How To Create A Successful Online Marketing Campaign: A Guide

Pat Walls

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Updated: October 8th, 2022

What Is Online Marketing?

Online marketing refers to campaigns that leverage web-based channels to spread the message about your brand, its products, or services to potential customers.

An effective online marketing campaign reaches potential customers through the online channels where they spend their time reading, searching, shopping, or even socializing.

According to statistics, global ad spend will reach $369 billion by December 2021.

The widespread increases in digital advertising spending shows that online marketing is the way to go.

In this post, we explain what you need to know regarding online marketing and provide examples of brands that attained success through online marketing campaigns.

Online Marketing Campaign Key Takeaways

Online marketing campaigns help to boost brand awareness, brand recall, and loyalty
A seamlessly executed digital strategy starts with ensuring an active online presence
As the online marketing landscape continues to change, it is important to use data to guide decision-making
Online marketing campaigns should be working hard for you at the moments your audience is most likely to convert

How Online Marketing Campaigns work

Online marketers leverage web-based channels to spread brand messages and product ads to their potential customers.

To attain the intended conversion, marketers aim at reaching potential customers through the channels they spend time on.

Therefore, the advertiser must first research which online channels deliver the ad message to target audiences.

Unlike offline marketing campaigns, online marketing campaigns are easy to track and measure effectiveness. Moreover, online marketing campaigns are well-suited for experimentation, which is not the case for offline campaigns.

Anyone can create an online marketing campaign regardless of whether there is a website or not.

Different online marketing channels have ways to measure engagements and conversions, which is not the case for offline advertisement channels.

Online marketing campaigns come in different forms. Knowing which form of digital marketing works for your brand could help you plan accordingly and meet your marketing targets efficiently.

Here are the different ways online marketing campaigns work.

Search engine optimization: Process of increasing quality and quantity of organic traffic to your online store.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Process of increasing clicks on your advertisement by paying for the number of clicks.
Content marketing: creating content in order to build the customer base, brand, and engage your target audience into having an interest in your business.
Social media marketing: Running organic and paid ads on social media platforms so that your business is visible.
Email marketing: Sending newsletters, promotional offers, and updates to the inbox of your target audience with an aim of educating them about your products.
Affiliate marketing: involves having a brand ambassador for your business who helps to engage with potential consumers and recommend your services or products.

To make online marketing campaigns work for your brand, you must create an online marketing strategy.

Real World Examples Of Successful Online Marketing Campaigns

Here are examples of how brands run online marketing campaigns successfully

Engagement is a critical factor when it comes to ensuring brand loyalty and increasing recall rate whenever a customer is ready to spend. One of the strategies that help brands increase engagement is an active social media presence.

Apple is a great example of a brand that uses social media to ensure market and increase brand awareness online. This is illustrated through their campaign dubbed “#ShotOniPhone”.

embed:instagram

The campaign began as a simple User Generated Content campaign challenge that took iPhone users' photos and shared them on the brand's social media feeds. Selected images were used on the brand's billboards worldwide.

The aim of this campaign was to illustrate and convince prospects of the iPhone camera quality. The campaign attracted over 20Million posts on Instagram alone.

This online marketing campaign is an illustration that social media marketing can help to increase brand awareness globally. You too can run contests on social media and attain a high brand engagement.

2. How Coca-Cola Connected With Consumers At a Personal Level Through An Online Marketing Campaign

Coca-Cola as a brand wanted to connect with its consumers through personalization. To that effect, they launched the online campaign “Share a Coke”, a campaign that involved changing the traditional wrapping around the Coca- Cola bottle to say “share a Coke with…”

The purpose of this campaign was to create an emotional relationship with the consumers and to inspire a moment of happiness as consumers shared a coke with their best friends. A campaign that started in Australia, ended up becoming a global online campaign.

The campaign was successful not only because of the powerful Call-To-Action but also because the brand connected with consumers at a personal level.

It just shows how brands like yours can engage consumers by allowing them to change the logo with their name. ideally, personalization can be a highly engaging and effective way to connect with consumers.

How to Setup a Powerful Online Marketing Campaign

Set a goal
Conduct SWOT analysis of your existing digital marketing presence
Understand the digital sales funnel
Build buyers personas
Locate your customers on the funnel
Create a content plan
Measure /Analyze your results

Setting up a successful online marketing campaign requires you to measure and analyze the results of every campaign. based on the findings, you can identify the online strategies working best for your brand.

Here are some of the tools you can use to measure the results of online marketing campaigns.

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