Customer acquisition and retention are critical focus areas for any business. Marketing campaigns help brands showcase their products and services. But not all marketing tactics yield the same or desired results. While some campaigns can get your brand recognition and better positioning, some are sales-driven. Before we discuss which marketing campaign is best for your business; you need to have a clear understanding of the Marketing Funnel. The different marketing campaign types we will be discussing in this article are closing related to the funnel stages.
What is a Marketing Campaign?
Strategies that help plan and drive actions towards a set of clearly defined goals while identifying the best channel to create an impact.
A successfully executed marketing campaign could help you create brand awareness, increase your audience reach, get engagements, convert more customers, retain existing customers, improve marketing ROI, and build credibility and trust.
What are the different types of marketing campaigns?
There are 4 primary types of marketing campaigns:
- Awareness Campaign
- Consideration Campaign
- Conversion Campaign
- Loyalty Campaign
1. Awareness Campaign
The continued flow of leads is the best fuel for any business. With digital media platforms, it is more convenient and cost-effective and you don’t have to depend on traditional channels to generate brand awareness. But in an attempt to amplify brand awareness, many companies try to get into everything and put all their efforts without realizing which channel and medium are best suited for their product and service offerings.
For example, if you are a personal care brand, Instagram and Facebook should be your first preferred channels. And sharing attractive images and videos is not the only solution. The brand will have to create awareness around a specific niche – it could be either a problem statement or a social stand.
Preferred channels and tactics:
- Facebook (Image & Video)
- Instagram (Image & Video)
- YouTube (Short & informative Videos)
- LinkedIn (Short videos, and images – but should be different than Facebook/Insta type content)
- SEM (Paid search & display ads)
2. Consideration Campaign
At the second stage of the funnel, you would want your customer to take the next step and interact with your website landing page or application. Asking users to engage with video content on the landing page, asking users to participate in a social media poll, and sharing open interactive dashboards with rich content are some of the examples.
Influencer marketing is very effective at this stage. Most companies use the smart placement of products with the right context that caters to the unconscious mind, creating a strong urge for the customers to experience or purchase the product. Here are a few examples:
For offline business, the over-the-counter (OTV) term is used in the same context where products are placed at the right visible spectrum which encourages customers to ask for or explore those items even if they originally did not plan to purchase them.
3. Conversion Campaign
By this stage, you would be collecting personally identifiable information about the users. Email address, phone number, name, and other demographic data are as best suited for your business.
Most effective conversion campaign tactics:
- Free eBooks or case studies
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Free trial period
- LinkedIn lead gen forms
- Retargeting through display ads and social media
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
A well-planned conversion campaign is always backed-up by nurture campaigns. For each user action trigger, there should be a follow-up checkpoint and users should be engaged actively with rich and informative content that helps them navigate through this stage with ease and gather better-qualified leads.
4. Loyalty Campaign
Continuous follow-ups and interaction touchpoints with your past and current customers could help you from 2 fronts – 1. they tell you first-hand about their experience with your brand so you can focus on those key areas and improve your product/service offerings, 2. they can refer you to their network giving you assured conversions with low cost to acquisition.
Effective tactics for Loyalty campaigns:
- Provide loyalty coupons for additional future purchases or renewals
- Bonus points and coupons for identifying any critical bugs or issues
- Free goodies for any major purchase
Conclusion
Brands that make the user experience easy to use and easy to understand throughout all stages of the funnel are more likely to grow cost-effectively. Adopt user experience tracking mechanisms that can provide you with real-time customer insights and data to optimize your campaigns and approach.
Nice post. I learn something more challenging on different blogs everyday. It will always be stimulating to read content from other writers and practice a little something from their store. Id prefer to use some with the content on my blog whether you dont mind. Natually Ill give you a link on your web blog. Thanks for sharing.