaign should focus on successfully achieving nothing more.

Nonetheless, successful marketing campaigns bring other benefits. Running a campaign to unveil a new product can also lead to a wider awareness of your brand.

Word of mouth advertising from excited new customers, and an increase in your brand’s sales revenue.

Well-executed marketing campaigns can leave a lasting impression of your brand in the minds of your target audience, meaning:

They spread awareness of your products and services through different media.
You can effectively reach your target audience and serve them better based on campaign feedback.
They increase your organic traffic.
They deliver a positive return on investment (ROI).

How to Create a Successful Marketing Campaign in 6 Steps

Running a marketing campaign requires careful planning. Below are six key steps to creating a robust campaign that, effectively delivered, will generate the best possible results:

1. Define Your Goal (Be as Specific as Possible)

Begin the process by defining your campaign’s single goal. This will keep you focused on achieving a specific result.

Some common goals for marketing campaigns include:

Increasing customer base
Unveiling a new product
Getting customer feedback
Product promotion
Brand awareness
Getting statistics or data on a social issue
Creating awareness for a cause

When you define your goal, back it up with figures or a specific “win condition”.

It’s not enough to state: “Our goal is to get new customers buying product X.”

An effective statement is: “Our goal is to get 50,000 new customers buying product X.”

Setting a measurable goal right at the start gives you a target to work towards, keeps you focused, and ensures every step is directed to a single, unifying purpose.

You’re also much more likely to meet a set target that you can measure.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Skipping this step or doing it wrong means you’ll waste a ton of money on an unfocused marketing campaign.

Your target audience is those people to whom your product or service is most beneficial. Before running a campaign, you must have a clear picture of that audience.

Write down your target market demographic (gender, age, profession, lifestyle, marital status, etc) and carry out a buyer persona to determine who your product or service targets most.

What’s included in this list would depend on the product or service you offer.

For example, let’s say you’re running a marketing campaign to get new customers for a game (we’ll call it Our Awesome Game) targeted at Gen Zs.

Your goal, target audience, and buyer persona may read as follows:

Goal: To get 50,000 new customers for Our Awesome Game
Target Audience: Older Gen Zs (late teens to early 20s)
Buyer Persona: Adam Smith, 20 years old. Technology enthusiast. Avid gamer. Owns every PlayStation console. Frequently on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Determining your target market demographic and carrying out a buyer persona may be complex.

But it’s definitely an important step to take. Read more on buyer personas to get a better understanding of the whole process.

3. Brainstorm the Best Strategy to Reach Your Goal

Now that you’ve been able to clearly define your target audience, your next move is to determine the best strategy to reach them.

Frequently used marketing strategies include:

Social media marketing
Content marketing
Paid media advertising
Word of mouth advertising
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Let’s revisit our buyer persona, Adam Smith. From the information we’ve put together, it’s obvious that the most effective marketing strategy for Adam is social media marketing.

4. Choose Your Marketing Channels

Now you know which broad strategy will work best, you need to zoom in on exactly where to aim your marketing.

Where does your target audience hang out the most? Are they social-media savvy or do they lean more towards traditional media?

Do they read the newspaper or subscribe to email lists?

To reach your target market, you must identify the places they go to and meet them on their home turf.

Identify your target audience’s most used channels and deliver your campaigns there.

In the case of our buyer persona, Adam posts or comments frequently on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. These will be our target channels.

5. Set a Deadline and Schedule for Your Marketing Campaign

It’s always more effective to set a deadline for important goals and marketing campaigns are no exception.

Setting a specific date to reach your goal will give you a timeframe to work with. Creating milestones for important steps along the way encourages tracking and ongoing oversight.

For our example, we will target the holiday season:

“Our goal is to get 50,000 new customers buying Our Awesome Game by close of business on December 24, 2020.

We will create four milestones for publishing ads on 1 December, 8 December, 15 December, and 22 December.”

6. Set and Measure Your KPIs to Determine Success

Make sure you define metrics for each important stage of your campaign and especially for the end results.

These key performance indicators (KPIs) will be critical to your post-game analysis.

Measuring how well your marketing campaign performed is the best way to determine whether it was a success. Analyzing the results will help you decide what works – and what doesn’t.

You can determine the success of your marketing campaign by measuring the KPIs you set earlier on, such as:

Return on investment
Sales revenue
Organic traffic
Cost per lead
Customer lifetime value

In our example, the KPIs could be sales revenue, click-through rates for our ads, the conversion rate, or a combination of any number of measurable factors.

6 of the Best Marketing Campaigns We’ve Seen

Here are six marketing campaigns that really impressed us – and our analysis of why they worked. We hope they get your creative juices flowing!:

1. Spotify: Wrapped – social media

Wrapped is an annual event in which music streaming service Spotify puts together an individual playlist for each subscriber, using their listening data from throughout the year.

Subscribers can share these playlists with friends and followers.

The Wrapped marketing campaign uses humor to capture the attention of its target audience, producing a series of billboard ads with funny memes on music trends and user playlists.

Spotify captures these billboards and posts them on their social media channels to usher in the event.

Wrapped has become so popular that subscribers look forward to it in much the same way they look forward to the holiday season it accompanies.

According to Spotify, Wrapped playlists have been streamed over 3 billion times and are engaged by more than 60 million subscribers.

Why This Worked

Spotify won the hearts of its users and gained new subscribers by appealing to human nature.

Sharing your playlist is as personal as it gets. It feels like you’re sharing a part of yourself.

2. Always: #LikeAGirl – social media

Feminine menstrual hygiene brand Always realized it was losing a significant group of its target market, 16-24-year-olds, as their competition appealed more to this demographic.

In a bid to stay relevant to this group, Always chose to address a social issue affecting young women: the drop in confidence during and following puberty.

Studies show that a girl’s confidence drops significantly during puberty and is almost never regained. A big contributor to this phenomenon is gender stereotypes.

Always used the derogatory phrase “like a girl” to spread awareness about the relationship between confidence and negative female stereotypes.

Always’ main marketing channel was YouTube and the original video surpassed 60 million views.

The brand also ran the video as a pre-roll and accompanied it with paid Facebook and Twitter campaigns, and paid influencer outreach.

Why This Worked

Always tackled a pain point that affects a significant percentage of its target market.

This positioned it as not just a brand, but a company that cares about social issues affecting its consumers.

3. Oreo: Dunk in the Dark – viral marketing

It’s February 3, 2013. The San Francisco 49ers are playing the Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans.

Early in the third quarter, there’s a sudden power outage

Minutes later, Oreo tweets:

The tweet quickly goes viral and is retweeted over 16,000 times.

It becomes a sensation and is one of the most successful social media campaigns ever.

Oreo’s tweet won the Super Bowl, even though it wasn’t a commercial.

Why This Worked

The Super Bowl is one of the most-watched sports events in the world; it is viewed in over 130 countries and broadcast in more than 30 languages.

Oreo capitalized on the game’s huge audience and diverted their attention to the brand during the power outage.

The smart, funny tweet drove more traffic to the company’s social media page and spread its brand awareness even further.

4. The Ice Bucket Challenge – multiple media

The Ice Bucket Challenge began as a way to spread awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and to encourage donations for research.

The challenge involved people dumping a bucket of ice-cold water over their heads while filming themselves, then sharing the video or picture on social media.

Participants were encouraged to nominate others to do the same. Nominees had 24 hours to comply or donate.

The ice bucket challenge started in 2014 and went viral; more than 17 million people participated and it raised over $220 million.

The challenge was so successful that it was reintroduced several times from 2015-2019 and continued to attract significant donations for research.

Why This Worked

The ice bucket challenge was simple and fun enough to arouse an initial interest from the target audience.

Then it challenged people to do something out of their comfort zone to achieve a greater good.

The frozen reaction from an ice-cold bucket of water is meant to make participants experience how sufferers of ALS feel when they can’t move.

The psychological effect of this challenge made it easier for participants to empathize with sufferers and donate to the cause.

5. Dropbox: Marketing Dynamix – value add in B2B

Dropbox wanted to target a new audience: marketers. For this, they knew they needed to create an impressive campaign – Marketing Dynamix.

The idea behind Marketing Dynamix was to create an assessment tool that helped marketers with aspects of personal and professional development.

Including understanding their personality traits, improving relationships, and effective team building.

Marketing teams that participated in the assessment were encouraged to share their results and invite others to take part in the assessment, too.

The Marketing Dynamix campaign resulted in an increase in lead generation of 220% and an ROI of 25:1 for Dropbox.

Why This Worked

The Marketing Dynamix assessment delivered value, in a fun way, that marketers couldn’t resist.

It gave participants a chance to work better as a team and achieve professional success.

6. IBM Campaign: Every Second Counts – value add in B2B

IBM’s vision is to help businesses run in the most efficient and profitable manner, which is why they decided to tackle a potential threat to all businesses: cyber attacks.

The Every Second Counts campaign was a webinar that tackled the issue of cyber-attacks through interactive sessions with audiences.

These sessions educated key decision-makers on the threat of attacks and how to protect their businesses. They emphasized the importance of having a rapid recovery plan in place.

The campaign kicked off in 2019 with YouTube videos, in which actors depicted horror scenarios. It quickly advanced to a live presentation with opportunities for interaction.

The campaign recorded significant success with IBM receiving requests to run the presentation at industry events and private meetings.

Including an invitation to join the ‘Future of Cyber in London’ round-table organized by the Mayor of London.

Why This Worked

The campaign engaged with key decision-makers and emphasized the importance of having a solid cyber-recovery system.

By showcasing scenarios based on true-life events and reenacting true complications and processes.

In short, it delivered realistic situations and solutions to the people who would take the issue seriously and who had the power to effect change in their business.

Now Go and Launch Your Marketing Campaign!

A marketing campaign may be what your business needs to give it that final push to the top. Remember to keep these critical factors in mind when planning your campaign: