A marketing campaign is a coordinated, concerted, multi-channel effort to get certain people to take an action. Below are seven universal principles of successful marketing campaigns which you can apply to marketing your nonprofit to any audience:
- A Campaign Should Be Designed by Beginning with the Desired Actions: Marketing starts by defining a desired action for a specific audience within a marketplace and plans backward from there. That's why our marketing arrowhead has action at its tip.
- Good campaigns are grounded in the perspective of the audience they are intended to reach: This audience perspective becomes the basis for forging connections with the people we want to reach, offering them a compelling benefit exchange, and sticking in their memories.
- A Campaign Must Be Inescapable: To succeed marketing campaigns must deliver a message many times, over time, in many forms. A few ads do not constitute a campaign. We need to concentrate our marketing efforts, or they won't have an effect.
- A Campaign Should Stake Out a Unique Competitive Position: Our marketing campaigns vie for attention with many other marketing campaigns, so we have to draw on the principles of competition to make sure the campaign we create not only reinforces the unique competitive position we want to stake out but also stands out from other campaigns.
- A Campaign Should Be Emblematic of the Cause and Extend the Brand: In making clear the competitive advantage of our product or service, the marketing campaign is defining our cause in the eyes of our audience. It is projecting who we are, what we do, and why our task is important. Therefore the campaign needs to be true to our cause.
- A Campaign Must Be Flexible: Marketing campaigns are in sync with the marketplace, which shifts all the time. Campaigns must be sensitive to those dynamics.
- A Campaign Should Be Tested Many Times: Good campaigns are tested before they happen, while they are happening, and after they happen.
