[Webinar] The Campaign Mindset: Focused Messaging for Effective Digital Marketing

In the fast-paced, ever-changing digital marketing landscape, campaigns have been a proven strategy that stands the test of time.

But, the campaign mindset is not just about short-term gains. It’s about telling a story that captures the heads, hearts, and hopes of your audience.

Video Transcription

Hello everyone! Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar called, “The Campaign Mindset: Focused Messaging for Effective Digital Marketing.” We’re excited to share some of our insights on how to think about and approach campaign marketing to make your campaign efforts effective for your business and goals.

Campaign Mindset

What we’re going to talk about today is the Campaign Mindset, which is our approach to creating an effective digital marketing campaign and telling your brand story in a way that will drive meaningful results for your business.

So in this webinar, we’ll go over our five-step approach to creating campaigns:

• Setting Goals – which is the process of researching and clearly articulating the aims and goals of your digital initiatives.
• Knowing Your Brand – defining and refining your brand identity and how you present yourself to customers.
• Knowing Your Audience – which is the process of researching your target personas and so you can create messaging and creative that is relevant to them.
• Knowing Your Message – which is the process of developing effective messaging that highlights the best of your business in a way that is impactful and relevant to your audience.
• Choosing the Most Effective Channel – we’ll guide you through a few digital marketing channels and the benefits of each.

So, what are campaigns, and why are they important? Today, there is more emphasis on campaign marketing as it relates to brand storytelling. Campaigns give you a chance to tell your brand story, and a brand story that is told over time has a better chance of leaving lasting impressions and delivering a clear message more so than any individual piece of marketing material.

Before we dive into how to think about a campaign, we need to define what a campaign is in digital marketing.

In digital marketing, a campaign is an online marketing effort put forward by a business to drive engagement, conversions, traffic, awareness, or revenue. Those goals can be customized to the efforts of your company.

Digital marketing campaigns include many different online channels to convey a single message. It’s many pieces of a whole that fit together to tell the story of your overarching marketing effort.

Setting Goals

So, now that we’ve defined what a campaign is, it’s time to start creating your campaign. In regards to the campaign mindset, goal setting is the first place you should start.

Before you begin goal setting, it is vital to outline why you want to do a campaign in the first place. The “why” is the purpose behind your campaign and will drive your campaign decisions through the rest of the development.

So ask yourself, what do you want to accomplish with this campaign? Do you want to generate revenue, spark engagement, generate leads, or something else? What does success look like for you?

It’s helpful to reflect on your company’s vision when clarifying your campaign’s purpose. Think for a moment about your company’s vision: where do you want to see your business in 5 years? Now you can work backward from there to define the purpose of your campaign.

So what’s the best approach to goal setting? We like to use SMART goals.

SMART goals are a widely used practice of creating effective goals that are actionable and drive results for your business. SMART goals define and clarify your goal, and keep projects within a well-defined scope. SMART goals can be used for anything, but for the purpose of this webinar, we’ll be showing you how to frame your campaign goal as a SMART goal.

Specific

What do you want to do with your campaign? What are the specific steps to achieve it? Be as specific as you can be, and try to put a number behind it.

Measurable

How will you measure the success of what you’ve done? What metrics will you use to measure your success? It helps to think about what actions you want people to take to reach your goal, such as how many people viewed a landing page or clicked an ad.

Another note on measuring goals, we recommend tools like Google Analytics and Social Media Business Insights to measure your results. We won’t go over those tools today, but they can help measure the success of your campaign and tie back to your KPI’s.

Achievable

Is this within your power to accomplish? Ensure that your campaign is realistic but also challenging. Be honest with yourself and your company about what you can achieve.

Relevant

Does this goal push you in the direction of your vision? Does this goal make sense for your business? The best way to check the relevancy of the goal is to think about the reason why you’ve established the goal in the first place. If the goal relates to the reason, then you’re in good shape.

Time-Bound

When would you like to achieve this goal? When do you want to run this campaign? What is the timeline?

Another note on Time-Bound goals, you’ll want to completely develop your timeline and scope before beginning your campaign. Defining and sticking to your timeline and scope is essential to the success of your campaign. The timeline makes sure that crucial deadlines are met, and the scope keeps your budget and resources in check.

So, we know this is a lot to absorb, so we’re going to tell you a little story to help illustrate our “Campaign Mindset” approach. We’d like to introduce you to a mock company called “Small World Travel Agency”. Small World Travel Agency is a boutique travel agency in Chicago that offers curated travel packages to people who are looking for unique and authentic experiences around the world but don’t want to deal with the hassles that come with international travel. Their mission is to offer the best authentic experiences so that travelers can truly immerse themselves in another culture. They want to grow their business, and specifically want to reach young adult travelers. Their vision is to be the preferred travel agency for young adults in the Chicago metro area.

We’re going to take you through the process of creating actionable goals for this travel agency to help illustrate the SMART goals approach.

Small World Travel Agency – Goals

Their vision is to be the preferred travel agency for young adults in the Chicago metro area.

Their purpose for this campaign is to create awareness for their new travel packages to select destinations in Japan.

So, the purpose for their campaign is well defined, and ties back to their vision. They are on track to having a great campaign!

Now they are going to create a SMART goal with their team. Imagine that the marketing team at Small World Travel Agency is sitting in an awesome conference room, probably sipping on a tropical iced tea, and having a discussion about this campaign.

They’ve just created their SMART goal, let’s take a look!

“We want to book 400 travel packages to Japan over the course of our 3-month campaign run. We will do this by creating an engaging awareness campaign, on various channels, with a well-defined funnel that drives booking conversions through the website.”

So let’s break down how they created this goal.

• Is it specific, yes! – They want to book 400 travel packages to Japan. They’ve put a number behind their goal.
• Is it measurable, yes! – They will measure their progress by assessing the number of packages booked (by demographics), the CTR of our advertising, the bounce rate on the campaign landing page, and the conversion rate. These are all valuable measurements that will help them assess if their campaign was successful.
• Is their goal achievable? Yes! – They will market to existing clients, and launch a digital marketing campaign targeting new and existing customers across various digital channels. They already have a strong online presence so it succeeding at their goal is definitely within their reach.
• Is it relevant? Yes! By offering more options and expanding our travel offerings to Japan, we move closer to our vision to be the preferred travel agency of young adults in the Chicago metro area.
• Is it time-bound? Yes! They will run this campaign over the course of 3 months, at the end of spring into the summer. This is a prime time to highlight travel and it is also a great season for festivals in Japan.

So they’ve created an actionable goal, that’s tied to their vision, and they’re on their way to creating a successful campaign! We’ll check back in with the team at Small World Travel Agency a little later. For now, let’s move on to the next step to creating an effective marketing campaign: Knowing Your Brand.

Know Your Brand

Knowing your brand with clarity sharpens your messaging strategy. Your brand consists of every single touchpoint, whether internal or external, that people come into contact with. It is the wording, imagery, and overall tone that communicates your company’s story.

What’s Your Story?

When it comes to building out your marketing strategy, it is essential to know your mission and values so that your messaging and campaign graphics always tie back to your brand. This ensures that your brand messaging is consistent, meaningful, and is driving your vision. Your mission, vision, values, and purpose all set the stage for the story you want to tell with your marketing.

What Makes You Unique?

What is your Unique Value Proposition? A unique value proposition is that “one thing” that makes you stand out in your industry. Is it your exceptional customer service? What do customers say they like the best about you?

For Small World Travel, we’ll say they offer complete & comprehensive guidance throughout the entire travel planning process, direct contact with a personal travel concierge, & “on-the-ground” support for fully immersive experiences.

Their style is warm and welcoming to draw people into shared moments, and their visual branding reflects this with their earthy, golden umber, and organic shapes. To convey their boutique experiences to a young adult demographic, they blend a modern script font with a classic serif.

Know Your Audience

Now that you know who you are and what you look like, you need to ask ‘Who are you talking to?’. Understanding this allows you to hone in and tailor your message for the limited touchpoints you have.

To do this, you’ll need to start with a little research.

Competitors

Look at your industry and see what your competitors are doing. How are they speaking about themselves and interfacing with customers? How does your brand’s voice compare and contrast? Is there a gap in the industry that allows for a fresh or unique take?

Current Customers

How are you communicating to your current customers and how can you tweak that messaging strategy to expand your scope to a wider audience & convert future customers?

When you set audience parameters, you target your audience efficiently to make sure you’re not spending money on unqualified leads.

Most travel agencies show landscape views with send-off centered messaging. Small World positions itself as a guide, with you every step of the trip. To target young adults already familiar with international travel and know the headaches of planning a big trip, Small World’s messaging seeks to be relevant & helpful, but not intrusive.

Knowing Your Message

With your brand’s story foundation set, you’re ready to plan your campaign messaging strategy! A campaign consists of 3 basic components: a ‘campaign cornerstone’, visual style, and tone & voice.

Campaign Cornerstone

Let’s start with the ‘campaign cornerstone’. This is an overall idea that drives your campaign and anchors every decision. This is your constant reference point to check all messaging and visuals against along the way. Sometimes this cornerstone can be used as a slogan.

For example, consider Coke’s “Shake up the Happiness” “Open Happiness” and “Share a Coke” campaigns. These are iterations around the cornerstone ‘happy’. Coke always ties their campaigns back to what they want you to feel when you interact with Coke.

For Small World Agency our Campaign Cornerstone is:

This represents our goal of introducing people to adventures they haven’t seen or considered before. The messaging is short with familiar phrasing to pair well with the evocative imagery.

Visual Style

Campaigns are a chance to push your brand’s identity. As long as there is some thread of consistency between your usual branding and your campaign, your audience will not be confused.

Let’s look at the photography we chose for this campaign. All the images are taken from an angle that puts the viewer in the moment. They are all taken outside to highlight the summer season and elements of the classic, Japanese vermilion color that pairs well with Small World’s brand colors.

Tone and Voice

Eventually you’ll get to the point where it’s time to put words to these fabulous images. What does your message sound like? Is it consistent and enhance your graphics?

Choosing the Most Effective Channels

So it looks like the Small World Travel Agency has really nailed down their brand identity, what audience they’re targeting, and created a compelling campaign with messaging and graphics that align with their brand and their campaign goal.

We’ll check back in with them later, but for now, let’s talk about channels. For the campaign mindset approach, it’s important to stop and think about how you want your beautiful campaign graphics and messaging to reach your target audiences.

First and foremost, you want to choose the channels that are relevant to your audience. Where is your audience already engaging with you? That’s a great place to start. Second, choose the channels that make the most sense for your business. If you’re selling a product for dogs, it might not make sense for you to advertise on LinkedIn. Choosing the most effective channel for your campaign will ultimately ramp up your results and save you money.

In digital marketing, there are so many channels to choose, but we’ve outlined the top four channels that are the most well-known and popular for campaign marketing.

Social Media

Social media is a great channel for brand awareness, audience engagement, customer experience, and customer loyalty. Facebook has its own ad platform that also shows ads on Instagram, so it’s a great place to get started with social media. Every social media channel has its own nuances and it’s important to research each one before you start a campaign.

Organic Search

Organic search is a great way to capture interest from search engines where people are already searching for your products and services. Here, you’ll create content for your website that is relevant and engaging to your target audiences but also include keyword phrases that people would actually be searching for.

Email

Email is still a strong digital campaign contender. Research shows that more than 60% of customers (those 25 or older in particular) would prefer to be contacted by brands via email. This channel is effective for just about every aspect of a campaign. You can highlight blogs and your website through email, create e-commerce email campaigns, build customer loyalty and retention, and so much more. You can also use email for marketing automation to reach back out to people who showed interest in your campaign but didn’t convert. The possibilities are endless with email!

Search Engine Marketing

Alongside organic search campaigns, you can use search engine marketing to create paid ads through Google to target your audience. You can also create display advertising to reach your audiences on websites they visit based on interest, or show video ads on YouTube!

If you’re not sure what channel is best for your business, one way you can find out is to test your content on various channels and see how well it does. Another option is to work with your digital marketing agency to help pick the best channels for your campaign.

So to go back to our team at Small World Travel Agency. They’ve created their beautiful ads and are ready to showcase their campaign to their target audiences!

Throughout their development process, they’ve kept their Campaign Cornerstone, “Wake Up to Japan”, at the top of their mind to ensure their graphics, imagery, and messaging all align with that idea.

So for this campaign, they’ve chosen to reach young adults with social media ads (both video and graphic ads), blogging for search engines, email marketing to reach new and existing customers, and display advertising.

The main takeaway from these examples should be that they are all consistent, align with the campaign cornerstone, mirror their brand identity, and have tailored messaging for their target audience. A successful campaign will have all of these elements that fit together to tell the story of your brand while also highlighting your products and services in a compelling campaign.

Conclusion

So in today’s webinar, we talked about our approach to digital marketing campaigns. When you set out to create your own campaign, just remember you’re not selling a product or service, you’re selling your story and why your customers should want to be a part of it.

Note: in this webinar, we took questions live. If you have any questions on campaigns, we’d love to help! Send an email to hello@phoscreative.com.

Happy campaigning!