How to develop an effective marketing campaign

Every single day, millions of businesses compete for the attention of their target audiences. How does your business improve its visibility? Build a marketing campaign strategy designed to capture that attention and back it up with real feedback from real people, not just a hunch.

A marketing campaign is a coordinated way to deliver one specific message to a targeted, segmented audience.

Your campaign might promote a product or service, build brand awareness, or capture customer feedback.

It can run across social media, print, email, online advertising, television, or any combination of channels that puts your message in front of the right people at the right time.

An effective marketing campaign hits four points: clarity, memorability, scalability, and value. Get these right, and your campaign supports both the immediate goal and your broader brand strategy.

Make sure your message is clear and supports not only your specific campaign but also a specific brand goal.

Example

Method ran its “Fight Dirty” campaign during flu season in 2017, featuring Tiffany Haddish.

The campaign is humorous and clearly sends the message that you need to use soap to clean your skin, with Method soap prominently displayed throughout videos of various lengths and a behind-the-scenes look.

Your campaign needs to move your audience along the buyer's journey, and to do that, your content needs to be memorable and meaningful.

Example

In 1988, Nike introduced its iconic "Just Do It" campaign.

It resonates with athletes and non-athletes alike, has been translated into languages across the globe, and is still part of Nike branding today.

Your campaign will likely run on multiple channels, so your message needs to translate across mediums, whether that's a social ad, a direct mail postcard, or an in-store experience.

Example

Aflac had only 12% brand recognition when it launched its successful duck campaign in 2000.

The campaign grew to include television commercials, social media tie-ins, an appearance on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and a plush robot that comforts children with cancer. Brand recognition has since climbed to over 94%.

Your campaign needs to add value for the people who see it. It can entertain, inform, or inspire, but it can't just repeat your brand mission. Find the overlap between what you want to say and what your customers want to hear.

Example

Hinge built a campaign around the idea that it's "the dating app designed to be deleted," a message that runs across multiple channels, including a memorable YouTube video, and speaks directly to what its customers actually want: to stop needing a dating app.

Improve an underperforming marketing campaign by testing the pieces separately: audience, message, and creative.

Check whether you're reaching the right target audience with market research, then test your message and ad creative with that audience before you spend more media budget defending a guess.

Most campaigns that underperform have one thing in common: a decision got made on gut feel instead of data. Before you rebuild a campaign from scratch, ask three questions:

If you can't confidently answer these from your own data, that's a sign to test your ad concepts with your target audience before you spend more on media.

Marketing campaigns are part of your overall marketing strategy.

The goal is to increase brand and product awareness in a way that boosts your bottom line, and the key to an effective campaign is research. Research and concept testing lead to stronger content decisions throughout your campaign.

An effective marketing campaign lets you take a strategic approach to content creation, which benefits your brand in a few concrete ways:

Creating a whole campaign may seem like a daunting task, but it’s actually a straightforward process. We’ve broken the process down into 4 parts—planning, distribution, converting customers, and ad testing.

It is absolutely essential to plan your campaign. Planning determines your goals, how you’ll measure success, and will guide your team throughout the process—even if things don’t go as planned.

What is the purpose of this campaign? What do you want to accomplish for your business?

Here are a few common general goals. Use these as starting points to create your own. 

Once you’ve settled on your general goal, turn it into a SMART goal. SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. These five characteristics ensure your goal will be clearly understood by all stakeholders.

If you’ve decided that your goal is to increase engagement, your SMART goal might be: 

To obtain 100 customer reviews of our new product using our campaign-based and brand hashtags on Instagram by December 31, 2022. It is specific (reviews), measurable (100 customers), attainable (using custom hashtags), relevant (for the new product), and time-bound (by December 2022).

How will you measure your campaign success? This will look different for everyone. Your measurement may include social media statistics, website analytics, click-through rates, conversions, or something else. Whatever your measurement is, it should harken back to your campaign goal.

Remember, if you are using multiple marketing channels, include how you’ll measure your campaign on each medium.

Identify your KPIs for each medium, such as:

Pro tip: Set up benchmarks to check progress along the way to your main goal.

The absolute best way to define your target market is through market research. Only with thorough data can you determine who your customers are, their interests, social media usage habits, types of content they like, problems they have that your product can solve, and more.

Use consumer surveys for existing and potential customers to create buyer personas. These will help your marketing team visualize the ideal customer during campaign creation.

The distribution phase is all about what your target audience sees, when they see it, and where they encounter your campaign.

As we’ve already mentioned, marketing campaigns can include multiple channels. Determining what you wish to use depends on your budget, audience, current brand engagement, and what channels you currently use. 

Of the channels you currently use, which ones work best? Which ones have paid ad options? Where do you already have good engagement? From your research, which channels are your target customers using?

The PESO model breaks up distribution channels into 4 categories—paid, earned, shared, and owned. What you choose is up to you.

This is in line with the “T” in your SMART goal. Begin with a start and end date for your campaign. Working from the end date, considering the materials you have to work with, enter your content backwards up the timeline to your launch date. Schedule posts, blogs, emails, ads, and other campaign content on your timeline.

This calendar, or timeline, will help you distribute promotional content evenly throughout the campaign and publish equally on each media channel.

And now we come to the ultimate goal—conversions. A conversion is not necessarily a sale. It all goes back to the goal you set in the beginning.

Look back at your SMART goal again. Our example was “To obtain 100 customer reviews of our new product using our campaign-based and brand hashtags on Instagram by December 31, 2022.” At various times throughout the campaign, we should be checking that our customers are leaving reviews. If not, we need to recalibrate our campaign to deliver content that will lead our customers to fulfill our goal. 

Pro tip: Use strong calls to action on website landing pages and social posts to tell your customer what their next steps should be. 

What metrics will you use to measure your success? It all depends on the type of campaign you’re running and the channels you’ve chosen. Whatever you look at, make sure you look beyond vanity metrics such as impressions or views. Those are nice to know, but they don’t necessarily deliver your desired results. Your analysis should relate back to—you guessed it—your SMART goal. 

Advertising is a component of marketing. Marketing is used to identify customer needs and figure out how to best meet those needs. It should raise awareness and convince customers to make a purchase. Advertising is used to creatively persuade customers to make purchases through paid channels. And since you’re paying for it, you want to be confident that your ad will work.

That’s where ad testing comes in. It’s the process of putting your ads in front of a sample of your target audience and asking them to provide feedback. You can test a part of an ad or an entire ad to collect feedback about whether it stands out, is believable or appealing, or any other information you want to collect about your ad.

Test your ad campaign by showing each concept to a sample of your real target audience, one concept at a time, and comparing how each one scores on clarity, believability, and purchase intent. This method, called monadic testing, is a core part of ad copy testing and removes the bias that comes from asking people to compare ads side by side.

According to Statista, advertisers in the US spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on advertising. That's a lot of budget riding on a guess. Testing your ad creative before launch offers four concrete benefits:

For the most useful results, test before, during, and after your campaign launches. That way, you can see exactly where and when conversions started to move.

SurveyMonkey LaunchPad packages this exact methodology into a guided, pay-as-you-go workflow. Instead of designing a monadic study from scratch or briefing an agency, you upload your ad concepts, choose your audience, and get a scorecard as responses come in.

Most teams validate a campaign one of three ways. Here's how the three approaches compare on speed, cost, and rigor.

Whichever stage of campaign development you're in, from an early creative concept to a finished ad, the goal is the same: know how your target audience will react before you commit the budget, not after.

These marketing campaign examples showcase how effective campaigns can make a huge impact.

In 2021, Dove took its #RealBeauty rebranding strategy a step further with its “Reverse Selfie” campaign.

The campaign highlighted the way social media selfie culture is harming our teens. Dove never shows or advertises its products in the campaign, but the brand received praise from the press and public about starting conversations about digital distortion.

The ad has over 991,000 views on YouTube and over 1 million views on Instagram.

Also in 2021, Reddit bought 5 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl.

The ad looked like a glitch, and featured a screen full of text that viewers couldn’t possibly read while it was displayed. It sent people online looking for information—it was related to the GameStop market disruption—and the spot became one of the most viral Super Bowl ads. Reddit took a big risk, but it grabbed people’s attention and drove viewers to the site.

According the Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review, Reddit’s commercial was among the most effective of the broadcast.

Turning back to 2010, Old Spice launched its “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign.

The first ad aired during Super Bowl weekend and featured NFL player Isaiah Mustafa. According to parent company P&G, the Old Spice campaign strengthened its market position and sales for body wash and deodorant experienced growth in the high single/double digits.

During the life cycle of the campaign, it received nearly 105 million YouTube views, 1.2 billion earned media impressions, 2,700% increase in Twitter followers, 800% increase in Facebook fan interaction, and 300% increase in traffic to their website.

Your effective marketing campaign is ready to launch. With a clear process and the right research behind it, you'll be measuring results before long.

Before you commit the media budget, increase your odds of hitting your SMART goals with SurveyMonkey LaunchPad ad testing, or start from the ad copy testing survey template to see exactly what a study looks like before you build your own.