Marketing campaigns and their benefits

The use of marketing campaigns is a key tactic for marketing teams and offers significant benefits for businesses. A marketing campaign requires a lot of effort, but it’s simple to get started — and good tools make it a whole lot easier for brands to master.

This short guide will help you understand everything you need to know quickly and easily about marketing campaigns.

What is a marketing campaign?

A marketing campaign is a designated, media-driven effort to promote a specific product or brand over a certain period of time. Successful marketing campaigns center on a clearly defined business objective. They utilize distinct marketing strategies tailored to accomplishing that objective in the most effective way.

Marketing campaign goals

Teams can design marketing campaigns with different goals in mind, but objectives typically fall into the following categories:

• Improving brand image and awareness
• Launching a new product
• Boosting sales of an existing product
• Rehabilitating a brand after negative press

Setting a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely — or SMART — within a general category will increase your campaign’s chances for success. Don’t set a campaign goal to simply improve brand awareness. Set a SMART goal instead — for example, “Rank on page 1 for 100 new SEO keywords by the end of Q2.”

Types of marketing campaigns

There are many ways to accomplish your marketing goals — whether or not your campaign is geared toward products or services. Advertising channels of all types can be used to support and enhance your marketing efforts, including:

Of course, some channels are better suited for certain campaigns than others. But remember to be creative. Don’t limit your marketing team to only doing what’s been done before. Be willing to take calculated risks — as long as they don’t overburden your team’s budget, abilities, and strategic projections.

Before beginning any marketing campaign, make sure your team is properly equipped to handle the traffic the campaign will generate. Here are a few examples to illustrate this further:

1. If you’re promoting newsletter sign-ups, make sure you have a process and resources to manage the list effectively.
2. If you have automated welcome messages, make sure new customers receive those and their user journeys are mapped appropriately.
3. If you’re promoting demo request sign-ups, ensure your sales team is enabled to take action on those leads.
4. If visits to your site increase, make sure you update your content continually to convert this traffic to profitable sales.

Coordinate these and all other efforts directly with your organization’s sales team. Together, create a unified plan to provide the best possible experience for new users and customers.

Marketing campaigns in action

Some of the most successful marketing campaigns have been driving profit for decades. Nike, for example, introduced its “Just Do It” campaign in 1988 and has used it effectively ever since. Here are two other examples of groundbreaking marketing campaigns:

Credit: Digital Marketing Institute

1. Dove “Real Beauty” initiative. This campaign was developed after internally commissioned research found that only 2% of women considered themselves beautiful. Dove responded to this newfound insight with a campaign that targeted core customer values. Since then, the Real Beauty campaign has continued to grow, creating positive change throughout the industry and around the world.

Credit: AdForum

2. American Express OPEN Forum. Launched in 2007, AMEX OPEN is an online platform for business experts of all backgrounds. Users are selected as guest writers and generate content for community dialogue. This low-cost, high-impact campaign has helped to solidify the image of American Express as a collaborative, proficient brand.

Get started with marketing campaigns

Effective marketing campaigns like these ones are made possible by using the right software and tools. Adobe Campaign is a specialized solution for marketing campaign development and execution. Drawing from a base of rich customer data, you can create, coordinate, and deliver dynamic campaigns using an integrated, no-code interface. And with advanced functionality for online and offline customer journeys, you can deliver personalized experiences to every single person.

Get started today on your next marketing success story using Adobe Campaign. Watch this video to find out more.