20 of The Best Digital Marketing Campaign You Can Swipe
Advanced advertising efforts are one of the best approaches to get a predictable flow of clients at scale – yet running a marketing campaign could be expensive and tedious. As if that’s not enough, there’s also no assurance that it will earn you a positive ROI.
A digital marketing campaign can be defined as an online strategy with the objective of promoting a product or service through increased traffic, engagement or conversions.
Making sense of how to reach, connect with and convert potential clients can be overwhelming, hence it’s usually smart to take a look at the brands that have been successful, break down what they’re doing and emulate for your business.
We have collated a rundown of 20 of the most unique digital marketing campaign examples that increased organizations ROI and added value to their clients, and we also breakdown why they work.
20 Top Digital Marketing Campaign Examples
1) Mobile Monkey
MobileMonkey, a Facebook messenger chatbot for businesses, definitely practices what it preaches. With increasing acquisition costs, they used their own chatbot to decrease customer acquisition costs while increasing reach, amazing right!
At the time, MobileMonkey was paying between $150-250 per lead. The issue with that is you usually pay for a click, but in the event, it doesn’t convert on your site, you’ll likely lose it forever.
About 98% of customers will leave your website without purchasing anything, and around 75% of those people will never return.
It’s very likely however that even if you do get the clicks, you won’t get any sales without remarketing. MobileMonkey eventually switched to optimizing for messages, with this, it enabled them to automatically collect an individual’s information in the system for retargeting. Here’s what the exact ad looked like:
For the retargeting, they made use of Messenger drip marketing campaign. This cut down their cost per lead acquisition by 97%, which also enabled them to reach a wider audience with the product.
The most interesting part about this is that the chat templates assist to give a much more customized experience than if you just sent people to a general landing page.
Learning:
If you’re looking to minimize marketing costs, consider minimizing costs of your leads through untapped channels like Messenger. Don’t just focus on getting more people with your advertising; rather focus on getting more qualified leads in your contacts.
2) Single Grain
Single Grain, a successful digital marketing company knows the importance of setting the SEO and brand-building foundation with great content marketing. That’s why for them, an omnichannel content strategy is a huge priority.
Every customer is unique and has their platform of choice, be it getting their content off Twitter, Facebook groups, Instagram influencers, Quora, blogs, email newsletter roundups, podcasts etc.
Single Grain and its CEO Eric Siu, are all about omnipresence. Eric has a daily marketing podcast (co-hosted with Neil Patel) known as Marketing School, as well as the weekly Leveling Up podcast and a YouTube channel. On the Leveling
Up podcast, he interviews renowned entrepreneurs and on the YouTube channel, he shares tactics and strategies for fellow marketers, entrepreneurs and business owners:
Also, a lot of their content is repurposed. For example, they posted a video called 7 Fresh SEO Hacks that You Need to Try and then repurposed the audio and posted it to the podcast.
They also repurposed some pieces to their blog where they publish about three times per week. Each blog article containing about 2,000 words or more including actionable insights that people can immediately use in their own marketing campaign strategy. Also, they do Facebook Lives, Fireside Chats, webinars, content collaborations with companies such as Intercom, ImpactBND, interviews, speaker events.
Learning:
Your potential customers may be online, but they’re not all on the same platform and don’t have a preference for the same media. Develop a multi-channel, multi-media strategy. You don’t always have to come up with separate topics for each channel. You can use topics that have performed well on one channel and repurpose them into a piece of content for other segments of your audience.
3) Anheuser-Busch
One of the smartest marketing campaign strategies of 2020 is Anheuser-Busch’s shift from brewing beer to manufacturing hand sanitizers at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. While it’s possible that it wasn’t originally designed to be a marketing campaign strategy, it has undoubtedly generated loads of brand awareness from publications such as LA Daily News, Fox, and the New York Post.
Their effort towards helping communities has also been a great way to build loyalty and goodwill with their community.
About 78% of Americans believe that companies should positively affect society hence, this was a great step in the right direction.
Learning:
Anheuser-Busch’s pivot assisted them in gaining the respect of customers which millions spent on advertising could have never done. Think about how you can contribute to the community in a way that your customers will talk about and remember. Always think beyond monetary rewards.
4) Lego
Lego’s offering makes it relatively easy for them to create a grand marketing campaign, and oh do they take advantage of this! In 2019, they released their first global brand marketing campaign in 30 years with Rebuild the World.
Lego had already established success in groundbreaking advertising with The Lego Movie:
With this new campaign, the intention was to tackle issues that were presumably bigger than the toy industry. The vice president of Lego and head of its in-house agency Remi Marcelli states, “We have proven ourselves in the toy industry and now it’s about more than toys.” The marketing campaign contains references to climate change and a scene with a transgender couple and the expectation is that it will inspire the future generation to take a closer look at critical social issues:
The video amassed more than 5 million views on YouTube and was successful due to the potentially controversial stance they took on social issues. This helped in shaping their brand story and gave people something positive to remember.
Learning:
Putting yourself out there as a brand that cares about more than just its products is a good way to stand out from the competition. Think of how you can create a story and values that your target audience will recall. Don’t be a faceless brand that caters to “everybody.” Pick a stance and own it i.e. humanize your brand.
5) Lyft
Lyft is a ridesharing company that has grown so much over the past few years.
The company’s swift growth in America is likely due to the fact that the average American is more than happy to pay for convenience. In fact, the average Americans spend about $4,000 on convenience each year and the leading percentage of it goes towards ridesharing. Realizing this, the company saw that because people already love their service, they just needed their current customers to spread the word.
To achieve this, they implemented a referral program and the company grew almost completely through word-of-mouth marketing – which of course is a very high-converting channel. In fact: 83% of people claim that they are more likely to purchase a product or service when it is recommended by a friend or family.
Lyft offers incentives for riders to act as advocates for the business by providing referral codes for their friends in exchange for free or discounted rides.
A combination of Lyft’s amazing and convenient product with a strong referral system is making the startup grow like wildfire.
Learning:
Begin by delivering a great service and then build a referral program that attracts word-of-mouth business. More often than not, it’s a more cost-effective approach than buying ads and is much more effective since friends love to give each other recommendations. Start by targeting one particular type of customer (in Lyft’s case it was tech entrepreneurs), and allow them to spread your message across to other segments.
6) State Farm
State Farm has delivered some of the most interesting advertising campaign examples, as they are masters in the art of infusing humour into a clear and consistent message: Here to Help Life Go Right.
In their most recent campaign, “Not The One,” they depict a man being dumped by his successful girlfriend. When he comes out of the house he’s greeted by Jake from State Farm. It fits effortlessly with their branding message of “Here to Help Life Go Right” and they released it with perfect timing on Valentine’s Day.
Even the renowned public speaking organization, Toastmasters, recommends using humour to connect better with your audience.
The critical thing to remember is that they kept the story in line in check with their branding message. If you’re creating a humorous campaign, don’t let the humour eclipse your message.
Learning:
Humour is effective for producing better Make your marketing simple for people to consume and don’t be afraid of being silly. State Farm has made something as ‘boring’ as insurance entertaining.
7) Dove
Dove produces some of the most groundbreaking marketing campaigns with their touching commercials that change beauty standards. Dove understands that the solution they are offering (body wash and soap) is just part of the larger picture. Women don’t just want to look better; they want to feel better.
They started with the Real Beauty campaign, where a forensic artist made two blind sketches of a few women – one from her description of herself only (he couldn’t see her) and one from a description of her given by another person. The sketches of the women describing themselves were all much less flattering than when described by someone else:
Dove has taken this idea to a new level with its latest campaign #Showus (more women who look like me):
This was a collaboration between Dove, GirlGaze (a GenZ photography organization) and Getty Images to create Project #ShowUs, a collection of 10,000+ images of women and non-binary persons in 39 countries that offer a broader vision of beauty for all media and advertisers to use.
Nonetheless, 70% of women claim they felt that they aren’t represented in everyday media images.
Since the start of this campaign, the company has nearly doubled its worth to a $4.5 billion valuation, proving the significance of joining a movement and listening to what your customers really desire.
Learning:
Understand the fundamental pain of your customers. These women were purchasing a beauty and self-care product, but they didn’t just want soap; they wanted to feel more beautiful in their own skin. Dove did this in a great way. Consider the bigger solution that your company can proffer. Your customers are perhaps just using your product as a tool to realize a larger goal.
8) Slack
Slack is a cloud-based instant messaging tool intended to be the centre of workplace collaboration so teams can communicate seamlessly, share files all in one place, integrate tools (like Google Drive, Zapier or Salesforce) and use video calling features:
It’s had an astonishing rise to fame from its 15,000 user launch in 2014 and currently holds the title as the fastest-growing business app in history:
• Slack has more than 12 million active users.
• In the fourth quarter (as of January 31 2020), Slack’s revenue rose to $181.9 million, a profit of 49% compared to the year-ago quarter, and up 37% from the previous year.
• It has a total conversion rate of about 14.7%.
Instead of launching a big marketing campaign, Slack’s success leveraged epic customer relations. They had a great start by generating pre-launch reviews from online publications like Venture Beat, TechCrunch and Inc.
They then maintained this momentum by emphasizing customer satisfaction and designing an amazing customer experience: It only takes three clicks to start using the product, and Slack will return any credits to you if you stop using it. In addition to this, their response time is about one hour even though they receive over 25,000 requests daily.
The product itself also resolves huge problems that teams were facing, like moving away from disorganized, endless email chains for more efficient communication: “In your inbox, seeing all the conversations about a single project requires sifting through many different email chains. In Slack, you can save time by seeing all the discussions and files about a project in one place: a channel.”
They also have a “Slack Wall of Love” on which you can find the latest Tweets and re-Tweets from people who love this messaging tool.
Learning:
From the first day, Slack has been about selling a solution, and not a product. They’ve concentrated on customer experience, believing that one positive experience does more than a large marketing budget could ever hope to accomplish. As their tagline says, they’re “on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.”
So, ensure to make it all about solving your customers’ pain points.
9) Airbnb
Airbnb has transformed the way we travel and look for accommodations. Launched when its founders couldn’t afford their own rent, the site now has over 150 million users, 7 million listings, and a total valuation of $35 billion:
Their digital marketing strategy depends largely on user-generated images and videos. Particularly on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (highlighting the cities and properties in its stable). Including how-to videos and posts directed towards owners, and popular city guides.
Their Instagram campaign mixes humour with compelling images of different travel locations around the globe, transforming it from more than just a service to a travel forum.
They are popular for their social media influencer collaborations. Mariah Carey was the first celebrity who used Airbnb back in 2015, and when the company’s marketing team saw that her post got 45K likes, they quickly jumped on the opportunity to collaborate with her – the first of many influencer campaigns:
Airbnb then went on to host Lady Gaga for her Super Bowl performance, as well as Drake, Wiz Khalifa Martin Garrix, and Stefanie Giesinger at their Coachella performances. Garrix’s post produced a 10% engagement rate:
Airbnb’s Instagram account currently boasts over 4.8 million users and continues to grow.
Learning:
Create demand around your product or service by finding a topic associated with your business that’s interesting. For instance, Airbnb is ultimately a crowdsourced hotel business, so interesting content for them is related to travel sites around the globe. Generate interest with content, and the returns will come. Also, consider how you can utilize influencers to do the marketing for you.
10) Consulting.com
Consulting.com is a coaching business for entrepreneurs who are getting their consultancy off the ground:
However, this isn’t just a lifestyle business for the founder, Sam Ovens. It’s surprisingly a $30+ million dollar business that was grown off of Facebook ads.
Till date, their ads are extremely successful with engagement and conversion numbers that are off the charts. Just take a look at one of their latest ads which generated nearly 800 comments. Not only is the engagement technically viral, but people love him!
So how are they so successful?
Firstly, Ovens runs ads that appeal both emotionally and logically and he tests loads of different versions. On the other hand, he also runs ads that appeal to a more logical reader. All his ads drive traffic to a webinar that has features of both the emotional and logical appeal.
Even so, the real genius of his Facebook ads is his copy. He’s a fantastic storyteller and thoroughly understands the dreams, fears and desires of his audience. He’s open and honest with his audience and while he surely is successful, he makes himself appear amiable and always talks to students with the attitude of “I did it and so can you.”
Learning:
If you’re driving people to a webinar or even just to pick up the phone, invest in mind-blowing copywriting and learn to tell great stories. Also, understand the nuances or retargeting, if you don’t grab the persons attention with a logical post, capture it with a more emotional post.
11) Yelp
It may seem pretty obvious, but the idea of combining social networking and online reviews enabled Yelp founders to gain traction when they first launched.
It wasn’t that review sites were unheard of at the time, but this company tried it a little differently with the social angle. Majority of customers believe online reviews as much as personal recommendations (81% of people between 18-34 trust online reviews as much as those from their friends and family). Yelp took advantage of this by allowing people to share their names, photos and experiences.
They put a lot of time and effort into growing a true community by enabling people to make friends (just like Facebook) and building out profiles. This helped customers trust reviews more since they could see the full profile of the reviewer:
Today:
• 45% of customers will likely check Yelp reviews before visiting the business
• 35% of people searching on Yelp will actually make a visit to the site they check within 24 hours
• Businesses could see up to a 9% increase in revenue for each new star earned on Yelp
Learning:
Focus on building a trustworthy brand and a trustworthy community. Reflect on how other brands like Facebook have grown over the years: they built a community that people loved and trusted. To give the best recommendations for every kind of business, Yelp needed fantastic reviewers, which other users could trust.
When they focused their marketing efforts on creating that trust, they were able to move swiftly ahead of other review sites.
12) Tide
For a long time, Tide has been a star of many Super Bowl ads. One of their most successful marketing campaigns was 2018 Every Ad Is a Tide Ad campaign.
The brains behind the ad, Saatchi and Saatchi were struggling to come up with good ideas about clothing stains when they realized that most of the ads on television feature people in clean clothes. As result, they decided to create a brilliant ad showing that “all ads are Tide ads” because all ads feature people in beautifully clean clothes.
The ad itself featured a man pretending to sell different products, but as each actor features stain-free clothes, he then concludes that every ad is actually selling Tide.
The results were remarkable with #TideAd trending on Twitter for the whole Super Bowl game that year.
Learning:
The best way to rejuvenate old campaigns may be to go in the opposite direction. Instead of talking about stains, they reversed it to talk about cleanliness. Consider how you can flip some of your old campaigns and make them strong new campaigns.
13) Uniqlo
Uniqlo, an innovative Japanese apparel company with a valuation of over $12 billion is the world’s third-largest retailer, after Zara and H&M. Their growth and success are largely due to their unique marketing approaches. By branding themselves as a tech company rather as opposed to a fashion company, Uniqlo has proved itself to be a trend adopter from the beginning.
It didn’t come as a surprise that their 2019 marketing campaign, #UTPlayYourWorld, made Uniqlo one of the first brands to use TikTok:
This campaign was a competition, which leveraged user-generated content. Consumers had to make a video on TikTok of them in a UT t-shirt, playing the challenge’s theme song and using the #UTPlayYourWorld hashtag. The company then chose winners from each country and region (for a total of five) and posted their videos on the monitors in Uniqlo stores globally and on social media.
This is an amazing way to not only generate content for free, but it could also help build your social following.
Learning:
Consider how you can use user-generated content and let your customers do the marketing for you. Since 83% of consumers either completely or fairly trust recommendations from family and friends, this is one of the most high-converting methods of advertising. This marketing campaign is also more effective than the typical “share to win” campaign, as your fans have to make the content themselves.
14) Close
Close is a CRM for startups and SMBs, it’s a great example of delivering solid content marketing campaign year after year. The blog generates six figures in traffic value per month and over 40,000 monthly visitors to the site, amazing for a SaaS company’s blog!
So why is their strategy so strong?
Well for one, the founder, Steli Efti, invests greatly in creating a lot of content himself. For instance, he has his own podcast known as The Startup Chat with Hiten Shah from which his team repurposes the expert content into blog posts:
Also, Efti creates a lot of content for the blog itself. For instance, when the Coronavirus hit, he created a video of himself talking with a team member about his remote onboarding process:
The episode was then repurposed into not just a transcript, but a full blog post with complete bullet points, screenshots, GIFs and more: They also share videos that the founder posts to his personal social accounts.
Finally, the team on its own is very capable of creating unique content. They invest a lot of time and effort into creating content that isn’t currently available. For instance, they often source original ideas from their own fans, like creating a piece about great and terrible Coronavirus emails:
Their guides and lead magnets are also well attuned to the current state of things. For instance, they recently launched a Remote Sales Survival Guide and the CTA is prominently displayed in the middle of the article.
Learning:
Creating a solid content marketing campaign strategy and sticking to it is the best way to see continuous growth. Going omnichannel can give you a 250% lift in engagement, also repurpose your content! Finally, develop truly expert content and take the time to collect unique data and research before you begin writing. This is what really makes a brand’s content marketing unique.
15) Chris Do
A lot of brands struggle to gain traction on Instagram because they think that its not a viable platform for sales. However, 62% of people actually become more interested in a product after seeing it on Instagram Stories.
Chris Do does an amazing job using Instagram for B2B with a six-figure following and teaches other B2B marketers how to do the same. First, he doesn’t just create posts; he creates carousels. A carousel is essentially a slide show of several images. Below is an example of a carousel called “The Perfect Sales Call,” where you swipe through the slides.
However, what really aided his growth was guest carousels. Similar to guest posts, if you create a guest carousel, you can then pitch it to willing influencers to post on their Instagram accounts.
Eric Siu recently did a guest carousel for Chris Do and it helped Eric in gaining 600 followers just from that one carousel!
Learning:
Instagram is largely underutilized for most B2B companies because they believe that they can’t compete with a lot of the entertainment content on Instagram. However, because most companies think this way, it’s actually a very good opportunity.
16) Tesla
Tesla’s success is one of the greatest digital marketing campaign examples with an immense social media presence. Despite being a lot younger in the market than its competitors such as Audi, BMW, and Chevrolet, Tesla is wildly popular with 5.1 million followers on Twitter (this is almost more than all three competitors combined):
Even though they only tweet about 4-6 times in a month and each tweet has something interesting to share, even if you aren’t actively in the market for a car.
Clearly, this level of success is a comprehensive process, but we can identify two major factors.
The first is the popularity and activity of Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, who is extremely active on Twitter and has more than 33 million followers. He doesn’t just reserve posts for product announcements and promotions. He shows his personality and uses it as a way to humanize himself more and be more transparent in the eyes of the world.
The second factor to their success is their Livestream events. These events generate tons of hype and attention, with people sharing the link on social media and live Tweeting. The unveiling of the ‘cybertruck’ alone garnered 2.6 million views:
Learning:
There are two major lessons here. First, if you’re a CEO or founder, don’t be wary of social media. Having an active online presence makes your brand and mission more human and relatable. Second, Livestream events are a great way to get your customers attention and engagement. It generates continuous conversation between friends and strangers around the world.
17) Google Photos
As a leading tech company, Google undoubtedly isn’t the first company that comes to mind when talking of emotional ad campaigns. However, their “Loretta” campaign brought tears to the eyes of watchers from around the globe during at the 2020 Super Bowl. CNN, USA Today, Today.com and many others covered it.
This marketing campaign featured a man who is using the Google Photo product to relive past experiences with his late wife. The ad itself is the actual audio of a Google employee’s grandfather, which makes the ad even more touching and original. The video received over 12 million views around the time of the Super Bowl and now has around 62 million views.
Even a tech company like Google understands how important it is to create an emotional connection with its users.
Learning:
If you are going to invest in a marketing campaign (even if it’s not a Super Bowl commercial slot), consider how you can connect to the emotions of people. How does your product really help people and impact their lives? And how do you capture that and share it with your fans?
18) Twitter’s #BrandBowl
Talking of the Super Bowl and digital engagement, Twitter decided to capitalize on the commercial hype and try to control the dialogue by hosting the #BrandBowl, which analyses the best Super Bowl campaigns on Twitter. This competition puts side by side the major brand’s marketing teams against one another as they compete in a few categories involving online engagement.
Here are the winners.
Winners got Twitter ad credits and consumer reach in addition to a nice customized trophy and obviously industry bragging rights. The marketing campaign got the attention of both of Twitter’s main audiences:
• Users – who were exhilarated to support their favourite commercials on Twitter
• Brands – who were encouraged to promote their commercial and hashtags even more than normal
It was a brilliant marketing campaign because rather than trying to move people’s attention away from the Super Bowl, Twitter made the most of the hype and made themselves the centre of attention. They became the host of the excitement.
Learning:
Capitalize on events that already have a lot of attention and exposure. By creating awards or competitions within those events, you’ll garner a lot more attention and even stand to gain some exposure from the brands involved in the event.
19) Popeyes Chicken Sandwich
Popeyes, an American fast-food chain focused on fried chicken, developed a chicken sandwich in late 2019 that caused quite a stir. As a way to attract more attention to the new product, they started what was known as the “Chicken Sandwich Wars.
”The Chicken Sandwich Wars was a genius marketing campaign/Twitter feud that Popeyes started with Chick-Fil-A by retweeting one of their posts and replying with “y’all good?” While Chick-Fil-A failed to respond, several other restaurants joined, such as Wendys and Shake Shack. Within just three days of the initial Chicken Sandwich Battle, Popeyes gained a remarkable 25,000 new followers on Twitter.
This marketing campaign worked out amazingly well and their sandwiches sold like hotcakes. In fact, as they began to sell out, it drove the demand off the charts. People turned to eBay paying anywhere from $60 to $10,000 (!!) for the chicken sandwiches and many stood in lines for hours at Popeyes to get their hands on the now-infamous chicken sandwich. Gayle King even went to 16 different Popeyes just to taste the sandwich.
In the end, the chicken sandwich sold out in just 16 days during which time Popeyes raked in over a whopping $65 million, talk about ROI!
The Lesson:
While starting a war with your competition can be a risky move, the best takeaway from this is that they created real scarcity. They brought the chicken sandwich back to the menu as a regular item, even though it hadn’t had nearly the sensation that it originally had when launched as a speciality item. Think about how you can create demand and scarcity with your products.
20) Planet Fitness
Planet Fitness, one of the leading gym chains in the country, was recently shut down due to the Coronavirus. In an effort to continue to remain in the minds of their customers, they created Facebook Livestreams every day at 7 p.m. They also record the videos for users to go back to later on.
Even though they don’t make any monetary gains from the livestreams directly, it keeps them top of mind and might even get some new people who are now stuck at home in quarantine and eager to begin their fitness journey:
Their engagement metrics likely were through the roof with more than 400 shares it, 170K views, and 2.8K likes.
Learning:
Livestreams can be a really good way to engage customers who want to attend your event, but can’t for whatever reason. If you are delivering an exceptional experience for attendees, then, by all means, broadcast it. Show participants having fun and getting value from the experience.
You may not necessarily stream the whole event, as well. Ultra only streams certain stages and artists. You may choose to stream just your keynote speaker or special segments of your event that deliver the most value and pitch it as “just a sample” of the full event.
