Marketing Campaigns: Definition, Types, and Examples

What Is a Marketing Campaign?

Marketing campaigns comprise a series of strategic efforts to use marketing channels to achieve a certain business goal or objective. This can include promoting business offerings to consumers using different forms of media, such as television, radio, print, and online platforms, but can also encompass broader objectives, such as growing brand awareness or differentiating a brand from the competition. A company that has lost sales due to negative press might also consider using a marketing campaign to rehabilitate its image.

Although marketing campaigns can include paid advertising on traditional and digital media channels, they may also include marketing efforts through organic channels such as a company's email newsletter, website, and social media. Businesses operating in highly competitive markets and franchisees may initiate frequent marketing campaigns and devote significant resources to generating brand awareness and sales.

Understanding Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaigns aren't just limited to advertising products or services; they can be designed with many different goals in mind, including building a brand image, introducing a new product, increasing sales of a product already on the market, or even reducing the impact of negative news. Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign requires defining, tracking, and analyzing performance metrics or KPIs that are relevant to the marketing channels and intended campaign goals.

Marketing campaigns can be planned and managed in different ways, but most effective campaigns start with a comprehensive strategy and use project management principles to organize budgets, timelines, roles, and responsibilities. They may also take advantage of briefs and templates to communicate project requirements and streamline the planning and creative process.

Types of Marketing Campaign Activities

There are many different avenues for marketing to customers, so typically, any given marketing campaign will include a list of channels a company will use to communicate with its audience. Campaigns can also have different goals and intentions that will define the types of resources they need and the activities that are likely to have an impact.

Types of Marketing Channels

These channels can include aspects of a company's digital and physical presence, such as:

• Printed assets displayed at a brick-and-mortar location
• Printed or digital brochures or pamphlets
• Social media channels
• Printed or emailed newsletters
• TV or radio advertisements
• Website and blog
• PR outreach and press releases
• Out-of-home advertising, such as billboards, transit ads, or digital displays

Often, the chosen channels will dictate the format and style of creative assets that a company will need to produce for any given campaign. However, in order for a campaign to be impactful, it's important to consider how it will be expressed across channels, and to strive for consistency in visuals and messaging.

Marketing Campaign Resources

Companies may use in-house marketing teams to generate their own marketing strategies and materials, or they may use paid advertising and professional freelancers or agencies to help them reach a wider audience. Some companies do both, depending on the size of their team and the nature of their campaign.

Whatever the size of the company, it’s important to designate the appropriate tools, resources, and processes to take advantage of the results of a marketing campaign. For example, if you are prompting customers to sign up for your email list, you must make sure that the list is managed well and that new customers are set up to receive marketing messages. If visits to your website increase, you must ensure that it is set up to handle the influx of traffic that a marketing campaign may generate.

Marketing Campaign Goals

Companies run marketing campaigns for all kinds of reasons, whether it's to launch a new offering, partner with another brand or organization, increase brand awareness, or showcase their brand values. For a marketing campaign to be successful, an intended outcome should be agreed upon and defined according to specific metrics or KPIs. Once the campaign ends, the campaign performance should be reviewed and analyzed.

A marketing campaign can strive to create a positive impression of a brand or business offering, or it might be created to combat a negative impression. For example, companies that lose sales due to major negative press often use marketing campaigns to rehabilitate their image. One example is Chipotle Mexican Grill, which was investigated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after dozens of customers became sick in 2015 from food safety issues related to E. coli and norovirus. Chipotle’s sales dropped 30% in the first quarter of 2016, so to regain customer interest, the company offered coupons for free food via direct mail and texts. Chipotle also used online video to announce a $10 million grant to support local farmers.

Examples of Successful Marketing Campaigns

One of the most prominent and widely watched marketing opportunities every year is the Super Bowl. In 2024, a single 30-second commercial spot cost up to $7 million. As such, brands who choose to advertise during the Super Bowl often pour their best creative ideas and resources into making their ad campaigns unique and impactful. Apple's famous "1984" Super Bowl ad, which ran in the same year as the title of the dystopian novel it referenced, is often cited as one of the most memorable ads of all time and contributed to around $150 million in Macintosh sales in about 3 months.

Another iconic example is the "Got Milk?" campaign run by the California Milk Processor Board throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, which got celebrities and other notable figures to sport "milk mustaches" on their upper lips to promote milk consumption. A 1999 study by the US Department of Agriculture reported that generic dairy advertising between 1984 to 1997 raised fluid milk sales by about 6 percent.

The Bottom Line

Marketing campaigns can include, but aren't necessarily limited to, a company's advertising efforts. Campaigns can be run on a company's organic channels, such as its website, blog, email, and social media, or through paid advertising opportunities on TV, radio, and digital marketing channels, or in print. A company might decide to run a marketing campaign for a variety of reasons, but in order to set itself up for success, it should have a strategic outcome in mind that it can measure, track, and review.