Hello,
I saw a post on LinkedIn that said seasonal campaigns were over. Now, I understand why people make sweeping statements like that but it doesn’t half make me roll my eyes. One person declared this to be true and so it must be true.
You’ll see it happen online more often when you start to notice it: one thought leader makes a bold statement and the dominoes topple until it is an accepted truth.
Only, I don’t agree. Seasonal campaigns might work for some businesses and be a bust for others. You’ll have the data available to know what is true for you. But working in campaigns is something I teach my PIMP clients. And it’s often missed in the need to get out content as usual. We don’t give ourselves time to think of more creative campaigns.
So today’s long read is a look at campaigns, with some examples and some questions to ask about running your own.
Before we jump into that, I’d love to know what masterclass you’d find helpful in the future. I am out of the habit of running my monthly SEO masterclass but I reckon it might be time for something new.
Are you ready to run a campaign?
If you’ve been a reader of this newsletter for a while, you’ll have heard me talk about the minimal viable content. A bit like a minimal viable product but it’s for your content marketing. The idea is that you figure out what the minimum is that you need to do each week or month and make that part of your routine.
So for me, that would be this lovely newsletter here, the one that goes out on a Monday, a couple of LinkedIn posts and a blog. Although sometimes the copy from this newsletter gets rewritten into the blog. That is what I do each week as a bare minimum.
Although, saying it’s the minimum might be understating how long this content takes. And, of course, what counts as the minimum has changed over time when my goals and strategy changed.
But this week, I want you to think about what you can do if you’ve got a bit more time. Let’s put aside the minimum and think about the wonderful possibilities that are out there for your content marketing if you plan ahead.
I’m talking about campaigns.
What is a campaign?
I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with the idea of campaigning. Many of us will have seen political campaigning leaflets this past month trying to get us to vote for a particular person. And that’s essentially what a campaign is: a series of actions that try to get a group of people to take the same action.
Content marketing campaigns can be a lot of fun. The best ones use lots of creativity to get the message across while also still speaking to their audience.
The easiest way to think about running a campaign is to consider what you’d need to do for a sales campaign.
If you’re launching a new product or service you want the content that promotes this to be out of the ordinary for everything else you put out there. It needs to be scroll-stopping. And what you put on your socials needs to coincide with your website content, email marketing, adverts, and everything else.
You capture the attention once and then reinforce the message over a short period of time, like a sprint. The goal of the campaign is to sell lots of your new product.
But not all campaigns are for sales.
Let’s say you know you’re going to launch something in the next six months so you’d like to have more people seeing those posts. You’d then do a campaign to get more people onto your mailing list.
This could work in many ways but let’s say you create a quiz. You would then launch this quiz and build a campaign around getting people to take it. They then end up on your mailing list and you’ve got plenty of time to get to know them before you sell your next product.
Or you might have a campaign that raises awareness and gets people to take action that’s aligned with your values.
Let’s say one of your values is having a truly sustainable business. You might also be a web developer. So having a campaign around getting people to delete rather than archive their emails is helpful to your values and finding people of similar values. It also helps the environment as a direct result of the campaign will mean less data being used by emails. And finally, it helps your potential clients. They can see that you’ve given them something simple to do that reduces their storage needs.
Altogether the campaign can help raise awareness of your cause and your business while helping clients.
I was recently invited to the Houses of Parliament for the launch of the League Against Cruel Sports latest campaign. This encourages businesses to sign a pledge to have a business without blood sports.
It’s a no brainer that I’d sign up and encourage others to do the same. In turn, this will help show how many small businesses would support the end of blood sports in the UK. It helps the businesses show their values and it helps the charity campaign for change. Then the businesses help share the campaign through their networks like I’m doing here.
Getting creative with campaigns
Campaigns should be short bursts of energy that you put into one single focus and one goal. But that doesn’t mean you need to follow a campaign template. In fact, it’s better if you don’t.
The more creative and fun you can be with campaigns, the better. This is why they are a lot of work but it’s also a time for you to flex that creative muscle. To not rush out content but think of it as a strategic whole. Really take your time over getting it right.
I worked with one client on launching a product that they’d launched many times before. They came to me because they wanted to have their best launch yet and doing the same old stuff was feeling tired.
We talked over my usual strategy points about how their market thinks and feels, their time and capacity, and what they are comfortable doing. And we came up with a plan to ask previous attendees to share the details on their newsletters, to do some Instagram Lives that demonstrated the course, a webinar and selected social content to support it.
The Instagram Lives was slightly out of the client’s comfort zone but really helped explain what the course was about and how it worked without being explicit about it. It was showing not telling.
And there was lots more that we could have done but it was being strategic about what was possible within the timeframe, splitting up the duties and making sure it had a coherent message that was far more important.
Key questions to ask when designing a campaign
I don’t believe that campaign templates will help because your goals, your audience and your capacity are unique so to help you out, here are some questions to answer for your next campaign:
What is the one goal I want to achieve?
What is the action I need my audience to take to achieve this goal?
Is there a hook I can use around this action?
How do I normally communicate with them?
What formats do I enjoy?
What can I do differently than my minimal viable content?
What can I reuse?
What’s in it for my audience?
These are questions that I took a client through at a Content Clinic last year. They wanted to get more people onto their mailing list using a campaign around Veganuary.
What we eventually did was set up a campaign that would give people a reason to want to be on the mailing list for Veganuary and then we planned out a follow-up campaign to keep them engaged and segment the list. There were a couple of months between the two campaigns but the two-step approach worked.
So:
The goal was to increase the mailing list
The action was to sign up for a challenge
The hook was Veganuary
We used a personal approach where the client got to know all the new sign-ups and was outside of the usual content approach of SEO
And we embraced their love of the camera.
Most of the content was already there from a previous campaign so we could reuse and repurpose that.
And the audience got lots of help and support from it.
Campaign hooks
If it’s directly relevant to your business, use seasonal or annual events for the campaign. But be aware that many other businesses will be doing the same. The best thing you can do is look at what your peers did last year and see how you could do this better or more relevant for your customers.
With Father’s Day approaching, you’ll see lots of businesses doing Father’s Day campaigns. If you sell a product that is helpful around Father’s Day then you should be considering how you’ll make it stand out.
Another way you could inspire campaigns is to go have a look at shops and see what you can learn from how other businesses do them. The seasonal aisle in supermarkets is a good place to start. Think about how they just seem to know that you need that tennis set right now. It’s not because they are reading your mind but are reading their sales data. They are doing their market research. And this is what you need for a great campaign.
Lovely campaign examples
And if you’re still stuck for ideas, check out some of these great campaigns.
Canva’s 15 Billionth Design
Canva could have posted about hitting its 1 billionth design to show how it’s the design app of choice or… it could have made it into a competition. Will you be the 1 billionth design? That was the ticker tape across its screen until it hit that number.
Does 1 billion matter? What about the 14,999,999,999th design? That’s got some pretty numbers in it as well.
What this campaign did was encourage people to create designs so they could be the 15 billionths. Interestingly, Canva didn’t share that design but a newsletter and blog about Canva facts to celebrate everyone who helped hit this milestone.
How the campaign works:
Gets more people to create more designs
To try to be that magic milestone number
And need the platform more
To sign up for the Pro version
Plus sharing lots of facts
Which will help blogs write content and backlink to Canva
Therefore reaching a wider audience.
They didn’t need to say “create more designs please” but created a campaign around a milestone moment, which was the hook.
Spotify Wrapped
Released around Christmas so they get to call it Wrapped, this annual campaign gets you, the Spotify customer, to share the app by sharing how cool you really are in your round-up video.
That is, unless you have kids and then it’s a mix of Disney show tunes and music you actually want to listen to. Or if you’ve got my kids, it’s the 90s and 00s skater punk that makes it look like you’ve got an unhealthy Green Day obsession alongside comedy podcasts and death metal.
Either way, when you join the annual sharing of your Spotify Wrapped you are taking the action the business wants as a result of their campaign.
How the campaign works:
Give listeners a round-up of their listening habits
Set it out in pretty sharable graphics and video
Tell them some nice things about themselves like they’re in the top 1% for listening to the Moomins Soundtrack
They share these fun facts
More people see this and share theirs
Spotify reaches a wider audience
And gets more listeners.
While this is not necessarily User Generated Content, it does get the customer to do the promotion for them which is likely the outcome of the campaign. And who doesn’t love showing off how eclectic their music tastes are?
VFC
VFC created a video that showed the reality behind KFC’s video from their chicken farm.
VFC is known for campaigning for animal rights and this is a brilliant example of a values-based campaign.
It’s not overtly selling you a product but aiming to get the audience to look a little deeper into the stories they are told by meat manufacturers. The video doesn’t exist on its own but is reshared across social media as part of a campaign to raise awareness.
How the campaign works:
Expose KFC for showing a sanitised image of chicken farms
Demonstrate the reality
The hook is the original KFC video
And the action they want people to take is to share the video and raise awareness
Then take a small action of swapping chicken for vegan chicken.
The campaign won an award and is incredibly powerful.
Okay, but what about a stunt?
Some marketing stunts form a part of a campaign and some exist on their own. THIS! Does lots of stunts. Brew Dog chucking a stuffed squirrel from a helicopter is a stunt. Stunts work to get your brand noticed but don’t necessarily try to get a group of people to take the same action.
Think in campaigns
When planning out content for your year (or quarter if that’s too overwhelming) look at where there is opportunity for campaigns. Even a newsletter series could be the seed of a larger campaign.
And if you’re wanting to start small, start with a campaign to get people onto your newsletter list.
How I help:
Get your content reviewed with a Content Clinic.
Have me write all your sales content with my Kick-Ass Sales Bundle
Get a whole year of me helping you with content on my PIMP Your Content Programme
I hope you enjoy the rest of your week. I’ll be making the most of this glorious weather in case winter suddenly returns again.
See you next Thursday!
Fiona