Well thought out and intelligently crafted digital marketing campaigns deliver effective results and tap on your team’s creative, digital and other latent skills. 

Crafting an effective and an unique digital marketing campaign can take up a lot of time, money and energy. Moreover, a digital campaign doesn’t necessarily guarantee you the kind of ROI that you learned was achieved by your competition. 

So what do you do in such a case? You learn from the best. The key here is to keep in mind that whatever you do should be relevant and should click with your potential audience. Therefore it should ideally resonate with your audience and may even resonate with the public at large.  

And so you observe, take notes, learn and use similar strategies executed by those digital marketing campaigns which have clicked and which have been hugely successful leaving an indelible mark in the hallmark of the online advertising industry. 

Why use a digital marketing campaign for your brand? 

Most businesses have acknowledged that they have benefitted by investing in digital marketing campaigns. Facebook hosts 8 million active advertisers who are either small or medium-sized businesses. 

Brands often use digital marketing for various reasons, one reason being, affordability. With digital marketing, there’s numerous possibilities such as social selling, retargeting, etc. through which you can get quality leads. In fact, 98% of companies use or plan to use social selling to their advantage. 

So in a way, digital marketing does make investing worth the spend. Another advantage of digital marketing campaign is that they give you the capability to drill down to your target audience through effective ad targeting. 

In the previous era, with only the traditional marketing channels such as radio, television, etc. targeting was quite limited to those who had access to these devices and further to the type of audience a channel had, no more beyond that. 

With digital marketing, advanced targeting is possible as you can now target as per age, gender, educational qualification, income, economic status, city, state or country, device, browser and much more. This enables creators to design campaigns that are relevant and are able to resonate with the target audience. 

And if you also want your brand to have more reach and gain trust, then internet presence is a must. Since 4.66 billion people are actively using the internet in 2021, reaching out to this potential means a lot. 

Thus, achieving brand awareness through digital marketing campaigns fits the goals of almost all businesses today.

6 best digital marketing campaigns of 2021

Acing a digital marketing campaign takes a lot of time and effort, nevertheless it is doable. Here are the digital marketing campaigns that have made a difference in the advertising world and have left an indelible mark in the mind of the audience.

Airbnb’s COVID-19 first responders

After the advent of the Covid19 pandemic, the focus had been on how you can prevent the spread of the virus and how you can keep yourself safe. 

But Airbnb went a step further and dedicated an entire campaign to Covid-19 responders. They announced a campaign which targeted the property owners i.e. the hosts to open their doors to the Covid-19 responders, given that all the safety protocols were being followed. 

A lesson to draw from this campaign – if you want your brand to stay on in people’s minds, empathise with them and find an impactful way to do so.

Airbnb used the pandemic to reach out to their target audience by urging them to help COVID-19 responders with accommodations, thus also helping out the public healthcare providers. All this reflected positively on Airbnb and on their brand image and brand voice.

Lego’s Rebuild the world 

Bring back some childhood memories? 

Lego is a well known Danish toy company and is a big player in the toy industry. The company even struck a chord with the adults with their #rebuildtheworld campaign. They did this by appealing to the adults to build memories while also recalling their childhood memories, which was when they were playing with their toys.

They did this by tapping on some good music and through their old advertisements. Moreover, they also focussed on the current issues pointing out the need to “rebuild” themselves and their surroundings. They called upon their target audience to take a stand on the current issues as staying silent was no longer a choice.

Further, you can draw on the strengths of your creative team and also try your hand at creative storytelling. This can help your brand create an impactful digital presence.  

Starbuck’s #whatsyourname

Starbucks started the #whatsyourname campaign signifying that every name has a story. 

The campaign was inspired by and reached out to the transgender community and the other gender diverse people who adopted a new or a different name in public. 

As a part of the campaign, moving portraits carried stories of people who had chosen new names. Thus the campaign #whatsyourname very well synced with the concept of “every name has a story”. Starbucks very intelligently created relatable content and successfully marketed itself with a human touch.

Apple’s #ShotoniPhone

The #ShotoniPhone is quite a well known campaign. If you have travelled through highways, you should have noticed quite a few captivating billboards containing very high quality pictures with the hashtag #ShotoniPhone. 

Apple had made use of the pictures clicked by the iPhone users to promote their phones on various advertising mediums majorly focussing on the digital mediums. Apple had very intelligently made use of  “user generated content” while putting forward what their users had said about them.

That was an incredibly smart  move by Apple, as they created an unique brand recall campaign. If earning the trust of your target audience is at the core of your company’s marketing goal, user generated content helps like no other, due to the fact that users have endorsed you and have taken pride in your brand. 

Gillette’s The Best A Man Can Be

Gillette’s digital marketing campaign “The best a man can be” is a perfect example of how brands can take their previous problematic marketing campaigns and messages and use them to give a healing spin. 

“The best a man can be” campaign addressed a serious issue which they too had knowingly or unknowingly contributed to in the past, which was by focusing too much on toxic masculinity.

With the help of a new spin to the narrative, Gillette now urged consumers to rethink their behavior patterns and mindsets revolving around this toxic masculinity. Using real stories of people on their website, Gillette acknowledged shortcomings that men may encounter while also resonating with their target audience.

Tasty’s Saturday Night Seder

Buzzfeed’s social media food handle Tasty organized a campaign that aimed at bringing people together ‘online’ to celebrate their love for food while at the same time they also socialized. 

This online event had celebrity appearances and music and was live streamed on their Facebook Live and Youtube channels. Though all this was pretty glamorous, the time at which this online event was organized helped people situated far and wide come together and celebrate a common interest – food.  

The proceeds from this online event went to charity for COVID-19 emergency response fund. By using the shared experiences of people, Tasty’s digital marketing campaign created a strong brand recall with their existing audience while also reaching out to their new target audience.

The fact that the campaign contributed towards charity really won it for Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed’s “time to give back to society” themed digital marketing campaign showed their target audience, their responsible side.

In Conclusion, your marketing campaign needs to connect!

In today’s world with so much happening all around, it is really difficult to hold onto the audience’s attention for more than 8 seconds. Thus, the key question, can you make those 8 seconds count? Can you create something so daring, so captivating, so wonderful, that will move your audience? 

The answer is yes, you can. All you need to do is to be aware. Be aware of the trends, the changes and the latest conversations happening in the community that your brand serves. You too can create effective, worthwhile digital marketing campaigns that will leave an indelible mark in your audience’s mind.