What Makes a Great Marketing Campaign?

Over the years there have been hundreds of thousands if not millions of marketing campaigns launched around the world. Some work, some don't, it can be a fine line between uplifting success and demoralising failure. So, what makes a great marketing campaign and what breaks a marketing campaign? A question I am sure you have asked yourself over the years when you thought you had created a hit promotion only for it to fall short of your expectations.

Target Market

The most important aspect of any marketing campaign is making sure that it appeals to the audience you are targeting. If you are promoting a new line of clothes for young adults then the campaign has to be relatable, catch the eye and involve their interests otherwise you are never going to get the attention you crave. A thought process we use here at Equinox is to visualise your perfect target that you know would love the product or service that you are offering. Whether this is Kelly from Preston or Steve from Newcastle it doesn't matter, but you need to identify their characteristics and why your product or service would enrich, help, or improve their lives. Then, you need to tailor your campaign to match their characteristics and to play on the highlights that reinforce their need for that product. This will be a huge step in getting the results you crave.

Don't Be Normal

Marketing allows you to be creative, weird, wonderful and exciting all at the same time, so don't create a campaign like a robot. If you create a campaign that is similar to a few that you have previously seen the likelihood is that you will get similar if not worse results as it has been done before. This may get you some short-term joy but in the long term, it will become just as stale and outdated as the rest of the marketing campaigns that don't generate nearly as much interest as they should. Be bold, be brave and don't be afraid to try something out of the ordinary or slightly risky as the chances of it being more successful than a campaign that everyone has seen a hundred times before is much more likely. Become the trendsetter.

Humour Sells

In the modern-day humour is a great tool which can help you improve campaign engagements, clicks, enquiries and sales. Look at two extremely popular adverts in recent years, Old Spice's "The man your man could smell like" and BT's Alec Baldwin and Ryan Reynolds adverts. They were both very good campaigns and amassed thousands of likes, shares and comments across a variety of platforms. This is because they got their message across in a very simple, straightforward but funny way that made people smile, laugh and take a genuine interest in the advert. Humour is a tricky route to go down as there are so many different forms of humour in the world today, but one thing is for sure, if you nail it on the head and produce a simple and funny campaign that people get, the results will be fantastic.

Use Emotion

Connecting with your target audience as mentioned above is absolutely vital to ensure the success of any marketing campaign. So how do you connect with them? Using emotions is one of the best ways to connect with a person. How your product will make them feel is one way to use emotions, look at tea adverts for example, the amount that portray a woman or man having a tough day at work or with the kids and then at the end of the day they get to sit down, relax and have a good old cup of tea. It's extremely simple but its relatable and it creates the persona that when you are sat down having a cup of tea you are relaxed and stress-free which is a feeling most people want to experience. Therefore, they are likely to purchase more tea in the future as they want to continue experiencing that feeling of relaxation. The same works for any product or service, you just need to connect an emotion that is relevant to your product and relatable to your target audience, so that when they are using your product or service they get the feeling of that emotion or in some cases if it is a negative emotion, your product helps to eliminate that emotion and make them feel better. Create a persona and a need that is relevant to your target audience and your campaign will fly.

There are so many ways to make a campaign succeed or on the flipside to make a campaign fail. Sometimes it's easily explainable and sometimes it isn't. We have explored a few ways to help you create successful marketing campaigns. Be bold, be brave and be different and you will see success. Playing it safe may see you take small baby steps in the right direction or may see you stand still, but taking risks and creating some unique, emotional and relatable is much more likely to see you vastly increase your marketing campaign results.

For more information on any of the above or chat about the marketing services we provide call 01934 643961 or email info@equinoxmarketing.co.uk