Ever wanted to build the best marketing campaigns, or thought about it? We’ve done marketing for our clients in small businesses for the past 5+ years and learned a few things about making creative marketing campaigns and advertising look professional even on a tight budget.
And the true measure of successful marketing campaign design? That is having customers remember and talk about them.
Ten years ago, social media was in its infancy. Nobody even heard of mobile marketing, content marketing or big data. The iPhone hadn’t even been launched yet. If you took a reasonably competent marketer from 2007 and transported her to today, much of what she knew about her job would be irrelevant.
We’re at a similar point now. Many of the most powerful technologies that will shape marketing over the next ten years are just emerging and many marketers will be left behind. Clearly, anybody who thinks that they can get by doing more of what they’re doing today is kidding themselves.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to exactly predict the future, but we can look at today’s technology and make some basic judgments. Big data and artificial intelligence will become much more powerful and interact more completely with the physical world. That, in turn, will transform how we identify and serve customers to something very different from today.
We like what Seth thinks about this.
We don’t have an information shortage; we have an attention shortage.
-Seth Godin
Many small businesses don’t have a lot of time or resources to have their marketing campaigns or ads professionally designed. Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering. Customers read and remember things that interest them.
So what’s a small business to do?
Here are eight important marketing design elements we rely on to design creative marketing campaigns and the best examples of each that we could find. Great way to learn and stimulate marketing campaign design ideas:
Best marketing campaigns … consumer insights
Consumer insight is a simple truth that applies to a significant set of your target community. Businesses must understand what customers are and aren’t buying and why. They should also understand the way and why customers behave the way they do.
Here are two examples of customer insights that we like a lot:
The first example is Sam Walton who put large stores in sparsely populated locations – the opposite of retail orthodoxy – because he ‘understood’ that the vastly improved highway system had made it easy for shoppers from the larger urban areas to travel to these stores and for the suppliers to deliver goods cheaply.
Another example is Steve Jobs insisting that the iMac was launched with four colors because he got that color is a way that people express themselves and makes the computer personal. This did not go down well with the left-brained people who could say the negatives: delayed launch, higher inventory, more pressure in forecasting, etc.
Specific, attainable objectives
The objective of creative marketing campaigns is to position your business as a better but less expensive alternative to your best competitors. You should specify what your customer community should think, feel, and do.
Focus on using emotions as much as possible. You’ll be surprised at the results.
Create a persona
Create the customer persona to represent your target community (think community and not an audience. Why you may ask? A community is about multi-way way engagement in the group, while an audience signifies one-way transmission.)
Listen to these personas, collect quotes and comments, as well as testimonials.
Successful marketing campaign examples … target each campaign
Creative marketing campaigns address issues that are specific to given objectives. So one campaign strategy won’t be effective for all of your objectives obviously.
Design marketing campaigns to specific business objectives. Think about your objectives, ok?
Think strategically, not predictably
You want to think strategically and avoid predictability. Think branding, the positioning of your messages, and direct responses.
Branding – Your branding is all about showing consistent messages and personality all the time. This is not about us, but how people perceive us and our story, what we look like, and what value we offer others.
Positioning – Positioning is about finding a niche in customers’ minds, and filling it with a tag line and unique selling position (USP) that will capture their attention and be remembered. A USP is one of the fundamental pieces of any solid marketing campaign. Simply stated, it’s a summary of what makes your business unique and valuable to your target market. It answers the question: How do your business services benefit your clients better than anyone else can?
This is because a USP can give a great deal of clarity to your business model, what your company does and why you do it. It can define your business and most important business goals in just a sentence.
Direct response – A direct response is a trigger you want from customers that result in an action you are seeking. The final result will hopefully yield new business for your company.
Creative Marketing Ideas: How Does JetBlue Become So Creative?
Tell great stories
Good stories immediately focus on engagement, experiences, and emotion … central tenets that are attractive to most customers. The narrative makes your message relevant and memorable through personalization.
Stories are a great means for sharing and interpreting experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.
Here is an example. It is one of my favorite examples of a company going viral and creating a story worth talking about. The company is WePay, and their story is a stunt of leaving a 600-pound block of ice in front of a PayPal conference.
Have you heard of them?
WePay’s execution here was brilliant: for years, people had been complaining about how PayPal would “freeze” their accounts, locking them out from withdrawing the money they earned. If you sell goods online, your PayPal account could be a big part of your livelihood, so to be locked out and ignored was obviously enraging for many people.
No surprise, then, that WePay’s jab at PayPal’s willingness to freeze your money was so well received! Press around the story was whirling, starting with coverage on TechCrunch:
Since some of the biggest points of difference that WePay offered were dependability, security, and customer service that PayPal has often been accused of lacking.
Taking a jab at their competitor with this stunt wasn’t just for the random, pointless press; it got people talking about a problem WePay truly hoped to address.
And their results were truly amazing.
Emotional influence and persuasion
Budweiser puppy love that was, by most accounts, the biggest winner of the 2014 Super Bowl. There are no better means of influence or the power of persuasion than emotion. Hands down the best, in our opinion.
Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that the experiences are important to remember.
Check out this ad here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQB7QRyF4p4
There are eight basic, universal emotions – joy, surprise, anticipation, acceptance, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Successful appeals to these basic emotions consolidate stories and the desired calls to action in the lasting memories of audiences.
Budweiser is awesome at playing to all these emotions. Their results prove it.
Build creative marketing campaigns … visual elements
Use pictures/visuals to convey the message much better than words. “Seeing is believing” and “actions speak louder than words” are two common sayings that reflect a bias and preference for visual presentation.
Does Samsung have another winning marketing strategy?
https://digitalsparkmarketing.com/differentiation–strategy/
