8. campaign
planning
A campaign is the mix of creative work and contact strategy
that reaches customers; it's how your marketing plan (or a part of it) is
delivered to your target market. A campaign can do three things: excite
an audience, deliver a message, and drive a response. While they can all
be done in the same campaign, they're different tasks.
A detergent marketer creates its audience with brightly coloured
packaging and a strategic choice of shelf space.
It delivers its message with before-and-after images of whiter-than-whites.
It drives responses with coupons in supermarkets. Three objectives: launch,
branding, tactical. But all part of the same marketing strategy,
executed in different ways.
Need to connect with an audience of burger buyers? Check the demographic:
create a game that links together young people. Tell them burgers get bigger
this week? Show pictures of your fat new wares. Time to drive responses?
Make a discount coupon the game's prize. The concept of the creative work
and the concept driving the contact strategy are one and the same.
Where it gets fun is when you're dealing with several audiences, at different
stages of their relationship with you, each needing the next communication delivered
to them in a slightly different way. That's where the storyboards, headlines
and graphics give way to the spreadsheet. Big grids of key messages mapped onto
delivery dates and response periods, branching into an extensive tree with each
branch trying its hardest to deliver the same result. A sale - and a customer
who'll come back.
A campaign involves creative work, contact strategy, and relationship
marketing. Redpump treats them as one, from deciding your messaging to drawing
up your contact spreadsheet and writing the creative work itself. Finally: killer
copy.