8 Remarkable Design Elements for the Best Marketing Campaigns

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.

advertising campaign ideas — Advertising campaign ideas.

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/

Here is a four-minute Samsung ad with 15-20 new features shown for their iPhone. No talking. And so simple that you quickly grasp the features and don’t lose interest. And the coordinated music has a way to keep you tied in. Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?

This ad subtly grabs and holds attention based on a great music soundtrack, no speaking, and a total reliance of superb visuals.

Letting the visuals totally carry the messages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec

Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing. And put it to good use.

It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

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Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Unique Marketing Campaigns: Campaign Examples Part 3

Do you like to learn by studying examples of others work? We certainly do. So in this series of unique marketing campaigns, we will do just that.

In each example, we will state what we liked in the campaign and why we thought made the campaign successful.

This is the first of a four part series. Here are all the parts and their titles:

Part 1: Classic campaigns

Part 2: Best marketing campaigns

Part 3: Very unique marketing campaigns

Part 4: Up and coming marketing campaigns

Why are these marketing campaigns some of the most uniquely different ones of all time? Because of the impact, they had on the growth of the brand, and because they manage to hit on some universal truth.

This truth allows us to remember these campaigns years after they first began.

Remember these tips: Ogilvy on Advertising … Best Lessons Learned from his Secrets

But first … what is a marketing campaign?

A marketing campaign is a group of ads centralized around one message. They often use many different marketing channels to get this idea across.

The timing of these campaigns is also very clearly defined.

So here they are, in no particular order (but feel free to let us know which one is your favorite in the comments) – many of the most unique campaigns, and the lessons we can learn from them.

Unique marketing campaigns … The Bear

Could you guess the most popular advertisement ever? You might ask about the criteria for most popular, yes? In this case, we will use the most awarded ads, according to the Gunn Report.

In the advertising business, everyone is familiar with a commercial for the French TV company Canal+, titled “The Bear.” Created by ad agency BETC Paris, this commercial is now, officially, the best TV ad of all time, according to The Gunn Report, which tracks advertising awards.

Adweek notes that the ad has received more industry awards than any other single piece of work in the Gunn Report’s history.

Released in 2011, it has been viewed 1 million times on YouTube but, obviously, has never aired in any of the larger TV markets in the English-speaking West because it’s for a French brand.

For Canal+, its communications are driven by a desire to remind audiences of its commitment to quality cinema.

As part of this strategy the channel’s ad agency, BETC Paris, produced an offbeat, witty TV commercial – ‘The Bear’ – in which a bearskin rug explains what it takes to become a great Hollywood director.

Have you seen this advertisement? If you have not seen this 30-second ad, you can check it out here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3393O1uD_w8

Let’s examine this commercial and what contributes to its secrets of its success. And its ability to influence or persuade:

Grab and hold attention

Hold attention with interesting information. Keep in mind that people don’t watch ads … they watch what interests them. Your ad messages must be interesting to your target communities.

This message certainly grabs and holds attention based on the simple emotion of effective humor, doesn’t it?

Define a value proposition

A unique selling proposition that truly discriminates you from your competition.

Give your customers reasons to select you. Maybe not the most significant visible feature, it does illustrate Canal+’s claim as a company that puts a high priority on great cinema, which is their clear, yet very simple message:

‘The more you watch Canal+, the more you love cinema.’

See our article on building the best Unique Selling Positions.

Tell a fun story

This is a humorous story that draws in potential customers.

It stars a bearskin rug who, having seen a lot of movies on TV from his spot on the living room floor, becomes a movie director himself in the egotistic style of Stanley Kubrick.

Through a combination of live action and CG ‘The Bear’, shows the rug at work as a film director behind the scenes of his latest film, complete with mood swings and tantrums.

he narrative wittily and succinctly brings to life Canal+’s claim that: ‘The more you watch Canal+, the more you love cinema.’

Make messages simple

Simple enough that the reader will quickly understand. Keep in mind that pictures are far more valuable than words.

Creating customer emotion though solid humor does not get any simpler than this, does it?

Influence and persuasion

There are no better means of influence or persuasion than emotion. Hands down the best, in our opinion. This commercial focuses on emotional appeal grandly, with its witty humor.

A real pleasure to watch in our minds.

It is the secret of this commercial’s success.

Outstanding visuals

This video would have been a winner without the commitment of the outstanding visuals.

The bear rug visuals pushed it well over the top, didn’t they?

Unique marketing campaigns … JetBlue Commercial

Have you seen this JetBlue commercial design? You know … the one with the great use of the analogy using pigeons?

Quite clever isn’t it, and likely one you will remember and maybe even talk about, right? And perhaps the best examples of value propositions in a commercial I have ever seen.

Related: What Makes These Extraordinary Commercials so Captivating?

Does a commercial have the power to encourage the right sort of conversations?

That is the objective, isn’t it? Let’s explore why this is so important.

Advertising is a key component of your marketing campaign, for awareness or consumer education of your value.

So your value propositions are a critical element. If everyone is creating content, how does a business break through the noise? How do we reach our customers in a way that engages them?

One of the best marketing campaigns of all time.

And, oh, by the way, it must be more interesting than the millions of other advertisements out there.

Now that is a daunting task, isn’t it?

JetBlue marketing has sought to overcome this dilemma with a powerful analogy to capture your attention.

If you would like to see this brilliant new ad campaign called “Air on the Side of Humanity,” you can check it out here.

Let me explain why I believe this commercial is so successful:

Create a visual analogy

JetBlue ingeniously uses pigeons as a transposed metaphor for frequent flyers who are challenged by business travel and crowded flights. I can relate.

The spot shows crowded skies full of pigeons while an off-camera narrator says “the reality of flying is not very pretty.”

It’s a royal headache and a major inconvenience.

Makes personal comparisons

They show crowded jostled pigeons on a building ledge lined up single file facing the camera while the narrator says, “They pack you in there, you hardly have any space for yourself. Hey, I’m a big guy, and I need some room to breathe”.

As the narrator continues talking about the future situation being bleak the camera focuses on a man’s legs sitting on a park bench throwing crumbs to pigeons on the sidewalk as the narrator says, “They throw you crumbs and act as if it’s a five-course meal.”

Next, they show a lonely pigeon on a busy pedestrian sidewalk as people walk around ignoring a confused bird as the narrator says, “I feel completely ignored.” Then the narrator asks the question, “There’s gotta be a way to fly with a little respect, you know?”

Connect the dots

Making powerful motivational messages to your target audience, as in this ad, is very effective in getting the viewer to relate to the issue in their own lives and to inspire.

So simple that the reader will quickly grasp the motivation. Keep in mind that the analogy is far more valuable than words.

This ad makes the desired call to action a part of the story.

A simple story

A good emotional story provides a very good connection between the issue and the company promoting their message. The ad does explain the action in the story for the audience.

And it allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action and the emotion.

This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys information boring.

Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that they are important to remember.

And create a good reason for you to want to back the JetBlue message, yes?

Customer engagement

What I love about this engagement approach is that it takes a customer experience perspective that no doubt was derived through deep customer insights.

As a frequent flyer myself I was able to relate to the spot on multiple levels. I can just imagine what the creative brainstorming session must’ve looked like.

It probably went something like this… Let’s find a metaphor for flying … pigeons.

Put them in crowded lines and jostled frustrating situation … crowded skies of birds flapping their wings.

Demonstrate the food is not very good … throw some crumbs.

And show how nobody cares about the passenger … show bird on a crowded sidewalk alone being ignored.

Then ask the question, there has to be a better way, and the answer from JetBlue is … Air on the side of humanity!

Simple and easy. And brilliant.

The bottom line

To be effective in this new era, we as marketers need to see our jobs differently. No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares.

We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire brand experiences that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.

We can do better. Much better. But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.

There can never be enough focus on continuous improvement on brand marketing, independent of how well the business is doing.

It seems we all are looking to take our success to a new level. This is an excellent time to make a statement with their brand marketing.

Changing before you have to is always a good idea.

Customer engagement improvements are worth the effort.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy improving your advertising design?

Do you have a lesson about making your innovation better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.

Volkswagen Ad … The Secrets to Its Effectiveness?

Effective Advertising … 14 Best Examples of Ad Design

Use 8 Breathtaking Commercials That Employ Emotional Appeal

Successful Advertisement Design … 12 Best Examples to Study

Insurance Advertising War … 8 Examples to Learn From

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Marketing Campaigns: Great Campaign Examples to Study

Do you like to learn by studying examples of others work? We certainly do. So in this series of best marketing campaigns and examples, we will do just that.

In each example, we will state what we liked in the campaign and why we thought made the campaign successful.

Keep learning: Successful Advertisement Design … 12 Best Examples of Study

This is the first of a four part series. Here are all the parts and their titles:

Part 1: Classic campaigns

Part 3: Very unique campaigns

Part 4: Up and coming campaigns

Why are these marketing campaigns some of the most popular of all time?

Because of the impact, they had on the growth of the brand, and because they manage to hit on some universal truth. This truth allows us to remember these campaigns years after they first began.

In fact, some of us might not have even been alive when these campaigns first aired!

But first … what is a marketing campaign?

A marketing campaign is a group of ads centralized around one message. They often use many different marketing channels to get this idea across.

The timing of these campaigns is also very clearly defined.

So here they are, in no particular order (but feel free to let us know which one is your favorite in the comments) – many of the most popular campaigns, and the lessons we can learn from them.

Marketing campaigns … Absolut Vodka: The Absolut Bottle

Despite having no distinct shape, Absolut made its bottle the most recognizable bottle in the world.

Their campaign, which featured print ads showing bottles “in the wild,” was so successful that they didn’t stop running it for 25 years.

It’s the longest uninterrupted ad campaign ever and comprises over 1,500 separate ads. I guess if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

When the campaign started, Absolut had a measly 2.5% of the vodka market.

When it ended in the late 2000s, Absolut was importing 4.5 million cases per year or half of all imported vodka in the U.S.

So what’s a marketer’s lesson here?

No matter how boring your product looks, it doesn’t mean you can’t interestingly tell your story. Let me repeat:

Absolut created 1500 ads of one bottle.

Be determined and differentiate your product in the same way.

Miller Lite: Great Taste, Less Filling

Examples of successful advertising campaigns.

Think it’s easy to create a whole new market for your product?

The Miller Brewing Company (now MillerCoors) did just that with the light beer market — and they dominated it.

The goal of the “Great Taste, Less Filling” campaign was getting “real men” to drink light beer, but they were battling the common misconception that light beer can never actually taste good.

Taking the debate head-on, Miller featured masculine models drinking their light beer and declaring it great tasting.

For decades after this campaign aired, Miller Lite dominated the light beer market they’d essentially created.

What’s the lesson marketers can learn?

Strive to be different. If people tell you there isn’t room for a product, create your category so you can quickly become the leader.

Volkswagen: Think Small

Many marketing and advertising professionals like to call Volkswagen’s “Think Small” campaign the gold standard.

Created in 1960 by a legendary advertising group at Doyle Dane & Bernbach (DDB), the campaign set out to answer one question:

How do you change peoples’ perceptions not only about a product but also about an entire group of people?

See, Americans always had a propensity to buy big American cars — and even 15 years after WWII ended, most Americans were still not buying small German cars.

So what did this Volkswagen advertisement do? It played right into the audience’s expectations. You think I’m small? Yeah, I am. They never tried to be something they were not.

This happened when the American automobile industry was flooded with long and big cars.

Long cars were a symbol of magnanimity and prosperity. It was a huge paradigm shift to promote cars that were much smaller than the ones then running.

They also came up with great campaigns for parking assist etc. but “Think Small” particularly was a huge success.

That’s the most important takeaway from this campaign: Don’t try to sell your company, product, or service as something it’s not.

Consumers recognize and appreciate honesty.

Volkswagen’s came up with the following campaign:-
(often referred to as “Think Small”)

Marlboro: Marlboro Man

The Marlboro Man ads, which began running as early as 1955, represented the power of a brand when it creates a lifestyle around its product.

Want to be free? Want to be a man? Want to be on the open range?

That was the very definition of a Marlboro Man.

The ads were effective because they captured an ideal lifestyle to which many men aspired at the time.

The lesson here?

Remember that whatever you’re selling needs to fit somehow into your audience’s lifestyle — or their idealized lifestyle.

Marketing campaigns … Bounty

Here’s a fun fact about your neighborhood marketing blogger: I. Spill.

Everything. Coffee? Check. Olive oil? You got it.

I am simply a mess and like to have paper towels nearby at all times.

Naturally, I couldn’t help but be impressed by this guerilla marketing installment from paper towel company Bounty.

By installing life-sized “messes” throughout the streets of New York — a giant, knocked over a coffee cup and a gigantic melting popsicle — the brand found a unique way to advertise its product and the solution it provides, with minimal words.

You might ask, “Wouldn’t a concise billboard ad accomplish the same thing?”

Well, not really. Culturally, we’re starting to opt for every possible way to eradicate ads from our lives.

That’s why we love things like DVR and ad-free options on streaming services like Hulu and YouTube.

This campaign, unlike an ad, isn’t as easy to ignore.

After all, if you stumbled upon a melting popsicle the size of your mattress on your way to work, would you stop and look? We would.

The big takeaway

Identify the biggest problem that your product or service solves.

Then, find an unconventional way to broadcast that to the public — preferably without words.

Marketing campaigns … Nordstrom

American fashion retailer Nordstrom began collecting examples of great customer service from its employees.

They called them Nordy stories.

For example, a customer comes into the store, laden with items already purchased from rival store Macy’s.

The customer shops in Nordstrom comes to the till and takes advantage of Nordstrom’s gift wrap service.

The Nordstrom employee obliges and then, to the surprise and delight of the customer, offers to wrap the Macy’s gifts too for no extra charge.

In another example, a customer comes into Nordstrom wishing to return a $17 tire iron. They don’t have a receipt.

Nordstrom doesn’t sell tire irons. The employee gives the customer a full refund.

That employee knows full well that the Nordstrom customer has an average lifetime spend of $8,000. What’s $17 compared to that?

Keep learning: Use 8 Breathtaking Commercials That Employ Emotional Appeal

By publishing these stories, Nordstrom gives not only concrete examples of how great their service is to customers but also to new employees as well.

Your employee handbook might say ‘give great customer service’ but to the average employee that just says ‘smile, make eye contact and tuck in your shirt.’

Nordy stories give concrete examples to the employees to show them exactly how good customer service is given.

The bottom line

To be effective in this new era, we as marketers need to see our jobs differently.

No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares.

We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire brand experiences that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.

We can do better. Much better.

But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.

There can never be enough focus on continuous improvement on brand marketing, independent of how well the business is doing.

It seems we all are looking to take our success to a new level. This is an excellent time to make a statement with their brand marketing.

Changing before you have to is always a good idea.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy improving your advertising design?

Do you have a lesson about making your innovation better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of the small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.

Ogilvy on Advertising … Best Lessons Learned from his Secrets

Volkswagen Ad … The Secrets to Its Effectiveness?

Effective Advertising … 14 Best Examples of Ad Design

Insurance Advertising War … 8 Examples to Learn From

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

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.

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.

We like what Seth thinks about this.

We don’t have an information shortage; we have an attention shortage.

-Seth Godin

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:

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.

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.

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?

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?

This ad subtly grabs and holds attention based on a great music soundtrack, no speaking, and a total reliance of superb visuals.

Letting the visuals totally carry the messages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec

Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing. And put it to good use.

It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Pinterest Marketing … Rich Pin Tips for Discovery Shopping

Improve Success with Small Business Tagline Designs

How to Get Small Business Press Coverage

Secrets to BMW Marketing Videos … Effective Campaign?

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Do you like to learn by studying examples of others work? We certainly do. So in this series of unique marketing campaigns, we will do just that.

In each example, we will state what we liked in the campaign and why we thought made the campaign successful.

This is the first of a four part series. Here are all the parts and their titles:

Part 1: Classic campaigns

Part 2: Best marketing campaigns

Part 3: Very unique marketing campaigns

Part 4: Up and coming marketing campaigns

Why are these marketing campaigns some of the most uniquely different ones of all time? Because of the impact, they had on the growth of the brand, and because they manage to hit on some universal truth.

This truth allows us to remember these campaigns years after they first began.

Remember these tips: Ogilvy on Advertising … Best Lessons Learned from his Secrets

But first … what is a marketing campaign?

A marketing campaign is a group of ads centralized around one message. They often use many different marketing channels to get this idea across.

The timing of these campaigns is also very clearly defined.

So here they are, in no particular order (but feel free to let us know which one is your favorite in the comments) – many of the most unique campaigns, and the lessons we can learn from them.

Unique marketing campaigns … The Bear

Could you guess the most popular advertisement ever? You might ask about the criteria for most popular, yes? In this case, we will use the most awarded ads, according to the Gunn Report.

In the advertising business, everyone is familiar with a commercial for the French TV company Canal+, titled “The Bear.” Created by ad agency BETC Paris, this commercial is now, officially, the best TV ad of all time, according to The Gunn Report, which tracks advertising awards.

Adweek notes that the ad has received more industry awards than any other single piece of work in the Gunn Report’s history.