Designing a great marketing campaign is like hosting a great party

Welcoming people in

Earlier this month I shared the introductory post to this customer journey blog series. In it, I compared inviting your target audience in with a marketing campaign to hosting your neighbors for a party at your home. The example I used in the post was my family’s St. Paddy’s Day open house. A few weeks ago now, I can reflect on that gathering with a smile. The party was a huge hit with family and friends and it was also a promise of more get-togethers to come. Have you noticed how much people enjoy being together right now? I found it wonderful how my St. Paddy’s Day guests made hosting easy for us. So how can we, as marketers, bring the warmth and hospitality of hosting a party to the customer experiences we design?

Selecting your goal

How can we help people feel a sense of connection with our organization and with one another? It begins with intention. In my experience, hosting a great party begins with a goal. Reader’s Digest has a fun article that endorses this as the first step for hosting a successful gathering too. The piece, written by Charlotte Hilton Anderson in November of 2022, teaches hosts to begin with a purpose. With a purpose, they can thoughtfully plan out their party and bring the event to life.

In her article, Charlotte Hinton Anderson suggests that being intentional will make the event memorable for those who attend. This is similar to what I teach my marketing students – when designing a marketing plan, you must start with the objective first. What are you trying to accomplish for your organization? If your goal is clear to you, then it will be clear, and hopefully memorable, to your target audience too. 

Designing your marketing campaign

In their marketing campaigns, I ask my students to select a stage in the customer journey as their goal. The first step in the customer journey framework I’ve adopted, and use in my teaching, is awareness. As referenced in the first post in this series, this version of the customer (or buyer) journey is inspired by Hubspot. If you are designing a campaign to generate awareness, your goal may be to simply introduce your organization or product to your target audience. And introduce it in a meaningful way as one that can help them solve a problem or overcome a challenge that they have.

So how do you discover the problems and challenges of your target audience? Well, first you have to define who they are! Just like creating your invitation list for a party, you have to think strategically about who should receive your marketing campaign. This is where market research on your ideal buyer is crucial. It could be primary research done by your organization or secondary research about your audience from third party organizations, or both! I first ask my students whose problem their organization or product is solving. Then, I ask my students to think through the demographics, psychographics and marketing channel preferences of those people. This way, their campaigns are grounded in the reality of their target audience.

Once the target audience research is done, then you are ready to design an experience with those people in mind. Just like when you’ve decided who you’re inviting, you know how to shape a good party for those people! After that, the next step is to let them know that the party is happening.

Telling them how you can solve their problem

Looking back to the Reader’s Digest article, the next step they recommend is designing a great invitation. This is similar to the design stage of campaign creative. For an awareness campaign, starting with messaging, imagery and media that reflect your organization’s mission and vision statements is one good plan. This way you can share your organization’s capabilities to solve the problems of your target audience. You probably already have clear language developed and finding the right visuals to go alongside that messaging is a natural extension of that work.

Zooming in on how your organization or product solves a problem for your target audience should guide you to develop the most relevant language and visuals. With effective creative, your awareness campaign should also be compelling and memorable! In class, I use award-winning campaigns as examples so students can see what a truly memorable campaign looks and feels like. 

Reflecting on my own marketing campaign work

When I reflect back on my own work from last year, I see a lot of awareness marketing. The projects I enjoyed the most were collaborative ones with big impact. For these campaigns, I brought multiple, mission-aligned organizations together to bring value to our shared target audience. By co-branding, we brought the power of our networks together, raising awareness of our roles as problem-solvers in our industry. These were powerful campaigns that led to impressive awareness numbers and a double digit year over year increase in our Net Promoter Score! You can read more about this work in my Cengage Client Success Story. In a few weeks, I’ll share my next post. This new post will continue the theme of hosting a party, moving on to the next phase in the customer journey – consideration. Until then – 

Be well!
Hester

Hester Tinti-Kane is the founder and CEO of Marketing Strategy Leader. She’s an award-winning, strategic marketing leader with deep experience in digital communications strategy.