A well-tailored brand campaign can smash awareness impasses and inject new vitality into any brand. But how to ensure the perfect fit? These seven tips will help yours truly resonate.

When it comes to brand campaigns, one size never fits all. But when strategized with finesse, they can light a fire under your marketing efforts and boost brand recognition long after they’ve lit up screens and billboards. Here’s how to create brand campaigns that deliver. (Spoiler: it’s all in the planning.)

On the same page

But first, let’s pin down exactly what we’re talking about: a brand campaign is the communication of a targeted message intended to increase awareness. That awareness might be about the brand as a whole, a USP, a product, a service, or anything else a brand encompasses. Creating a more positive public perception of the brand, changing perceptions of it, dispelling misconceptions, or simply increasing the number of people who are familiar with it are all examples of objectives they might intend to achieve. Brand campaigns often run across multiple marketing mediums such as OOH ads and social media and typically run for between three months and a year.

Seven keys to brand campaign success

Time isn’t money

Budget, understandably, is a key concern when planning a major brand campaign. But timing is just as important. It’s tempting to want a campaign to feature on everything, everywhere, all at once. But this approach can lead to overinvestment.

Just as critical as visibility, is message duration. Balancing the duration and frequency of your message is the key to consistency, and that’s what it needs if it’s really going to sink in. And allowing your campaign to run for the right length of time also allows you to get a feel for what’s working out there in the wild. With that time and intel at your disposal, you can make tweaks for better results before your budget has burnt out.

Review and refine

We all know that any brand campaign needs a clear goal; success must be pre-defined. The trouble is, without due care, that goal can easily be set, then forgotten. The best way to ward against that? Review and refine. The most successful campaigns are monitored continuously and subject to frequent strategic tweaks designed to squeeze every last drop of effectiveness out of them.

So set up a system to give you real-time feedback. This will reassure you and your stakeholders that your campaign is working, and that the key milestones outlined in your strategy are being hit. And if it’s not, you’ll be able to make an immediate intervention.

Look to the long-term

Beware short-term wins. Once a campaign has kicked off, focus can easily shift to scooping wins in the immediate future. Especially if you have a key stakeholder breathing down your neck. But brand campaigns – especially those focused on, for example, customer loyalty or growing industry share of voice – simply aren’t going to produce overnight results. So remember to be patient. These things take time.

Yes – reviewing and refining regularly is crucial to brand campaign success, but strike the balance. It’s essential to remember your long-term goals. Choose your tracking metrics carefully to help keep your eyes on the right prize.

Say it right

You’ve established your objective. Now’s the time to craft the clearly defined message that’s going to achieve it. People are more likely to remember gist than specifics; a psychological phenomenon you might recognise as the Verbatim Effect. The thinking behind it is that to avoid brain overload, we instinctively summarise new information before storing in it the long-term memory.

With that in mind, in a world filled with competing marketing messages, distilling your complex offering down into one tangible, memorable, instantly understandable message is a challenge well worth taking on. Customer attention is limited after all, so use it wisely. And make sure the summary that people remember contains only relevant information.

All for one
Yes, the marketing department will lead the brand campaign, but ultimately to ensure success, it needs to be a whole company affair. Here’s why:
1) Any promises the campaign makes need to be backed up by other teams.
2) Sales, customer care and similar departments will have invaluable insights into customer motivators and incentives.
3) The ideal customer journey for the brand campaign should be mapped out and known across the company.
Invite a representative from other key departments to your brand campaign planning sessions and you may be surprised by the added value they bring. And if you find your marketing team retreating into a bubble at any later stage, burst it. It’ll be for everyone’s benefit.

Beyond the frame

While planning, remember to consider how your campaign messaging compares to what’s being communicated across your sector. You’ll already be keeping an eye on the competition, so use what you know to inform your brand campaign. Auditing the brand campaigns your competitors are running or have recently will show you how your campaign will look in comparison. And that’ll give you a clear indication whether it’s destined to stand out. If it blends in with its background, then it’s back to the drawing board.

What and where

Would you post exactly the same content across all your social media platforms? Hopefully not… And the same goes for brand campaigns. It’s often the case that messaging will want to flex a little to the medium it’s published on; your OOH billboard ad won’t read exactly the same as your Instagram post, and so on. Core concepts and key messaging need to transcend specific platforms and have the adaptability to chime on each channel.

This is where customer journey mapping comes in again. Each customer touchpoint should reinforce the same key messages. This is why it’s essential for the voice of every marketing specialism – from PR to graphic design – to be heard during campaign planning. Every member of your marketing team will have value to add, and the combination of that value has the power to give your campaign wings.

We’ve created award-winning brand campaigns for leading international organisations. Whatever you want yours to achieve, our expert guidance can help make it happen. Get in touch.