An advertising campaign is a strategy carried out across different mediums to achieve desired results such as increased brand awareness, increased sales, and improved communication within a specific market. All of this is accomplished through advertising.
What is an Advertising Campaign?
Advertising campaigns are a set of advertisements that focus on a single message. They are intended to meet a specific business goal and lead to conversions. Some business goals ad campaigns can target are creating brand awareness for a new product or service. Driving sales for a specific product or service, generating leads by asking potential customers to sign up for an email list, subscription, or other free offers.
It is important to note that advertising campaigns are more than just creating an eye-catching ad and posting it on a search engine results page. For best results, advertising campaigns must be well-researched and organized, with a clear, linear plan for marketers to follow. Launching ad campaigns starts with identifying business goals, researching keywords that better reach and represent your target audience, and creating advertisements and other content that raise awareness for and interest in your products or services.
Why are Advertising Campaigns Important?
Advertising campaigns are essential because they can give your business a focused edge in marketing and advertising. Of course, the goal is not to beat out other companies but to find the people who will most benefit from your business. This means identifying and catering to Internet users who might benefit from your products or services and converting them to long-term customers.
You have a lot of site traffic ad post views, which do not mean anything if they come from the wrong visitors. Customer demographics matter if you’re going to make a difference in the size and success of your business. With this in mind, ad campaigns are helpful tools for reaching the right people.
How Can You Create Great Advertising Campaigns?
There are a few critical moves for instant success when creating great ad campaigns. These include setting a campaign goal, identifying a target audience, segmenting an audience, and choosing the best means of advertising.
Setting a Campaign Goal
Let’s start with the basics. Even if you have an excellent ad campaign in mind, if you don’t have a central goal for the campaign, you don’t have much. Ad campaigns need to have a plan to be helpful to your business. Not sure what your particular purpose should be? No worries. The most common campaign goals include:
Acquiring new clients.
Successfully promoting current products.
Launching new products and services.
Improving general brand awareness.
Whatever goal you wish to meet, ensure you’ve identified it before starting any ad campaigns.
Identifying the Target
Your target is your intended audience. Identifying who this is and what they need is critical for accomplishing your goals. Define who you’re trying to reach through your ad campaign. Consider age, social status, sex, marital status, habits, likes, dislikes, education level, and hobbies to understand who will benefit your business most.
Segmenting Your Audience
Once you have a good idea of who you’re trying to reach, you can further break your target audience down. This is known as segmenting the audience. You can divide them into groups based on the products and services you want to sell. Factors such as age, marital status, habits, education level, hobbies, and more can help you separate your larger audience into smaller ones.
Choosing Your Best Means of Advertising
How you advertise is as vital as advertising itself. When working online, you have a lot of options at your disposal for how to promote. Choosing the right one for your business depends on your products or services and where the bulk of your audience spends its time.
These are some of the most common means of advertising:
Social Media
Advertising on social media is helpful if your demographic comprises teens, young adults, adults, parents, and young professionals. These people are most likely on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. You can post content here, engage with your followers, and personalize your outreach. Moreover, your audience can easily interact with you over social media, making it an excellent vehicle for connection.
Advertising through email, or email marketing, is a helpful way to acquire new leads and possibly make conversions. For one thing, having the email of site visitors means they already have some interest in your business. Following up with emails about your products and services makes them more likely to purchase shortly.
SEO and SEM
Search engine optimization and marketing are different, but they have similar goals. SEO is when you optimize your website and business blog content so that it can rank higher in organic searches. On the other hand, SEM is all about optimization but through paid efforts like cost-per-click ads displayed on different search engine networks.
It knows what you’re doing and why is half the battle regarding ad campaigns. Before your ad campaigns are underway, you should ensure your website is up to scratch. This means blog content is updated, product pages are clear and informative, and calls to action are easy to understand. Let Directive help you ensure that your online business is where it needs to be. Get a free proposal today to learn more.
Keys for Launching a Successful Advertising Campaign
1. Set a Campaign Goal
Typically, when we think about ‘goals,’ most people think of sales. But the truth is that there are many other advertising objectives to focus on. The most common goals include acquiring new clients, promoting current products, and launching new products. You can also create an advertising campaign to improve brand awareness or to help associate a specific brand with specific emotions. Whatever your goal, it’s essential to identify it before proceeding.
2. Define a Target
Part of a campaign’s success is directly tied to your target audiences. It is much easier to accomplish and measure your goals if you have a well-defined target market or audience. Defining points like age, sex, social class, marital status, education level, likes, habits, and hobbies will help you understand who you’re trying to reach through your advertising campaign strategy.
3. Segment Your Audiences
Once you have clearly defined your target audience, you should then segment the audience, dividing them into various groups based on the products or services you want to sell and their multiple demographics. Put yourself into the shoes of your potential customers and try to identify what would spark their interest. Is what you offer help for them? How will you grab their attention? Are they aware of your brand or product? Do they have the purchasing power to buy your product/service at the set price?
4. Decide on Your Advertising Mediums
Many helpful tools are available to get your campaign’s message to your target segment. Let’s review the different types of advertising options that exist.
- Advertising on Social Media. As the name suggests, advertising on social media allows you to create ads on the social networks where your target audience is. This means opening up a line of communication that enables you to reach your audience quickly. The different formats and platforms offer personalized design strategies with high success rates.
- Email Marketing. Email marketing is another means of advertising that could use in your campaign. Although you can use it to acquire new leads (which could result in potential clients), using its ‘loyalty formula’ generates incredible results. Did you know that getting a new buyer is seven times more expensive than maintaining just one who is already active?
- Content Marketing. This is an excellent avenue for digital advertising campaigns, thanks to the popularity of branded content and video marketing. However, there is a bit of confusion regarding what content marketing is. Content Marketing Institute states, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” Therefore, content cannot be exclusively promotional. You must add value (such as entertainment, new information, promotions, etc.). Keep in mind that there are four stages within the execution of content marketing: traffic generation, lead generation, lead nurturing, and client generation.
- SEM. Search Engine Marketing refers to paid advertisements on search engines. They consist of ads that are paid for by a pay-per-click (PPC) model. SEM is a great way to boost your position on search engines, and, like social ads, they can be highly targeted and segmented.
5. Communication
The message of an advertising campaign is also fundamental. Even though each company and each strategy are different, the copy should always be natural sounding, well organized, clear, concise, fluid, and coherent. It may seem easy, but if you add that the message should also be brief (as not to bore your audience), the pressure to get it right can build up. We recommend leaving the task to experienced experts within the sector or copywriters.
6. Pay Attention to Your Design
The design is just as important as the message. Utilize responsive design and UX-friendly websites to win over your audience. Delight them first by sight and then through everything else you have to tell them.
7. Track Metrics and KPIs
Measuring is essential in many different fields but crucial in advertising. If we don’t track our results, we won’t know what’s going well or what we could improve on. In an advertising campaign, the metrics should make up an integral part of the process. The only way to understand the movement is to track and measure the metrics and data. Furthermore, we should note the difference between general metrics and KPIs. Even though the latter does not offer metrics, they deal with how to measure your company’s set strategic goals.
Conclusion
Which marketing campaign does your company need to implement at this stage of its business growth? Remember that you don’t need to use all the different marketing campaigns. It wouldn’t be effective even to try.
Instead, select one or two types of marketing campaigns that exist throughout your funnel’s stages and become an expert at running those.
Run your campaigns, pay attention to the analytics, adjust or pivot based on results and keep running those same marketing campaigns until your lead generation and sales machine increases profit year over year.