Design a Marketing Campaign that Works

In a world where everyone and their mother is a Social Media Marketing Guru or an Online Marketing Expert, it is difficult to cut through the noise to find a tune you can dance to. Designing a digital marketing campaign is about just that design. It is important to look at a number of options in order to hone in on the graphic, wording, layout that is both attention getting and conveys the message. Throwing a cute kitten on a post about my latest white paper may get attention, but is it going to attract an appropriate audience. Conversely that dry research without some form of evocative image ain’t gonna get the clicks.

I have been fortunate in my consulting practice to work with some open minded people that have allowed me to stretch the envelop of exciting and pertinent content.

Here is a small cross section of some past designs and the audience data that went along with them, because let’s face it no advertising campaign is worth it if you can’t track its reach.

While helping the Converting and Package Printing (CPP) Expo to grow its audience we were able to capitalize on the popularity of Soccer’s World Cup that was happening at the time. Using some of the imagery and analogizing the scoring of goals with the benefits of attending the show we won a very decent open and click through rate on our email campaign.

17% open rate
Click through at 5%

18% open rate
Click through at 4%

The conventional wisdom puts the open rate for email marketing at a generous 11.1% these two campaigns garnered 18 and 17% respectively, well above average. While the click through rate was hovering around 4-5% which is also impressively above average.

In another mailing we used bold bright colors and represented a tropical (equated as fun) atmosphere. Also gaining some very good numbers. 

An 18% open rate
with click through around 6%

Conversely for the International Franchise Expo we relied on some more traditional images and had some big name brand recognition. While the open rate was spectacular we were not as impressive with our click through numbers numbers.

22% is not too shabby either.

23% open rate is spectacular.

   

When it comes to infographics things are a little bit harder to track, but layout is really the key element here in that it must be visually appealing and it must flow in an orderly manner to help the viewer process the information in a way that makes sense.

Very precisely targeted, this
achieved a click on rate of almost 10%

With a click on rate of 8%
we managed beat the industry average.

Infographics have an average click on rate of about 5% and with the above I was again able to beat that number by offering clean well organized image and information.
While this less well designed and more cluttered image below, we did do less well.

Our click on rate here was a mere 5%
This I attribute to the cluttered layout.

Also of increasing importance when it comes to  Social Media and Digital Marketing  stratagem are what I call “Flash Card”, these are the simple informational images  that don’t rise to the level of infographics, but can be very useful on twitter and other platforms to give a quick snapshot of what you will see when you click through. For this type of image what we want to see numbers wise are a high engagement rate (who stopped to view or enlarge it) as well as the desired click through.

These two are much more cluttered and the layout is far more busy, not surprisingly they garnered less attention than did the bottom images which have a more concise direct layout. Also interesting is the image with the solar flare worked out quite well as opposed to the infographic with a similar image, above, which tells us that the image is less important than how it is used.

Again we learn that design is the key to getting the result we desire.

Additionally, I feel it is important to point out that all of these campaigns were organic, no dollars were harmed in the generation of these numbers.