5 Key Steps to Plan Award-winning Campaigns: What makes campaigns stand out?
It is definitely an honor to attribute winning "Digital marketing awards Asia 2017" as a B2B winner from Forrester and CMO Innovation to the success of the digital marketing campaign - The Future World of Internet of Things. Through planning and managing this campaign, as well as preparing thought leadership content and designing infographic draft, here are my 5 key takeaways from doing this award-winning campaign and you can check out the campaign links at the end of this article.
An outstanding digital and content marketing campaign should consist of a strong ad, profound content and appropriate targeting. Bringing them all together, you can create a relevant, rich and smooth experience to your audience and end up with better results of your call-to-action.
1. Define your objectives
A well-defined and clear set of your campaign objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) is, of course, crucial to a successful campaign. What are your overall goals/ KPIs to achieve after the end of campaigns? It is paramount that you should ponder success indicators ahead of generating content. By defining your call-to-action and identifying key metrics for success, you can then craft an effective strategy for your campaigns. Goals of digital marketing campaigns normally include:
- raising brand awareness - measured by the number of followers acquired;
- delivering engaging content - determined by the campaign engagement rate;
- generating sales leads - calculated by the number of contacts gained on the landing page or after the campaign.
2. Create an engaging, profound and insightful content
To achieve your ultimate objective - boosting the results of call-to-action (CTA) - you have to share some key takeaways with your audience. Instead of urging them to fulfill your call-to-action request, you should treat this as an entire branding experience. It helps walk them through each piece of information and engages and educates them with thought leadership content which ideally mixes with opinions of your domain experts and research data from the authority in your industry. The presence of the research data gains credibility to your content and in the long run to your brand, helping you to differentiate from your competitors. With great content, your choice of delivery makes it impactful. You may use blogs, videos, infographics, and reports or a combination of different formats to create a thought-provoking topic and a vivid story.
3. Write a strong ad
Your post may be inspiring but you also need an appealing ad to draw your target audience attention to click your post. Summarize your content and condense it and you are halfway to create ads. An attractive ad is an essential source of a high click-through-rate (CTR). By using a catchy headline and an eye-catching and relevant image for your sponsored and organic ads, you can set apart from your competitors or posts which share similar content with you. Consider the followings tips to create a clickable ad:
- Pick up some trending keywords for your headline
- Write a powerful headline with concrete takeaways
- Choose an engaging main ad visual with a clear CTA on it
- Brief your audience about the content they will read with a short description
4. Choose an appropriate targeting and option to bid your ad
Now, you get a clear set of objectives, interesting content and catchy ad. Your effort will be rewarded if you can identify your target audience by selecting the relevant location, function, seniority, company size, years of experience and etc. This means one-size-fits-all strategy is no longer effective, so you better dive deeper into picturing your ideal audience and where they mainly come from (focus more on the social media channels they use). As every campaign is different by nature, your previous targeting sets worked well, but it is always good to review and revise your targeting each time based on your current campaign goals and target audience. Once you target your audience, you can move to the next step by choosing one from two major bid types (sponsored ad on LinkedIn for this case):
- Cost Per Click (CPC) - based on the number of clicks on your ad post to charge you.
- Cost Per Impressions (CPM) - calculated the number of views (per thousand) on your ad post for the cost.
According to the nature of above bid types, you can fully utilize your budget by selecting either CPC or CPM for your sponsored ad. Note that the bid rate, daily budget and the number of total audiences will also affect the overall effectiveness.
5. Employ A/B testing to improve your campaign results
If you think you get everything on the table, you properly miss out one significant yet subtle step - performing A/B testing to understand your ad performance better.
One single ad post can stand out, but two ad posts can make you understand which dimension the counterpart outperforms.
To do so, it is just as simple as changing one variable of your first ad while keeping the rest unchanged to create a second ad. Then, you can gain insights by comparing two ads with how the variable you change will affect the overall campaign effectiveness, like enjoying higher CTR after using a more eye-catching image for the second ad. Gathering the insight and analytic results, you are able to identify the successful area and keep modifying your ad materials as well as the overall campaign strategy next time.
Thanks for reading. It is my very first time to write an article on LinkedIn. I hope you all enjoy it and find it useful for creating impactful and insightful content as well as a successful campaign. Would be great if you have other ideas to share with us!
#awardwinning #forrester #cmoinnovation #CXSG #B2B #contentmarketing #digitalmarketing #thoughtleadership #bestpractice #socialmedia #SEM #campaign
About the campaign (ad post):
About the content (infographic landing page):
About the award: