[00:00:00] Are you tired of empty promises and stolen ideas? Me too! Got Marketing is a podcast for marketers and small brands who want real talk and clever strategies without the BS. Running an online business is hard, but everything gets easier when your marketing starts performing. I'm Mia Feilman, your straight shooting campaign loving friend here to talk marketing, running a business, pop culture, and everything in between.
Let's dive in.
[00:00:40] Hello friend. When I first started this business, my business model was a monthly subscription delivering campaign ideas to small brands. It flopped. Why? Because many small business owners don't actually know what a campaign is, let alone need campaign ideas on tap. I quickly realized the real opportunity wasn't giving small businesses campaigns, but teaching them how to create them.
[00:01:08] Because campaigns build brands. Name a single successful brand that doesn't run campaigns. I'll wait. Here's the thing. There is no one size fits all campaign. The best campaigns are fit for purpose. Some are designed to boost brand awareness, others to generate leads, and some to convert those leads into paying customers.
[00:01:35] The key to success with campaigns is knowing your objective. And executing with strategy. So in today's episode, we're breaking down the different types of marketing campaigns, brand awareness, lead generation, and conversion, and the step by step process to build a campaign that actually works. If your marketing is feeling scattered or ineffective, this episode will bring you focus and strategy to your efforts.
[00:02:07] Let's dive in. All right, let's start with brand awareness campaigns. Every brand should be running brand awareness campaigns. They are intended to build your audience. They are intended to gain you visibility and make you a well known brand. Brand awareness campaigns get a lot of slack because they are not directly linked to sales or conversions.
[00:02:36] But they are essential for building your brand. I love brand awareness campaigns. And if you've been following me for a while, you'll be familiar with some of mine like the Gurus We Deserve or Make Marketing Great Again. These campaigns were not intended to directly lead to paid customers. They were intended to build my brand value.
[00:02:59] To make Campaign Del Mar a well known brand. So when we're running brand awareness campaigns, what we're really hoping for is for people to be like, I know what she does and I know who she is. That's really the goal of brand awareness campaigns. Brand awareness campaigns work best when they speak to your purpose as a business.
[00:03:23] What is it that you are trying to achieve with your business? Your why? Brand awareness campaigns can be quite expensive because we are often investing in video production or photography in order to create something really memorable and attention grabbing. But they don't have to be expensive. You could create a brand awareness campaign For as little as 2, and I have done that with a campaign called Lessons in Falling.
[00:03:51] This was my first ever campaign that I launched for this business. And it was a seven part mini series that I ran across social media and emails. The reason why it cost 2 was because I bought a packet of presets. From a brand called Unfold and I created templates for my mini series using these Unfold templates.
[00:04:15] This campaign was so successful for me. It earned us our first few hundred social media followers, and it got me my first 200 email subscribers, which. are so valuable because at about 200 email subscribers, we started making money from our email list. So a brand awareness campaign doesn't have to be expensive, but it does need to be creative and it does need to be rooted in strategy.
[00:04:45] I get a lot of questions about, well, what's the call to action for a brand awareness campaign? And that's a really good question. The call to action can be as simple as learn more, discover the campaign Del Mar difference for lack of a better word, or see how we can make marketing great again together.
[00:05:03] It is an invitation to go on a journey together. That's what a brand awareness campaign is. Okay, let's move on to lead generation campaigns. The primary objective with lead gen campaigns is to build your email list, right? And it is worth running lead generation campaigns because it is so worth building your email list.
[00:05:24] As I've mentioned many times on this podcast, I make all of my money from email marketing. So how is a lead generation campaign different to a brand awareness campaign? We need a lead magnet. This could be a workshop, this could be a masterclass, it could be a webinar, it could be a checklist, it could be a download, it could be a wall art collection.
[00:05:44] We need the lead magnet and then we build a campaign for that lead magnet. With a brand awareness campaign, your brand, your story, your purpose is the hero of that campaign. For lead generation campaigns, your lead magnet is the hero. That is what we are leading with. Please make sure that you invest in a lead magnet that is high value.
[00:06:08] We are drowning in e books and white papers and pdfs. Really think outside the box with your lead magnet. One of our most successful lead magnets is a wall art collection. I created 10 inspirational marketing quotes and then I had an illustrator create posters for each of my quotes. And we made this a free download from the Campaign Del Mar website where you could get the whole wall art collection.
[00:06:39] Take it to Officeworks, take it to Canva, print it out, rotate it and zhuzh up your office walls. Hundreds of people have downloaded the wall art collection because it's different. It's not just another ebook. So lead generation campaigns, we are tracking opt ins. Please make sure that you are comparing apples with apples.
[00:07:02] We are not measuring the success of a lead generation campaign based on how many sales or enrollments or conversions you get. We are evaluating it based on how many people join your email list. So that is the metric to track. Okay, let's move on to conversion campaigns. Here's the bad news. You can only run a conversion campaign if you have a warm audience.
[00:07:29] Okay, which is why it's so important for brands to run brand awareness campaigns because we are building the audience. We are warming them up to then run a sales campaign. Please don't be the person that tries to convert a cold audience It's not going to work and you're going to burn out in the process.
[00:07:50] So you've run a brand awareness campaign to build your audience. You've run a lead generation campaign to get your audience off a borrowed channel and onto your email list and now you're ready to run a sales campaign. Be mindful about how many sales campaigns you run per year, because you can fatigue your audience.
[00:08:11] But sales campaigns can be really effective if you've got that inbuilt audience. With Sales Campaign, your offer is the hero of the campaign. So if I was going to run a campaign intended to get enrollments for Campaign Classroom, Campaign Classroom, my nine week program is the hero of that campaign. What we cover, what you learn.
[00:08:35] The testimonials related to that program, how many students have done the program before, examples of successful campaigns that were built through Campaign Classroom, that's what we're running in our sales campaign. Okay, so the question that I often get asked is, How many campaigns should I run per year?
[00:08:55] And like every good marketer, my answer is it depends. It depends on your budget. It depends on your objectives. A good frame of reference, a good place to start is to run one brand awareness campaign per year. Is to run one campaign per year where you are deliberately and intentionally trying to build your email list.
[00:09:18] So a lead gen campaign. And then run a couple of sales campaigns per year. This will mean that you cover all of your different marketing objectives. Does your marketing feel like guesswork? Be honest, join marketing circle, the membership for female entrepreneurs who want to nail their strategy, boost. and create marketing that actually pays off.
[00:09:46] No cookie cutter templates and broken dreams, just practical marketing training, mentoring and support to help you grow your business. You'll work directly with me, a legit marketing expert, and tap into a brain's trust of clever business owners who bring their expertise, ideas and support to the table.
[00:10:06] We're capped at 45 members, so apply to join today. Here's the most important thing when it comes to campaigns. One objective, one campaign. Okay. Don't cram a million objectives into one campaign. The reason why campaigns are so successful is because they are laser focused on one objective. Okay. So you've figured out what type of campaign you're going to run, whether that's brand awareness, lead generation or conversion.
[00:10:39] And by the way, there are so many more types that I will definitely talk about in a future episode. Now, what are the steps to actually create and implement a marketing campaign? Let's go through them. So number one, we've already done. Pick your primary objective. And the way that you do this is by asking yourself, what is my most pressing goal right now?
[00:11:03] If no one knows who you are, if you don't have a big enough social media audience and nobody coming to your website, then brand awareness is probably going to be your most pressing objective. Objectives are step one in planning our campaign. Step two is that I want you to channel your inner marketing nerd and write a brief.
[00:11:24] I write briefs for myself. Yes, I did say that out loud. A brief is an essential part of the campaign building process. I want you to list out what your budget is for this campaign. Who is the target audience segment that you are going after? What is your timeline? If your timeline for this campaign is four weeks from now, That changes everything else that we do when building this campaign.
[00:11:52] You don't have time to pull together an influencer marketing campaign. You don't have time to plan a major event. So having that brief provides us with the important constraints that we need in order to build the right campaign for you right now, based on your budget, based on your timeframe. The other thing to include in your brief is any specific deliverables.
[00:12:16] Is this campaign going to run across social media? If so, you're going to need vertical videos and you're going to need social media aspect ratio sizes thingamajig is. So be very clear about what you're looking for in terms of this campaign. The other thing to include in your brief is a couple of key messages that you want to get across that meet those objectives.
[00:12:41] All right, step three of building our campaign. Creativity. We need a big idea. Launching a campaign that essentially says, please buy my s t is not going to get anyone to stop the scroll and pay attention. I've mentioned this before, but the goal of marketing is to capture attention long enough for people to want to spend time with our brands.
[00:13:06] So every campaign needs a big idea. It needs a creative theme or story that makes the campaign interesting. This is the hardest part of building a campaign. Because many people believe that they're not creative. And it's just not true. Just so you know, for 12 years I was a suit. I was an account director and a brand manager, and we had really trendy, funky people wearing cool t shirts, come up with all the creative ideas.
[00:13:38] And I was the person who wrote the briefs. Well, I'm now firmly consider myself a creative. This is a muscle that you can grow. And one of the things that we do in Marketing Circle and at Campaign Del Mar is that we brainstorm. We brainstorm in groups. We really learn how to channel our creativity so that we can come up with a really cool, interesting idea for our campaigns.
[00:14:04] So that's step three is coming up with your campaign concept. Step four, we need to plan everything out. Campaigns have many moving parts. We are using a mix of paid, earned, owned, and borrowed channels, which means we've got to write so many emails, so many posts, we're going to run ads, which need creatives, which need captions.
[00:14:29] We need landing pages. We need forms on our websites. We need to brief designers. We need to clean up our email list so that we're sending this campaign to the right subscribers. All of those tasks are important, right? Because we don't want to end up dropping the ball during a campaign. We want a really pleasant and seamless customer experience for our audiences.
[00:14:57] So, this is where you use Asana or Trello or Basecamp or ClickUp or Notion to plan out your campaign. The way that I like to do this is by working backwards from my launch date and putting in dates and tasks of what has to happen when in order to meet that hard launch date. Now, by the way, I have tried all of those platforms, Asana, Basecamp, Trello, and they're good.
[00:15:26] They do the job, but after two decades of running campaigns, there was nothing that was perfect. So I created my own campaign builder. I've built it now so that it works across Asana, ClickUp, and Notion. So no matter what you use, it's gonna work for you. And it plans out campaigns the Mia way. And this is something that we offer everyone in Marketing Circle and anyone that participates in Campaign Classroom.
[00:15:52] But you can use those project management tools that I mentioned to plan out your campaign. Okay, so once we've made the plan, then we start building our campaign. This is where you start creating the assets. If you're doing a video shoot, book the shoot. If you're doing a photo shoot, liaise with your photographer.
[00:16:14] Create a run sheet. This is where you brief your graphic designer or you get Happy on Canva and create the assets for your campaign. Please have everything that you need for your campaign ready to go before you launch. You do not want to be creating assets while your campaign is in market. That is just frankly very, very silly.
[00:16:40] So be ready to go and then we push the big green button and we launch our campaign in market. And let me tell you, campaigns are hard work. There is a lot of planning, a lot of runway, and then you get to the launch and you need to be energetically available for the length of your campaign. This is where you're going to get the most comments, the most DMs, the most emails, the most inquiries, because you are the most visible.
[00:17:09] So I want you to make sure that you have. Space in your calendar to be able to be available during your campaign. Not be writing emails last minute. Campaigns can be quite exerting, but they're only in market for a few weeks. The longest I will run a campaign is four weeks. And so, yes, it's high energy, but it's time limited.
[00:17:33] And so then after your campaign, you can recharge, you can re strategize, you can take a well earned break. The last step to building a campaign is a post campaign analysis. You do not need to be a data analyst or a data scientist or have a degree in market research to do this effectively. Make a list of what your goals and KPIs were.
[00:17:58] Make a list of the results that you achieved during your campaign. Put some detail in there, write down on paper, which was your most performing Facebook ad or which email got the most clicks or which video got the most views so that you know that for next time. Every campaign will teach you something about your business because everything is theoretical until we go to market.
[00:18:24] If running a campaign sounds pretty overwhelming at this point, then I completely understand. Come and do it with us. If you've run campaigns before, but it's been a while and you haven't brushed up on your marketing skills and don't know what's the latest with marketing campaigns, then come and join us because I mean, I didn't earn the name, the campaign lady for nothing.
[00:18:46] Strong opinions are sexy. I am so mad with the word launch. Okay, so mad with it. I don't know where this word came from, but it is definitely born in the online business. But let me tell you, and I know this is going to sound snobby, but a launch is not something that ever appeared in any of my marketing textbooks.
[00:19:14] Okay. If you want to launch something. That's a verb, um, and we generally launch campaigns. We don't run a launch as a noun. But anyway, I digress. What is the difference between a launch and a campaign? So, and I have so many opinions about this. The way that online business gurus tell you to launch is to cram All of your objectives into a seven day or 14 day window where you go to market with an offer.
[00:19:55] It's usually an online course or a membership. And within 14 days, you need to take people from an unknown stranger to a paid customer. And it doesn't work. This is why so many launches fail. They are trying to do too much within too short of a window. My approach is very different. We spend time building the audience during a brand awareness campaign.
[00:20:25] We spend time nurturing the audience during a lead generation campaign, and then we ask them to spend money with us during a conversion campaign. And that period is usually three months to go from brand awareness, to lead generation, to conversion. And it works really well. Going to market with an online course that someone has never heard of, never heard of you and expecting that they are going to make a decision within two weeks is really setting yourself up for failure.
[00:20:58] Okay. That's a wrap on today's episode. I would. Love to hear your thoughts. I welcome your questions. I've started a sub stack as the ideal companion to the podcast. It's packed with extra insights, visuals, and nuggets that didn't make it into the episodes. Plus you can revisit past additions anytime. If you want more or just prefer to read, you'll love it.
[00:21:23] Plus, it's a place for us to connect. Want the backstage pass to Got Marketing? Subscribe now at gotmarketing. substack. com. And I'll see you next week. Thank you. You listened right up until the end. So why not hit that subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and they're also the best way to support a small business.
[00:21:48] You can connect with me Mia Fileman on Instagram or LinkedIn and feel free to send me a message. I'm super friendly.
