8 Best B2B Digital Marketing Campaigns for SaaS

digital marketing campaigns

Running one of the best marketing campaigns for your SaaS company takes a lot of planning, research, and a little inspiration. You’ve come to the right place if you need help with your digital marketing strategy.

This article will share insights into what makes a marketing campaign successful. It will also provide eight excellent examples of impactful campaigns that have achieved great results.

Contents

What is a marketing campaign?

A marketing campaign is a strategic effort to achieve a particular marketing or sales goal, such as lead generation or raising brand awareness. Ad campaigns can occur across various channels, such as social media, search engines, TV and radio, or print advertisements.

Recently, many marketers have turned to digital marketing campaigns to connect with audiences cost-effectively. Traditional marketing methods can still be effective. This includes TV and radio ads, flyers, and billboards. However, these methods require a substantial campaign budget to yield positive results.

An acquisition marketing campaign aims to attract new customers while maintaining engagement with existing ones. These campaigns focus on lead generation through various marketing strategies, emphasizing educational content to foster initial relationships with potential customers.

Of course, most people don’t have a million dollars to drop on prime-time TV slots. This situation partly explains why more brands are turning to digital marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing campaigns are crucial. They allow users to target specific segments and ideal customers. This targeting is more precise than what traditional marketing methods offer. You can also use marketing campaigns to target your existing customers to reengage or drive revenue streams like upselling.

Definition of a Marketing Campaign

A marketing campaign is a series of coordinated activities designed to achieve a specific business goal or objective. It is a strategic effort to promote a product, service, or brand. This is done through various marketing channels, including social media, email, advertising, and content marketing.

Each campaign is tailored to a target audience, ensuring the messaging and approach resonate with the intended recipients.

A campaign can maximize its reach and effectiveness by leveraging multiple marketing channels, driving specific results like increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or boosting sales.

Purpose of a Marketing Campaign

The main goal of a marketing campaign is to reach a specific business objective. This could include increasing sales, generating leads, or building brand awareness.

Marketing campaigns can also be instrumental in launching new products or services, promoting special offers or events, or repositioning a brand.

A marketing campaign aims to drive business results and achieve a return on investment (ROI) for the marketing efforts. By clearly defining the campaign’s purpose, businesses can align their strategies and resources to ensure its success.

What is the difference between marketing and advertising campaigns?

While some people use these terms interchangeably, they describe unique concepts. The line between them is getting blurrier by the day.

Marketing and advertising share a common objective. Their aim is to raise awareness of a product or service. They also seek to persuade individuals to make a purchase. Marketing teams accomplish this by researching the product, market, and target audience. They promote it through various physical and digital channels. Advertising is one part of that campaign.

An advertising campaign involves creating persuasive content and copy. This content is designed to promote or sell a product or service.

Successful campaigns often have a campaign featured with unique elements such as landing pages, creative ads, or user engagement strategies to enhance visibility and effectiveness. Again, for clarity, advertisement is an aspect of marketing.

“Demand Gen vs Lead Gen”

Another marketing and advertising concept that sometimes gets confused is “Demand Gen vs Lead Gen.” As you might have guessed, it stands for demand generation vs lead generation.

A content marketing campaign is a focused effort lasting from 30 to 90 days aimed at a specific audience or topic.

The main difference between the two is as follows:

Demand Gen: Demand Gen focuses on brand awareness and creating interest in a business’s products or services. This digital marketing strategy aims to identify and connect with a target audience and get them into your sales funnel.

Demand generation digital marketing campaign aims to:

  • Make your prospective audience aware of the problem your product or service solves

  • Increases your trust and authority

  • Reach out to a broad audience

  • Provides easily accessible and free resources

Lead Gen: Lead Gen is about converting prospects into leads. You can do this in several ways, such as getting landing page signups, product downloads, or connecting via social media.

A lead gen marketing strategy, on the other hand, aims to:

  • Shows how your audience can solve their problem or pain point with your solution

  • Focuses on generation leads

  • Uses gated content to capture email addresses and customer data

Marketing campaign objectives

Marketing campaigns can have a wide variety of goals. For example, some of the most common marketing goals are to:

  • Build brand awareness

  • Generate sales

  • Generate leads

  • Boost your conversion rate

  • Customer acquisition

  • Increase social media followers

  • Drive social media engagement

  • Customer acquisition

  • Landing page visits

  • Generate website traffic

  • Improve customer experience

Understanding and defining your goals is an essential first step. Tying tieing in Demand Gen KPIs to your business objectives. For example, raising brand awareness could be your priority if a new business enters a crowded and competitive marketplace.

social media platforms

Understanding Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaigns are a crucial part of any marketing strategy and can be used to achieve a wide range of business objectives. To understand marketing campaigns, it’s essential to consider the key components, characteristics, and lessons learned from successful campaigns.

Businesses can craft campaigns that effectively engage their target audience and drive desired outcomes by analyzing these elements.

Key Components of a Marketing Campaign

A successful marketing campaign typically includes several key components:

  1. Clear objectives: A well-defined goal or objective the campaign aims to achieve.

  2. Target audience: The campaign is designed to reach and engage with a specific group of people.

  3. Marketing channels: The various channels used to promote the campaign, such as social media, email, advertising, and content marketing.

  4. Content Strategy: A plan for creating and sharing content that connects with the target audience and meets campaign goals.

  5. Budget and resources: A clear allocation of budget and resources to support the campaign.

By focusing on these components, businesses can ensure their marketing campaigns are well-structured and poised for success.

Characteristics of a Successful Marketing Campaign

Successful marketing campaigns typically have several key characteristics:

  1. Clear and concise messaging: A clear and compelling message that resonates with the target audience.

  2. Strong creative assets: High-quality creative assets, such as images, videos, and copy, support the campaign message.

  3. Effective targeting: A clear understanding of the target audience and effective targeting strategies to reach them.

  4. Measurable results: A clear plan for measuring and tracking the campaign results.

  5. Flexibility and adaptability: The ability to adjust the campaign strategy and tactics based on feedback and results.

These characteristics help ensure that a marketing campaign can effectively engage its audience and achieve its objectives.

Lessons Learned from Successful Marketing Campaigns

Several key lessons can be learned from successful marketing campaigns:

  1. Know your audience: Understanding the target audience is critical to creating effective marketing campaigns.

  2. Keep it simple: Clear and concise messaging is essential for reducing noise and resonating with the target audience.

  3. Be authentic: Authenticity and transparency are critical for building trust and credibility with the target audience.

  4. Measure and track results: A clear plan for measuring and tracking results is essential for evaluating the campaign’s effectiveness and making adjustments.

  5. Be flexible: The ability to adjust the campaign strategy and tactics based on feedback and results is critical for achieving success.

By applying these lessons, businesses can enhance their marketing efforts and create impactful campaigns.

Effective digital marketing campaigns

A successful digital marketing strategy relies on a deep understanding of your product and target audience. It needs to concentrate on the customer journey, from initial awareness to the point they purchase and become loyal customers.

Here are some essential ingredients for a successful marketing strategy alongside a brief step-by-step guide.

#1. Set your digital marketing campaign goals

Before you spend money or time on a digital marketing campaign, you must determine your goals. You can’t define or measure success if you don’t know what you want to get from a campaign.

As mentioned above, your business goals and objectives should inform and influence your marketing strategy. 

Once you know what you want your marketing strategy to achieve, you can define KPIs and metrics that you can use to measure campaign effectiveness.

#2. Know your audience

Knowing the audience for your product is essential. It informs everything from messaging, what channels you use, and even the type of marketing campaigns you should employ.

Any SaaS product or service needs to do deep research on its customers. They need to learn a lot about their pain points, including the language that resonates with their target audience.

Additionally, while your customers are all somewhere online, they’re not all hanging out on the same platform. So find and research where they congregate so you can figure out how to reach them.

#3. Get your messaging right

Getting your messaging right is an extension of knowing your product and your audience. You understand their pain points and know how they think and talk about them, so you should know what tone, language, and concepts will resonate.

The right message should connect with your business goals too. Figure out what actions you want your targets to take and incorporate that into your messaging.

#4. Always measure and adjust

You can’t predict how every campaign will go. Some do well, while others will fail. You must have a way to measure if your campaign has been successful. As we said earlier, define your goals before you start and establish KPIs and metrics that determine if a campaign is effective.

Use what you’ve learned to adjust the campaign or inform your subsequent attempts. Sometime,s very subtle adjustments can improve a campaign dramatically, so don’t be afraid to experiment.

b2b vs b2c

Is B2B marketing different from B2C marketing?

Many people in the marketing world suggest that B2B and B2C marketing should take a different psychological approach. Generally, this thinking is based on the idea that businesses are logical and consumers are not.

However, as the vice-chairman of Ogilvy, Rory Sutherland, pointed out in his excellent research paper The Objectivity Trap, advances in Behavioral Sciences suggest that the business world might not be as logical as we think.

Sutherland advocates for taking a more human approach to B2B marketing. He believes B2B purchasing decisions are subject to fear and self-preservation rather than rational self-interest.

So if your SaaS product is built for businesses, remember that you are still selling to emotional beings, but they’re just wearing suits.

Different marketing channels

There are lots of different marketing channels. While some businesses use them all, others can benefit from tighter targeting.

For example, the user demographics of each channel are somewhat varied. So, if you’re targeting a younger audience, social media like TikTok or Snapchat might get you better results.

Let’s take a look at some of the channels you can use for different marketing strategies.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a type of digital marketing campaign. An effective email marketing campaign involves building a list of customers, sending them email messages, and implementing strategies such as having clearly defined objectives, creating lead magnets, and optimizing email send frequency to engage subscribers effectively.

While sending digital campaigns via email has become more difficult due to data privacy laws, it’s still an effective way to market your products.

Organic search (SEO)

An SEO campaign is a type of digital marketing that attracts customers via organic traffic. It involves optimizing your website with keywords and terms that high-intent customers enter into a search engine.

The user is served a link on the search engine results page (SERP) if your solution is relevant.

Paid search

Paid search campaigns have a similar dynamic to organic search, but you don’t need to optimize for keywords to appear at the top of the SERP. Instead, you pay for clicks or impressions and hope interested customers click on the ads.

Examples of paid ads include Facebook Ads, Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords), LinkedIn, Bing, etc.

Social media campaigns

Social media marketing refers to a social media marketing campaign that involves careful planning and execution across multiple platforms. A social media campaign can be as simple as posting content or images, connecting with users, or sending messages. Additionally, social campaigns can use your personal brand and network to reach new customers.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a type of campaign that relies upon producing interesting content to drive engagement. This content can contain links or be designed to boost awareness, trust, and authority.

Publishing content as a marketing strategy can be done via a blog post, social media, or across various online platforms.

This digital strategy can also involve guest posts, videos, whitepapers, infographics, or other downloadable content.

User-generated content

User-generated content campaigns are a type of marketing that relies on asking your users to create social media content about your brand.

You can do this on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. It’s a great way to produce relatable content that provides your target market with social proof with minimal marketing spending.

Influencer social media posts

An influencer marketing campaign is a type of marketing that uses internet celebrities or highly respected users to promote your product or service. Because these celebrities have tightly defined audiences, they can present a good opportunity for marketing teams to reach their ideal customer.

Digital marketing campaign examples

When you’re devising a digital marketing strategy to engage your target audience, it’s worth knowing what’s already worked.

Use these excellent marketing campaigns to inform and inspire your marketing efforts.

#1. Lead-Gen: Oracle’s Digital Bank of the Future

Oracle’s Digital Bank of the Future camping is an example of using content to boost interest and authority and ultimately generate a serious amount of leads.

The plan for the campaign was to engage C-suite execs at smaller banks who were interested in modernizing their software stack by embracing digital banking.

The campaign started in 2013 with revenue generation goals of $16m. It used the well-researched lead magnet of an in-depth report on modern banking and digital transformation that was full of valuable and smart insights. B2B businesses signed up in their droves.

Three hundred fifty thousand leads and $28m in revenue later, it’s fair to say the camping was an incredible success.

#2. StoryBrand: Google’s Google My Business campaign

Google used the power of storytelling to highlight their Google My Business B2B service.

Google’s ad highlights how Google My Business works for Zingerman’s sandwich businesses. It highlights the brand’s story as it takes the journey from a small local business to a $14m mail-order business.

This campaign is a classic example of using a StoryBrand campaign to produce a clear and consistent message. The business, in this case, Zimmerman’s, is the hero, with Google My Business as the wise, benevolent guide. It even manages to squeeze in how Google Analytics is used by the business to monitor sales and engagement.

#3. Social proof: Salesforce’s Success Page

Social proof is a powerful motivator that lends your business trust and credibility. It’s an important part of the end of the sales funnel and can convince users that they should try a brand.

Salesforce uses a Success Page highlighting how businesses using their service have achieved success. There are a lot of use case examples on the page, and Salesforce allows users to filter by business size, business type, industry, and products, so each business can find someone with a use case that speaks to them.

The idea is that your company can unlock success by following the same process. It’s a brilliant, evergreen resource that can supplement Salesforce’s other digital marketing efforts by showing users how they can provide them with value.

#4. Programmatic SEO: Zapier

Zapier is an integration and automation tool allowing businesses to build no-code app connections. They launched an SEO campaign to boost their monthly visitors. Soon, they had over 5 million monthly visitors and average recurring revenue (ARR) of $140m. In total, almost 60% of their visitors come from searches.

To capture this traffic, Zapier built landing pages for each possible connection with the tool. For example, users can use Zapier to create an automated link between Google Sheets and Slack.

In total, they made 70,000 landing pages. More than 1 in 4 rank first for at least one keyword.

#5. Referral marketing: Zoho

Zoho makes an excellent suite of business software. However, they are perhaps best known for their email tools. They performed a superb referral marketing campaign, boosting their users and brand awareness.

Referral campaigns have two great functions. Firstly, they can help engage your existing users. Secondly, they can use your existing user network to exploit your growth.

Zoho’s strategy was simple. It gave users five free accounts to share with their friends. In turn, each of these friends got five free accounts, too. Essentially, each unengaged user could help find 25 new users for the company.

Additionally, because the recommendation to use the business comes from a friend, it strengthens the likelihood of activation through social proof. It’s a smart, cost-effective way to drive user numbers and promote your app.

#6. Email marketing: MailModo

MailModo deserves a place on this list for executing a great marketing campaign that uses email to promote its service and show the power of its product.

The main feature of their product is that it automates emails for marketing that include high-quality creative assets and interactive content in the main body.

They sent out sales emails that featured these interactive elements. In effect, these emails worked as a mini product demonstration because when someone opened them, they could see exactly how the product worked and how it felt to receive one of these emails.

#7. Personalization: Double Your Freelancing

Personalization is a powerful part of the consumer experience. Digital marketing allows businesses to change and adjust their message to connect with a broader audience but without being so overly general that it speaks to nobody.

A well-coordinated marketing team is essential in planning and executing comprehensive marketing campaigns. Collaboration among diverse marketing specialists, whether on-site or remotely, enhances productivity and efficiency.

Double Your Freelancing helps freelancers run their businesses. Their marketing problem was that freelancing is a broad church that includes a massive variety of people. How do you create messaging that speaks to each demographic?

Their solution was an email campaign for each user persona with unique content, CTAs, subject lines, etc.. The tailored offers and testimonials for each user are based on their information. The result was a 250% boost in conversion rates. That’s the power of personalization.

#8. Promote new features through social media: Spotify

Social media channels are a great tool to announce recently launched product features, boosting engagement and serving multiple objectives within marketing campaigns. Of course, it relies on having an existing social media audience.

Spotify’s Enhanced Playlist is an excellent demonstration of launching new features in an easy-to-digest and fun way. They produced a short video promoted on Facebook with clean, crisp copy, illustrations, and animations, all within the company’s existing tone and brand identity. It was a great way to drive feature engagement and boost brand visibility.

Pick a digital marketing strategy that works

As you can see from the examples we’ve listed, choosing the right marketing strategies depends on your target audience and customer base. By understanding the channels or digital space your ideal users occupy, you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing.

The most important thing is to do your research and know your audience. Then, you can predict how to connect with potential customers and deliver effective campaigns. Use the existing examples to inspire your campaigns.

Author
Picture of Bryan Philips
Bryan Philips
I'm Bryan Philips from In Motion Marketing, where we turn B2B marketing challenges into growth opportunities. I create marketing strategies and deliver clear messaging, working closely with CEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs. We're known for our precision in messaging, creating impactful demand generation, and producing content that drives conversions, all tailored to each client's unique needs.
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