If you read our previous article, Tips for planning a successful Partner Marketing Campaign that drives growth, you’ll hopefully already have considered and planned out your marketing campaign ingredients.
But once you’ve got the campaign planning done, how do you actually start planning and executing your campaign activity? Afterall good planning without good work is nothing.
Campaigns come in all shapes and sizes and there are many different types of campaigns you can run depending on what you are trying to achieve.
Here at Gratifii, we typically see two different campaign objectives:
Strategic: Brand Awareness
This is where your campaign is all about establishing a memorable and recognisable brand for your target audience. Establishing brand awareness is a powerful marketing strategy that leads your audience to develop an instinctive preference towards your product and services. It’s all about building the strong foundations you need for long-term growth.
Tactical: Demand and Lead Generation
Tactical campaigns provide a set of targeted tactics to get people interested in your business/product/service and gradually move them through a pipeline to become paying customers.
Some people still have a perception of lead generation as big email blasts and pushy salespeople, but be warned: Those techniques are no longer successful.
Once you have defined your target audience and settled on the key objective/s of your marketing campaign (strategic or tactical) – the next important stage is to focus on aligning the tactics with solutions.
And just a note here: Your marketing strategy will often be a blend or strategic (the longer term, foundation building) and shorter term tactical campaigns. Taking a multi-tactical approach is critical for certain segments, building a brand and driving near-term demand.
The outline below gives a simple summary of how to align various tactics for solution and segment selling. Let’s go through each tactic one by one.
Awareness tactics
These tactics are ideal if your target audience is only just becoming aware of your brand and engaging with it for the first time.
They might not know a lot about your product or service yet, so activities need to be focused on content and marketing material that promotes brand awareness and driving traffic to your website and social channels to learn more about what you have to offer.
- Create a landing page or infographic that introduces your brand, service, or product to new visitors.
- Share a post on social media that highlights your unique selling proposition (USP).
- Write an article highlighting your opinion on a topic your audience will be interested in. According to HubSpot’s Demand Generation Report, 96% of B2B customers want content from industry thought leaders to inform their buying decisions. Creating compelling content is your key to establishing yourself as that go-to, educational leader in your industry.
- Produce a video that showcases your product or service in an engaging way. Never underestimate the power of video – particularly if it’s engaging or quirky. It’s a great way to show people what you’re offering, rather than just telling them, and reports suggest people tend to retain more information from video, compared with reading. If you’d like some more information on the different forms of video you could use, head over to our video tips article, 3 Video Ideas to Promote your Incentives
- Share case studies and customer testimonials. Take a look at one of our recent examples.
Demand and Lead Generation Tactics
Driving traffic to your website and/or getting people to engage with your content doesn’t automatically turn these engagements into leads for you.
Unfortunately, all too often a gap exists between the ‘generate awareness phase’ and the ‘lead generation phase’ that often results in one-time visitors who avoid your attempts to capture their information, and so never hear from you again.
You can seal up that hole with lead magnets. These are tools that provide value for your visitors in exchange for their contact information. Businesses use lead magnets such as email opt-ins, subscriptions, and social media follows to fish for some sign of interest from their site’s visitors and receive permission from prospective customers to follow up.
Some examples of lead magnets include:
- Providing a free eBook or white paper that delivers value, answers a question, or solves a problem for your potential customers. You can run a targeted digital or social campaign promoting an eBook or valued piece of content.
- Running events and webinars for target audiences. Again, it’s key to offer an event or webinar that offers value for the potential customer, helping them solve a business problem or educating them on a current trend, for example.
- Offer a trial or demo so visitors can experience your product or service first-hand.
Strategic and tactical campaigns are symbiotic, coming together to create a complete campaign that is stronger than each part individually. Combined they can enable you to develop and maintain relationships with customers and reap the benefits of immediate results as well.
Contact Gratifii today and get connected to our experienced Channel Marketing Team who can help you plan, execute and manage your next successful integrated Marketing Campaign.