Today’s consumers expect to receive special deals and offers from the brands they love all year round. Seasonal events are the best opportunities to motivate consumers into purchasing from your business. Any seasonal sale you choose to host can be a potential profit-booster, and it must be well publicised. But, with everyone targeting promotions at the same time, how can you make sure your campaigns get the attention they deserve?
Think of your marketing campaign as a painting. A degree of basic painting knowledge is required to produce an adequate piece of art, but a more creative artist or one with more expertise may have the knowledge to add something that allows the work to shine and stand out from the crowd. Of course, there is no one sure-fire formula to ensuring a campaign’s success, but there are steps that you can take to maximise your chances.
To create your campaign, first, you need a target audience. In our previous articles, we covered plenty of tips to help you to create your very first targeted campaign. After this step, you should also decide what channels to use.
Very often, retailers make the mistake of choosing channels according to their popularity. However, the real question you need to ask is “which channels do my customers use?”. You should also consider the strengths and weaknesses of each channel, as these can influence your decision in a major way. Especially, if your brand’s presence on social media platforms is new, it would be better to concentrate on really honing your message on a select few of them where your target audience already spends their time, rather than diluting your message across as many networks as possible.
Ask almost any consumer in the world to identify the red and white branding and famous hand-written font of Coca-Cola, and chances are they will be able to – even if the brand name itself is not present.
The example of Coca-Cola proves just how important the colours, designs, shapes, and even font that you use in your campaign marketing is to its eventual success. All of this combined help to create a unique brand image, and reflecting these elements in your campaign is essential for consumers to make the mental association between the campaign and your brand.
While working on your campaign content and its message, you should be clear, customer oriented and consistent. You should be able to re-purpose and adapt your content for every channel you plan to feature it on and offer the same information, but in a way that suits the medium. Whatever your message, make sure that it is direct and includes a clear call to action clearly. The question of why consumers should take the action you are asking them to, and what will drive them to, is one that you need to answer in order to create a customer-oriented campaign content.
What any marketing campaign boils down to is its overarching goal -where do you want your customers to go, and what do you want them to do.? To visit your website, social media channels or your offline store? If you don’t try to funnel your customers towards your business goal, your campaign’s potential for success will take a massive hit.
It might not seem like it, but analysing the results of a campaign in its aftermath can be the most important element of all. If you don’t analyse your results, you won’t be able to garner a clear indication of what went well and what didn’t; and it’s this insight that will give you a chance to improve your marketing efforts in future. Not everyone is a marketing specialist, but there are plenty of things that any brand can put into practice to ensure that they give themselves every chance of success. This all begins with launching campaigns, experimenting, and relying on the experience of success or failure to guide your approach in the coming months and years.