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Creating Effective Integrated Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaign success in today’s mobile-focused, multichannel, and distinctly social media-driven landscape relies on an integrated approach. This is designed to maximise viewership by reaching out to specific pockets of wider target audiences in uniquely appealing and engaging ways.

Direct marketing and print advertising once dominated campaign strategies, but now online advertising, social media platforms, mobile and email marketing can be leveraged to secure game-changing results.

The best campaigns look beyond the merging of different techniques and channels, and instead focus closely on identifying consistent ways to represent brand values and appeal directly to target audiences. Tactics that work well for individual marketing approaches aren't always transferable. However, there are several key steps that marketers and businesses can take to create genuinely valuable integrated campaigns.

Understand your audience

The creation of every successful campaign is reliant on a comprehensive understanding of its target audience.

As well as understanding the types of content your audience wants to consume, you need to identify where they want to consume it. Clearly identifying your audience by both psychographic and demographic factors will help you to begin to craft a campaign that will speak directly to the people you most want to reach.

Understanding the behaviours, interests, and attitudes of your target audience is just as important as building a comprehensive picture of their age, gender, location and income level. Each of these attributes will inform important campaign decisions, including the tone you should adopt in your messaging and the channels you should utilise.

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Source: Variety

Snap Inc.'s ‘Spectacles’ campaign is a prime example of a brand successfully using its fundamental understanding of its audience. Blending a bricks and mortar approach by placing ‘Snapbots’ i.e. vending machines which stocked the products with its already effective online efforts, Snapchat users created additional buzz around the release of the Snap Spectacles as they waited in (often extremely long) lines to get their hands on the much-anticipated product.

Select your channels

Not every business needs to target every marketing channel to create a successful campaign. In fact, considered channel selection is an important component of every integrated campaign because it's essential to avoid spreading your efforts and resources too thinly.

In addition to identifying which platforms your audience actually uses, it's also important to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each channel and whether it can help you to achieve your core business objectives.

Engage through creativity 

To cut through the online noise you need to create something different and engaging. Marketing campaigns give you the opportunity and try new creative approaches to see what gets your audience’s attention.

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DotLabel created an innovative fully integrated campaign for client Acquia. The software-as-a-service company wanted to increase brand awareness, educate prospects on their solutions and encourage disruptive behaviour. They were targeting the digital marketing decision makers in upper mid-market and enterprise-sized organisations.

The ‘Become a Digital Ninja’ campaign was designed to enable Acquia to ‘train’ its target audience in the mysterious arts of digital disruption.

The integrated campaign, designed in a 90s style video game, positioned Acquia as the Grand Master and sought to creatively train its prospects (or students) in the power of disruption, how to control it and when to use it.

Prospects were initially targeted with a direct mail in the format of a wax-sealed scroll invitation to join a mysterious cult of digital disruptors. It included a link to an online portal with a unique pin access code. To increase intrigue there was no corporate branding or messaging on the direct mail. Other prospects were targeted with an email invitation with a personalised URL to access the portal.

When they arrived at the mobile-optimised landing page, the prospects were presented with a message explaining they have been specially selected to complete the rigorous training to become a digital ninja. They had to complete three unique tests, each one tougher than the last.  The design and tone of voice was tongue-in-cheek to creatively engage the audience.

 Screen Shot 2018 03 13 at 15.16.25

Stage one was the Green Belt. The online game challenge was to fight off the digital nay-sayers. Successful completion was awarded with a green belt social avatar. One week later, the Brown Belt challenge was set. Cutting through digital threats was the task, karate chopping through the correct answers by tapping into the gyroscope of the mobile phone and using a chopping motion. Once complete, they were awarded with a brown belt avatar to share on social media.

Finally, the Black Belt challenge invited prospects to a real life training session at a Dojo in Berkshire. The special select few were invited to a digital dojo where they could be given support and advice By Acquia digital experts to help the prospects objectives.

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This successful campaign used a variety of online and offline marketing communications tools to achieve stand out and engage the Acquia audience in a creative, but coherent and impactful way.

Clear cross-channel content creation

Every piece of content you create should be clear, compelling, and suitable for a variety of different channels.

If you’re creating a long-form blog post, identify sentences to use in a Tweet, select an engaging snippet to include in an e-newsletter, and create imagery that you can also use on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook. You might also choose to break down a blog post into a series of text and image graphics that you can share on Snapchat or Instagram Stories. This allows you to communicate the same messages in slightly different ways to appeal to subtly different elements of your audience.

Each channel should be used to drive traffic to the ultimate target destination of each campaign, which could be towards a landing page to boost traffic, conversions, or subscriptions, or towards a specific social network to boost engagement.

Strive for impactful creativity and you'll create a considered integrated campaign which will complement your brand, your vision, and your core objectives.

This article was originally published on the DotLabel website

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