In the summer of 2020, LEGO® launched a marketing campaign for their new product: Braille Bricks by LEGO®.
Designed to help children who are blind or visually impaired learn the Braille system of reading and writing, Braille Bricks was launched in twenty countries over the next six months following a successful pilot program.
This launch was driven by a strategic, well-coordinated marketing campaign that included: a dedicated website, video, press releases, media coverage/PR, social media, ads, webinars, and more.
In addition to developing an incredibly valuable and innovative new product, LEGO’s global launch of Braille Bricks offers an insightful glimpse into just how many content assets, channels, and promotional strategies can go into executing a successful marketing campaign.
If you’re new to developing marketing campaigns, or simply want to learn how to make them more effective, this guide can help.
Let’s dive into the steps and stages that marketing teams should go through to achieve successful outcomes from their marketing campaign.
At its most basic, a marketing campaign is simply an approach marketers use to promote their company’s products, services, or resources.
However, for a marketing campaign to have a fighting chance at being effective, that approach should start with a clear strategy and detailed plan.
Think of the strategy component of your marketing campaign as a destination you’re wanting to reach. Before you can know how to get there you need to know where you’re going. It can also help to know why you’re wanting to get there and who’ll join you in your journey.
Applying this to a marketing campaign, your strategy should clearly identify:
If the strategy is akin to the destination, then the marketing campaign plan is your roadmap for getting there. It lays out how your strategy will be executed. Ideally, it should clearly identify:
Whether your marketing campaign is focused around a specific product, has a small budget and will only run for a month in a narrow geographic location, or is a large, global, multi-month initiative with a significant budget, the point is that the first few stages of your campaign should be focused on defining your strategy and plan.
Now that we’ve covered this at a high level, let’s dig a bit deeper into each of these segments.
While traveling without a clear destination may work for a free-spirited wayfaring wanderer, in the world of marketing, that’s an approach that risks wasting both time and money.
To help you ensure you’re not meandering with your marketing campaign, take the time to consider — and answer — these questions:
The answer to this question should (ideally) tie back to a larger business purpose.
Let’s circle back to our LEGO® Braille Bricks example from the beginning of this post. Based on LEGO’s communications around their campaign, we can speculate that an objective for this campaign was to promote inclusive learning in a fun, engaging way.
Another way to phrase this is, what’s the purpose of this marketing campaign?
In LEGO’s case, the WHY behind their campaign was clearly stated in their press releases and marketing assets: “To help children with vision impairment learn critical thinking, problem-solving and collaboration through play.”
Now, the purpose behind your marketing campaign doesn’t have to be as benevolent as this, but it’s important for you and everyone involved in the campaign to understand – and get behind – why the time, effort, budget, and resources are being put into this campaign.
Other common “why’s” behind marketing campaigns include:
The key is to include the WHY behind the WHAT. For example, “Increase brand awareness” is a what. What you really want and need to get at is, why do you want/need to do that?
And taking this a step further … it’s even more valuable to clearly answer the question, “Why would my intended audience care about this?”
The heart of this question is, who is your ideal and intended target audience for this campaign? This is also referred to as your “buyer persona”.
Returning to the Braille Brick’s campaign, their communications and content made it clear that the primary target audiences for this campaign were:
Why does this matter? Because, in the words of Seth Godin, “Everyone is not your customer.” It’s essential that you are clear about who you are trying to reach and add value to through your campaign.
If you haven’t created a persona (or personas) of your ideal customer, check out our post: “ How to Create Your Buyer Persona”.
Most marketing campaigns, even short-running ones with small budgets, need a team to help bring it to fruition. So, who are the individuals you’d need to rely on to successfully implement and measure your marketing campaign? This roster might include:
After taking into account What you’re wanting to accomplish, Why you’re wanting to accomplish it, and Who will help you accomplish it, it’s vital to look at how you’re going to pay for it; in other words, your budget.
Most of this will likely go toward the creation of assets you’ll need for your campaign and paying for the ads to promote those assets. However, other budget considerations include web hosting and development costs (if you’ll have a full site or subdomain dedicated to your campaign), bonuses to influencers or affiliates, postage if doing any direct mail, and any additional tools you may need to use to efficiently and effectively execute your campaign.
Whether you want your marketing campaign to run for a few weeks, a few months, or even longer, setting a clear start and end date is important – not just for performance measurement, but also for proper budget and resource allocation.
Your key performance indicators (KPIs) for your marketing campaign should tie back to your objective and purpose.
For example, if your objective is to promote a new product or service, your KPI might be “X amount in sales revenue.” And if your purpose is something like LEGO’s – to help blind and visually-impaired children learn Braille in a fun, playful, engaging way – then you might have a KPI around customer satisfaction, the share of voice, and/or social engagement.
Support your marketing campaigns
with 40+ Semrush’s tools for campaign planning, implementation, and tracking.
Okay, now that you know where you’re going with your marketing campaign, the next stage to focus on is your plan to get there.
To bring this campaign to fruition, what tactics will you take?
Answering this question can be one of the most challenging and time-consuming steps in this process as there can be many pieces, parts, people, processes, perspectives, paths, and priorities to consider. Some of these include:
Said differently, what specific actions need to be taken. For example, if you’ve determined you’ll leverage blog posts, paid ads, and video in your marketing campaign, the tactic might be to create 10 blog posts, 5 paid ads, and 2 videos that focus on X, link to Y, and are distributed by A, B, and C channels.
Going back to your “Who will help you get there” question in the marketing campaign strategy stage, the answer to this planning question should focus on assigning ownership to the various tasks that need to be completed to accomplish the tactics that will get you closer to achieving your objective.
In short, this is your delegation step.
Your mighty marketing campaign needs deadlines for each tactic they are accountable for. It helps keep them on track, know what time parameters they have to work within, and establishes clear expectations.
Marketing calendars can be a valuable tool for providing clarity into what’s due when, what’s being worked on and by whom, what’s been completed, etc. This transparency can foster collaboration and cohesion throughout your marketing campaign.
Your overall marketing campaign budget should be set in your Strategy stage. How you’ll allocate that budget should be determined in your planning stage.
This relates to the What (tactics) and How (activities) of your plan. If you want to run paid ads, do videos, and work with influencers or affiliates, this is the step where you determine how much you’re willing and able to spend on each.
If a KPI is a measurable value tied to your marketing campaign strategy, then your planning stage should use more granular measurements — metrics — to help you achieve or optimize your KPI.
For example, if your KPI is $100,000 in revenue from your new product sales, then the metrics you might track and measure might be related to the specific tactics you’re employing to contribute to driving sales.
See below for examples of metrics to track depending on the type of content you’re leveraging for your marketing campaign.
Type of Content |
Metrics to Track |
Email Metrics |
|
Social Media (Paid) Metrics |
|
Social Media (Organic) Metrics |
|
Lead Magnet/Content Offer Metrics |
|
Display Ads/Paid Media Metrics |
|
Content/SEO Metrics |
|
Direct Mail Metrics |
|
If the above insights have conveyed anything it’s that marketing campaigns, especially successful marketing campaigns require a substantial amount of thought, time, resources, and collaboration.
Fortunately, tools do exist to help streamline, simplify and scale parts of the process. In a shameless (but hopefully helpful) plug, here are a few Semrush tools that many marketers find invaluable in their marketing campaign strategy and planning process:
Although a plethora of tools exist to help support the strategy and planning stages of a marketing campaign, there are no shortcuts to the approach that’s required to make that campaign successful and effective. Leverage the tools, but trust in the process.
Support your marketing campaigns
with 40+ Semrush’s tools for campaign planning, implementation, and tracking.
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