What is Marketing Campaign in Business? An Effective Customer Value Journey Guide 2022

Most beginners ask this question “what is Marketing campaign?”, but in summary; it is an intentional act that’s required for any business to grow its customer base. How do you, without a problem and sensitively move customers and prospects through every one phase of the Customer Value Journey?

The short answer is that you need to build marketing campaigns that will intentionally move people from one stage to the next.

Besides, these two words—campaigns and intentionally—are important here.

In this post, we’ll walk through the definition of what is marketing campaign, how you can deliberately drive people through the customer value journey and achieve your desired success.

So, let’s unpack the whole deal one at a time.

What Is Marketing Campaign?

Marketing campaign is the process of using an intentionally strategic promotion or ad campaign to help prospects, leads go through the customer value journey and take the desired action you want them to take.

First, before we move further, let’s talk about what a campaign really is.

What are the components of marketing campaign?

A marketing campaign has two critical components:

• A call to action
• A traffic source.

1.     Call to Action

What is marketing campaign can’t be truly complete without the inclusion of a call to action which is precisely what you want people visiting your site to do.

If the marketing campaign you’re creating is designed at the subscribe stage of the Customer Journey, your call to action might be for people to download a whitepaper, checklist, or video resource.

If it’s a campaign in the convert or ascend stage, your call to action might be to buy a product or service. If the campaign you are creating is for the awareness stage, then the call to action might be as simple as listening to a podcast episode or reading a blog post.

2.     The traffic Source

The traffic source could be digital clicks from ads, email, social media sites, or search engines like Google; this is for online marketing. Offline marketing could consist of direct mail, TV, or radio advertising, print ads, or anything else that gets the call to action in front of your prospects. This is the second element that defines what is marketing campaign.

Get to know more on how to do online marketing accurately. After which you can take this marketing 101 guide to help you understand what promoting your business offline is about.

Now that you know what a campaign is, let’s talk about what a campaign is supposed to do. The idea behind what is marketing campaign is the key to intentionally help move people from one phase of the Value Journey to the next.

For example:

A campaign may have the aim of getting persons to sign up for your email list – that’s going from Engaged to Subscribe. Also, another campaign may be design to get new customers that are excited about their purchase – that’s going from Convert to Excite.

Once more, have you spotted that a campaign is intentionally moving people through the Value Journey? And that term “intentionally” is key.

How to Intentionally Move Customers Through the Value Journey

Now note that any person who has ever become a customer of a company has definitely moved through the Value Journey, whether the company made it take place intentionally or not.

Occasionally, people move through the Value Journey by chance. This is what is marketing campaign about – moving customers through the value funnel

For instance, see that you had never heard of Dropbox in the past. At that point, one day, a friend speaks to you that he makes use of Dropbox to store all his files online, and he suggests that you check it out.

At this instant, both you and your friend have advanced to the next Value Journey. You have moved to Step 1 be being Aware of the product, and your friend has moved to Step 8 because he has Promoted the product to you.

On the other hand, you can see that this progress both of you made didn’t just happen because of anything Dropbox as a company did intentionally. It rose from an accidental comment or a casual conversation between you and your friend.

Comparing that with Dropbox’s marketing campaign, offering additional space to customers who refer friends and family:

In this example, Dropbox is encouraging people along the value journey INTENTIONALLY by crafting a program that is intended for that specific purpose.

This is an important characteristic to make.

As soon as you understand that you can move people intentionally through the Value Journey using marketing campaigns, you become conscious that you have the skill to grow your business by refining the areas where your customers are getting

“trapped.”

At this point I’d like to call your attention to the fact that there’s one frequent mistake that many businesses make when striving to move customers and prospects all the way through the Customer Value Journey.

The Number 1 Mistake Marketers Make When Creating Campaigns

As soon as a business realizes the Customer Journey, they can get so motivated about the possibilities that they attempt to move people all the way from visitor to promoter in one step, in one campaign.

Friend, this is impossible!

The truth is, you can’t feasibly create one campaign that will makes people be aware of you, engages them, gets them to subscribe and convert, excites them, ascends them, and then turns them into advocates and promoters, all at the same time. Big NO.

As an alternative, you need to create multiple definite campaigns that are planned to move people from one stage of the journey to the subsequent one. Or in some cases, a campaign can almost certainly move people from 1 to 2 or maybe 3 steps at once. But the best way to really explain this, is with a few case studies.

Related Article: How to create an optimized ad campaign

                        Introduction to conversation rate optimization

What is Marketing Campaign – Value Journey Campaign Case Studies

1.     Case Study: Honest Company

• Campaign Goal line: From Engaged to Subscribe to Convert
• Content Required: Email Copy and Creative
• Traffic Source: Google AdWords
• Call to action: Exclusive Offer! 25% off your first order

Here’s an instance of what marketing campaign is about – that’s to drive people through two steps in the Value Journey: that’s from Engage to Subscribe and then to Convert.

Now, let’s go through this campaign from the start. The traffic source here is Google AdWords which is aimed at targeting the keyword “buy organic diapers.” Here you can see the AdWords ad:

                                                     

When someone clicks on the ad, they will arrive on a landing page that asks them to subscribe.

Once they opt in, they’ll send them the following coupon in their email (approximately 24 hours later, supposing they didn’t by this time make a purchase):

I want you to pay a close attention to that call to action: Exclusive Offer! 25% Off Your First Order. Notice that this price cut only relates to visitor’s first order.

This is because the goal of the campaign is not to create recurring purchases; the aim is to get people to make their very FIRST purchase. It’s a time-tested and effective tactic for turning someone into a new customer.

2.     Case Study: ModCloth

• Campaign Goal line: From Engage to Subscribe
• Content Needed: Blog Post
• Traffic Source: Facebook organic traffic
• Call to action: Sign up for ModCloth’s good news and great offers!

Here’s another case in point of a campaign with a distinct goal. In this case, the clothing company ModCloth needed people who were already engaged with their content to subscribe to their email list.

The content necessary for this campaign was satisfactorily simple: it’s a blog post. As soon as you go to the ModCloth blog, you’ll see a lot of valuable blog articles like this one:

Since ModCloth has a lot of engagement on Facebook, they were able to use free organic traffic from Facebook as their traffic source. Recall, you don’t at all times have to pay for traffic.

Hence they have content and a traffic source. Straightaway, what’s their call to action?

All right, you’ll notice that even as you’re browsing the blog you’ll be welcomed with this popup:

At this moment you might not consider this as a campaign, but then it totally is. It’s a definite call-to-action: Sign Up for ModCloth’s Good News & Great Offers! And anytime someone sign up using this form, they move on to the next stage in the Customer Value Journey.

Over and over again, the best marketing campaigns are the simplest

3.     Case Study: DigitalMarketer

• Campaign Goal line: From Aware to Engage
• Content Required: Branding Video
• Traffic Source: Facebook Ads (Video Views campaign)
• Call to Action: End the war between sales and marketing… watch this video!

This is the third campaign case study by DigitalMarketer with a goal of engagement, they started by studying the Value Journey map and recognizing the steps where their audience need help. In this case, they realized that while they were doing a good job of generating awareness through Facebook ads, they didn’t have a good engagement campaign in place.

As a result, they decided to create some content that’s a branding video whose goal was to get people engaged with their brand:

Then again as you know, simply creating a video isn’t enough. They also had to select how they were going to get people to watch their video. So they chose to run a Facebook ad campaign with video views as the goal to generate traffic to the video. This made up the “Traffic” portion of their campaign.

Here’s what one of those ads looked like:

Advertising is the best way to get eyeballs on your content—for all stages of the Customer Journey.

For the reason that the goal line of this campaign is to get people engaged with their brand, their call to action was just very simple: “Watch this video!”

It’s also crucial to note that they didn’t try to persuade people to sign up or buy anything at least not right away, since that wasn’t the goal of the campaign. The goal was to generate engagement, and this kind of campaign will be successful because it was focused 100% on simply engaging people.

Finally, On What is marketing campaign in Business

The Customer Value Journey is the basis for all the tactics you’ll acquire in this Guide. Whether you’re learning about content marketing, digital advertising, or web analytics, or any other topic, keep this theory in mind.

Here and now that you understand the Customer Journey, it’s time to talk about the number one tactic you’ll use to engage people at every stage: and this is Content Marketing.

Here’s a comprehensive guide that will help you understand what content marketing is. Just follow the link and get yourself acquainted with the process.

I hope this what is marketing campaign guide help you. Share your thought with other readers in the comment box.