How do you build a smart content campaign?
In a content campaign, you combine a series of content formats in a journey and push those formats in a targeted way to the target audience. You create the campaign from three perspectives:
Who is your target audience, and what offerings do you have?
In what steps does your audience get you from awareness to conversion, and how do we push that?
In what layers of reason, emotion and interaction do you build your offering?
01
Target group and offerings
It is obviously crucial to make an interesting offer that suits your target audience. Make sure you have a sharp picture of the people in your target audience and, above all, visibility into their pain points (see our article on content strategy). What offer are you making to the people in your target audience and why should they respond to it?
02
Customer journey and touchpoints
What set of content formats do you need to convince those in your target audience to take the desired action and make them feel good in the process?
If they are existing customers, you may be able to convince them with a regular mail campaign and the necessary content items on your website. If you also want to appeal to non-customers, build in some extra steps on social media and cold outreach via mail, for example.
Example
A simple content journey to invite customers to a construction company 's Academy workshop.
1. Awareness
- Mail campaign to existing clients: short teaser about the workshop.
- Website banner with link to Academy page.
2. Consideration
- Additional explanation on the landing page with benefits of participation.
- Client testimonial or short video illustrating the usefulness of the workshop.
3. Conversion
- Automatic confirmation email with practical info.
- Clear CTA: subscribe via form.
4. Loyalty and Upselling
- Follow-up email with thanks and additional resources (slides, articles).
- Suggestion for next workshop or training.
03
Structure: primarily rational, or also emotional and interactive?
In the creative development of your campaign, ask yourself how difficult your target audience is to convince and how much attention you want to give to branding in addition to conversion
If you have a no-brainer offer to existing customers and are only aiming for conversion, a campaign based on the rational benefits may suffice. If you want to convince non-customers or also pursue branding, you will need to add an emotional component as well. If you want to deepen the impact on your target audience, you can also add interactive content formats and formats with web animation.
Example
A simple content journey to invite customers to a construction company 's Academy workshop.
1. Awareness
- Social formats with teasers around self-expression + David Bowie.
- Research figures (Gen Z & self-expression) in visual posts.
2. Consideration
- Inspiring visuals & short clips from Bowie: "Be whoever you want to be."
- Landing page with rational benefits of the software
3. Conversion
- CTA: free trial or download of the 3D software.
- Interactive game in Bowie's dressing room: download additional 3D attributes.
4. Loyalty and Upselling
- Community content (sharing user-generated designs).
Emotional component: self-expression and David Bowie
The campaign not only played on the rational benefits, but also integrated an emotional component around "self-expression.
With this software, the campaign said, you can ideally show who you are as a young designer. That answers a pain point with the young target group: according to research, young Gen Z'ers seem to have a lot of trouble showing their own personality. That research was also played out in the social formats at the beginning of the content process.
The emotional impact was further heightened by pairing that self-expression with an iconic artist who reinvented himself time and again throughout his career: David Bowie.
Bowie was prominently played out throughout, with old videos of his performances, with beautiful illustrations and with constant references to the slogan "Be whoever you want to be."
Interactive component: game in Bowie's dressing room
And the campaign also adds an interactive component deeper into the journey, with a game that designers can play in which they can find and download all sorts of fun 3D attributes in Bowie's dressing room, which they can then work with further in the software.
