15 Successful Marketing Campaigns
It’s not news to any marketer: the field is evolving. As we speak to buyers at Primary Intelligence, they tell us they want marketing content that educates, is specific to their needs, and is served up in their preferred format. Here are 15 creative marketing campaigns that meet those criteria (and inspired us to also do marketing just a little bit better).
Adobe: 99u
Considered Adobe’s “educational arm,” 99U is a highly-trafficked blog and the go-to place for creative professionals. Beyond the blog, this campaign expands to a conference series, books, podcast, and a print magazine!
Why It’s Successful
Looking to serve as the “missing curriculum” on creative productivity, 99U keeps the content focused on serving creative professionals minus the strong sales pitch or direct marketing. Preserving the line between sales and content.
ADP: HCM Challenge
The audience for this campaign connects and engages with an ADP solution through the use of white papers and a diagnostic assessment tool.
Why It’s Successful
The integrated content program helped ADP spread the message to the C-suite via emails and social media platforms. ADP took a journalistic approach to white papers so the research could be presented in long form as well animated images, SlideShare decks, and blog posts. This provided ADP with opportunities to engage with their audience about their product, human capital management.
AT&T: Networking Exchange
The Exchange includes articles, white papers, webinars, and more to help businesses engage with telecommunication networks and technology experts.
Why It’s Successful
When AT&T announced the AT&T Networking Exchange via a scannable newsletter email blast, they did it using an innovative responsive email code so people could read it in any format: computer, tablet, phone. The email blast was easy to engage with the content minus any pinching or zooming, no matter the screen size.
American Express: OPEN Forum “Big Break for Small Business”
Since its launch in 2011, OPEN Forum is an AMEX hosted annual contest empowering small businesses to connect with their customers online. Winning businesses got the opportunity to learn marketing strategies from AMEX industry leaders along with funding to apply those new strategies.
Why It’s Successful
The biggest reason it works? AMEX doesn’t sell them credit credits and offers free knowledge and support instead. They help answer questions through content and create posts which link back to their website. This campaign helps AMEX building a community of entrepreneurs who will use their credit card services eventually.
Hewlett Packard: Success Stories Demo
HP StorageWorks Division’s Success Stories site contains hundreds of case studies.
Why It’s Successful
It’s easy to navigate between stories and find one that’s applicable to the readers situation. This site is not only functional but also tailored to their target buyer. The stories themselves are well constructed and serve up the validation buyers are looking for when making a decision.
General Electric (GE): Quirky+GE
This website promotes GE’s product Aros, “the world’s smartest air conditioner you can control with your smartphone.”
Why It’s Successful
GE combined their efforts with crowd-sourcing platform Quirky to mix questions, videos, links, and images into their social media campaign, focusing on topics like medical science and data science. Although they mention the GE brand in posts, the spotlight is on technology and innovation rather than self-promotion.
Google: Think with Google
This site is designed to provide insights and planning tools on consumer behavior data and ground-breaking research from Google and industry leaders. The YouTube Ads Leaderboard series, Creative Sandbox, and newsletter provide inspiration for advertisers and marketers everywhere.
Why It’s Successful
With an 80% year-over-year increase in unique engaged visitors and 2.6 million Google+ followers, it’s clear the site is successful. It works because of a beautiful interface and, most importantly, relevant content.
IBM: Smarter Planet
This campaign includes long print ads in the Wall Street Journal, thought leadership followed by action, and stories from IBM employees via the social network.
Why It’s Successful
The biggest success factor is the employees who engage in social networking. By having employees share their knowledge and start conversations, the campaign is still making its mark among B2B professionals even though the campaign launched 6 years ago.
Klick Inc.: Klick Wire
This email newsletter promotes content from Klick’s Digital RX blog.
Why It’s Successful
The newsletter builds Klick as a digital health and marketing expert by including pioneering information, trends, strategies, and best practices in the healthcare and marketing industries. Contributing authors include Klick employees and senior leadership who share opinions about current events in the digital health space. The site also recruits external sources to write articles.
Kimberly-Clark: The Healthy Workplace Project 90-Day Challenge
This campaign promoting health and wellness focuses on making the workplace more productive.
Why It’s Successful
By relying on people’s competitive spirit, this campaign features eye-catching imagery and humorous taglines that’s delivered through via multiple channels (print and digital).
Limelight Networks: Digital Presence for Dummies
Written by Jason Thibeault, this campaign was a simple e-book written to educate marketers on digital presence. Limelight partnered with Wiley (owners of the “Dummies” brand) for the book.
Why It’s Successful
The book deftly integrates humor and simple instructions, making it work for a large audience. Limelight smartly found a partner with a well-known brand that could help it earn wide distribution. The e-book earned awards and, according to Top Rank Blog, received close to 10,000 social media and news release views, and generated more than $200k worth of sales opportunities for Limelight.
Penske: Stories That Move Us
The cleverly-titled campaign promoted the Penske Truck Rental brand through customer stories.
Why It’s Successful
Penske pushed this campaign through multiple channels — sales meetings, tradeshows, online, and through email blasts. They also identified the correct targets — transportation, logistics, and supply chain managers — and crafted the message to meet their needs.
SunGard: How to Move to the Cloud and Survive a Zombie Attack
Riding the zombie wave, SunGard created this series of infographics and e-books geared toward IT professionals, designed to create awareness for their Cloud offerings.
Why It’s Successful
The humor makes this campaign “click worthy”, but the real value is the simple steps and facts offered about SunGard’s offering.
VerticalResponse: VerticalResponse Customers Get Their Deal On
This campaign is a daily-deal email and landing page geared toward post-holiday weary customers and non-converted leads.
Why It’s Successful
The email is bold and easy to read, with the offer code and “Buy Now” button taking center stage. The landing page continues the urgency to buy with a live countdown to how much time is left to redeem the offer.
Xerox: Get Optimistic
This content marketing campaign produces the Chief Optimist publication, which combines Forbes magazine articles and Xerox thought leadership.
Why It’s Successful
Designed to resemble a trade magazine rather than marketing collateral, Xerox was able to get Chief Optimist into the hands of business leaders. A 10-city live event complemented the campaign and helped launch its success.