PART 8 : POCKET CAMPAIGNS
The following article is part of an ongoing series from J.Schmid with the critical elements and insights you need to strategize, execute and launch successful omnichannel campaigns. Watch your email and follow #CampaignBuildingBlocks on social media to keep up with the full story.
We’ve all seen people go crazy for tiny houses. There’s a reason for that: smaller means simpler, quicker to build and easier on the budget. Well, the same concept works for campaigns. It’s possible to build a small, agile campaign that reaches a portion of your audience and prospects too, with a friendlier bottom line. However, as with tiny houses, you still need a strategy, skill and planning to build it. Even if it is pocket-sized.
When we say to a client “Hey, we want to do a brand campaign for you,” we have a few go-to examples: Dove’s Real Beauty, REI’s Opt Outside, or the famous Got Milk campaign.
We use these examples because most people have seen them, and thus it helps to ensure that we all know that we’re talking about essentially the same thing. But here’s the rub: these examples are all MASSIVE brand campaigns, some of which spanned decades. It sometimes leads a marketing director to believe that if you can’t spend millions on TV ad placements, it’s not a campaign. I’m here to tell you that’s not the case.
Let’s first take a look at what parts make up a campaign, what’s critical, and where we can scale it down.
The Big Idea: This is the crucial, non-negotiable lynchpin. You’ve got to have the key message first, then build around it.
Repetition: Campaigns aren’t a one and done, it’s a steady drumbeat of the Big Idea. It’s not a re-run of identical content, it’s variations on a theme – how many different celebrities did you see with a milk moustache during the long-running “Got Milk?” campaign? How many videos or print ads in Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign? Repetition can make sure that the key message gets noticed.
Audience: How many sets of eyes and ears does the campaign reach, and are they customers or prospects? This is another area where you can scale up or down depending on your goals and budget. Getting a campaign in front of your email list, website visitors and a portion of your social following is potentially free (or already-extant overhead), but you can increase that reach by in boosting the content to a carefully targeted audience on your social channels.
Channels: Where does the campaign reach the eyes and ears of customers and prospects? This is an important pivot point where a budget can be scaled. Selecting a few key channels as a starting point reduces the creative assets and versions that need to be created.
Check out this illustration that shows all the typical channels that you’d try to reach your audience with a campaign.
And rest assured, the big campaigns that we all know and love: REI’s Opt Outside, Dove’s Real Beauty, and the ubiquitous “Got Milk?” campaign…we know and love them because they practically filled the skyline with the message throughout the duration of the campaign’s lifecycle. But that’s not the ONLY way it can be done. Big campaigns have a broader reach, sure, but a smaller approach can be powerful and useful to help your social followers and customers understand you better, to deepen the relationship, to drive engagement, connect on a human level, and as we mentioned, test different creative messages to see what really seems to grab attention.
What if you just took a few key channels to get a message out to your social followers, email subscribers and website visitors? Here’s what that might look like:
With only these few channels, we can still map a meaningful customer journey that has good potential for engagement and sales.
This approach has one more big benefit: easy scale and easy repetition. You can increase your reach by utilizing paid social ads, getting it in front of a larger portion of your audience, retargeting website visitors and getting the campaign message in front of prospects.
Want to find out more about pocket campaigns? Reach out to laurena@jschmid.com.
Tags: #campaignbuildingblocks, #campaigncontent, big idea, Budgeting, campaigns, cross-channel marketing, Lauren Ackerman, messaging, Strategy