Miniseries: How to Launch a Successful Campaign

For any product or initiative, top tier agencies and brands are faced with top 5 key questions ahead of hitting the market:

1. Do I need to run an awareness or performance-based campaign? What will drive results?
2. How will I measure success? What is the key performance indicator?
3. Should I design a hyper-creative ad or opt for an efficient call to action goal?
4. Who are the best partners to help me achieve this?
5. How do I find our key customers and break through the noise?

In this 5-week mini-series, we’ll share how to tackle each of these asks with a strategy that drives results. This series will focus predominantly on digital advertising across Native, Video and Display formats.

Segment 1: Type of Campaign

A campaign without an objective likely won’t deliver the outcome you’re looking for. The key to success is to build a strategy that incorporates messaging that will entice a user to take action. From a high level, it is important to consider the lifecycle of the product you are advertising. Is it brand new? Does it require an awareness play to socialize its existence? Or, is it an established product that needs a boost in sales?

Let’s start with the basics. What is the difference between a performance driven campaign and an awareness campaign?

Awareness Campaigns

Awareness campaigns are designed to increase brand recognition and the visibility of a company and its products. Their goal is to establish credibility, build brand loyalty, and ultimately generate buzz around a company. When measuring success, metrics like frequency and reach, CTR, VCR, views, and landing page visits are important to consider.

Performance Campaigns

Performance campaigns, on the other hand, are campaigns designed to directly drive sales or leads. The goal of a performance campaign is to generate a measurable return on investment (ROI) from the marketing effort. Performance-focused metrics include form fills, cost per landing page, return on ad spend, or other conversion funnel activities.

Upper Funnel Campaigns

The most successful marketing campaigns understand how to marry appropriate KPIs to tactical execution in a logical and sequential way. Included in that understanding is an awareness of where a customer is on their customer journey with your company or product. Consider a user who has just discovered a product: they may need more information or more message exposure prior to making a purchase. The product’s marketer should allocate more budget to upper funnel tactics for users like this to further educate the consumer. Running solely conversion campaigns will likely lead to wasted media dollars as end users are not yet ready to make the final purchase.

Emodo’s extensive audiences, specialized creative, and focus within the in-app space yields excellent results for upper funnel campaigns like the one in the previous example. We’ve seen repeated success across several verticals, including retail, when we’ve been able to target users in a live environment within a specific vicinity to raise awareness on a new product or promotion. The ability to target a user on the device that they are always carrying garners higher engagement and CTR rates. We couple audience, frequency, and reach for optimal upper funnel results. Our commitment to creative more memorable connections through our proprietary Adapt format also drives higher attention, brand recall, ad recall, and message association.

Midfunnel Campaigns

For Mid-funnel, a user who is familiar with a brand would be a prime candidate for Emodo’s propriety Rich Media units that drive a user to store. Our ability to target a user, drive them in-store, and follow their journey through to check out is unmatched. A great recent example of this, is with a produce brand that was rolling out new flavors. We created rich media units that targeted users that were located by the supermarkets in real-time; these units drove higher engagement and more foot traffic than standard display campaigns.

Lower Funnel Campaigns

Lower funnel users are familiar with the product or service. They have previously shown interest by going to the website or store. At this point in their customer journey, it is a great time to engage in a conversion-based campaign. These end customers are primed and ready to fill out a form, put down a credit card or take another action. The key to a lower funnel campaign is retargeting and efficiency. These users do not require anything splashy to remember the ad, they need a reminder and a fast way to convert. Emodo’s proprietary rich media units include custom features that enable commerce. For a CPG brand, we created rich media ads with interactive creative that drove the user to add each ingredient to an ecommerce shopping cart as they built their rice bowl. This experience was delivered to consumers who had already engaged with previous branded content or in this category.

In summary, here are the best practices for deciding between Awareness and Performance Campaigns:

1. Evaluate the product or service – is it new or established?
2. Decide on your primary goal per partner – will the initiative be awareness (upper funnel) or performance (lower funnel)?
3. What are the KPIs? Remember, it is critical that the KPI matches your overall strategy. Measuring cost per acquisition while running an awareness tactic will lead to unfavorable results.

If you have questions about how Emodo can help you in your next awareness or performance campaign, or even to consult on best practices, get in touch.

In our next segment, we’ll discuss partner choices and matching partners for the best outcome.

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