Digital Marketing Strategies: Campaigns and Examples.

 Within digital marketing campaigns, companies can use a number of digital strategies to aid the success of a campaign. As social media and viral marketing is ever growing, companies can use social media marketing to use with a campaign. For a number of successful campaigns in 2017, a social media platform was used in conjunction with the campaign. A company will often use Facebook to post adverts or Instagram to post a picture with a hashtag. This spreads the awareness of the campaign as it has the tendency to go viral.

Storytelling can also be an effective digital marketing strategy. Often, consumers want to know more about a brand and what they stand for. A story has the ability to communicate the brands message with its customers. If done correctly, a story can evoke compassion, while also addressing customer needs.

For certain types of companies, particularly beauty and fashion brands, will use online PR to promote their products. Often companies will send an influencer on YouTube or Instagram a foundation or a pair of shoes etc., and will pay them to sponsor their product on their posts. This can be very effective for their campaigns as there are many influencers with substantial followings that can have a huge impact on the sales of a product. 

Often there have been times when a popular YouTuber has recommended a product and that said product can result in being sold out in stores, e.g. the Tarte Shape Tape concealer was a prime example of this.

1.     One example demonstrated this year was made by Heineken. Their “Open Your World” campaign was one of the most influential social campaigns of 2017. Heineken set out to achieve what the Pepsi Ad failed to do. This campaign used political differences and extracted the humanity from behind them.

The campaign involved people from all political sides, e.g. Feminists, climate change activists etc., and put them into team building activities, with a set of questions to ask one another. After the team building activities, both people in their duos revealed their political outlooks. The duos then both had a Heineken and debated over their differences. During the campaign, Facebook was used predominately as their social platform. The campaign was a success as in only days after its release, the YouTube video was viewed 3 million views and 50,000 shares in the first month.

2.      Another example was H&M’s “come together” was successfully completed by the retailer at Christmas of 2016. The campaign was hailed as the UK’s most successful Christmas advert of 2016 with approximately over 5 million views on YouTube.

This campaign proved that genuine creativity can create something innovative and effective without having to use elaborate technology trends. H&M hailed one of the top Hollywood directors, Wes Anderson to shoot an advert alongside one of the stars of his movies, Adrian Brody. By directing this campaign in the style of Wes Anderson’s films, a connection with consumers was instantly made. 

Through this campaign, H&M were able to stand out in comparison to other adverts of the year, by hiring a top Hollywood director and enabling him to have free will over the campaign rather than sticking to brand suggestions. This campaign was a huge success in 2016 as it crushed the competition for Christmas adverts.

3.     “Lidl Surprises” again was an innovative campaign that combined both digital marketing and traditional marketing to deliver a campaign that tackled consumer’s needs and concerns head on and managed to satisfy them.

Within this campaign, Lidl had one task only, which was to ensure customers had no worries as to where the food stocked by Lidl was local and fresh. To do this they didn’t create loose tag lines that sound appealing in terms of advertising but didn’t mean anything to any regular consumer. Instead of this, they publicized negative criticism they received and posted it to social media. 

Lidl eased consumer’s fears of where their produce came from by unveiling to them where the source of it was. As a result, Lidl managed with honesty and good intentions showed suspicious customer’s that they don’t need to worry about the produce that Lidl stock on their shelves. The campaign was a massive success for Lidl as using both social media and TV enhanced the overall customer satisfaction by ceasing their worries. Lidl managed to step out of the traditional marketing strategies and outdoing their competition.

4.     In 2017, Gucci produced an innovative campaign dubbed as “humour” that incorporated current social media trends in order to target a specific demographic. Within this campaign, Gucci aimed to target a particularly younger generation, who wouldn’t be able to afford their products just yet, in order to increase their brand awareness.

The campaign centered on Instagram with the aid of a microsite to provide supplementary information. Primarily the campaign was based on the hashtag #TFWGucci (That feeling when Gucci) which was created around the popular phrase from social media “That feeling when” which was then accompanied by a humorous image that was linked back to a Gucci Product. By mimicking already created memes, Gucci had the ability to explore a popular social media trend and in turn target younger audiences to raise brand awareness. 

The photos on Instagram accumulated over 2 million likes and 21 thousand comments. As a result, this campaign proved to be a success as Gucci were able to improve their brand awareness and improved their social media platform.