If you’re running a business or have a product to sell you know that advertising is critical to its success. It is never a case of build-it-and-they-will-come.
If you don’t put it in front of people then they won’t know it exists. However, it can be a little difficult to decide exactly how you want to construct your marketing campaign.
Sometimes, it’s good to get a bit of inspiration to know which direction you want to go in. Here’s a look at some of the best advertising campaigns of all time and how they impacted all of us.
Table of Contents
1. Start Your Day with Breakfast
If you ask almost anyone in the world what is the most important meal of the day they’ll probably tell you breakfast. That’s because more than a century ago in order to sell their cereal Kellogg’s developed a campaign to market breakfast as the most important meal of the day. They cleverly marketed their cereal as a primary source of nutrition first thing in the morning.
Cereals have now become synonymous with breakfast. People do eat cereal at various times of the day but by far the majority of people eat it at breakfast. Making the Kellogg’s campaign one of the most effective marketing strategies of all time.
What you can learn from this when creating your own campaign is that you should connect your product to people’s health and well-being. That’s what Kelloggs did. Sell it as being the most effective solution to the issue that they are facing and people will get on board.
2. Personalize Your Marketing
If you do any form of email marketing for your business you probably already know that you should personalize your emails as much as you possibly can. Personalizing an email is a sure way to get somebody’s attention. If you haven’t been heeding this suggestion or are only doing it sometimes, take a look at why you should be doing it all the time.
Coca-Cola perfected the personalization technique with its “Share a Coke” campaign. They used popular names to complete the sentence, “Share a Coke with”.
People were busy searching for their names on Coke bottles wherever it was sold. Almost everyone who heard about the campaign wanted to discover more about it.
In fact, some people started to get a bit upset when they couldn’t find their name on a coke bottle. Proving once again how important personalization is. The best way to get somebody’s attention is to use their name.
The takeaway from this is that it is absolutely worth the time and effort it takes to find out the names of the people involved in any business that you want to market to. Find out a little bit about the company or organization and make your email marketing campaign very personal.
However, when you personalize you want to strike a balance between being knowledgeable about who they are and appearing like a stalker. Remember, you don’t really know these people but you just want to know enough and say enough to trigger something emotionally when you market to them, making it more likely that they will respond.
3. Do You Brush Your Teeth Every day?
No matter where you go in the world most people brush their teeth at least once or twice a day. However, at least a century ago this was not a common practice.
This practice was sold to us by the people selling toothpaste and to say it was effective is an understatement. The product was sold as an important form of hygiene and the campaign to get people to brush their teeth became a resounding success.
Imagine how uncomfortable it was to talk directly to some people before the invention of toothpaste and toothbrushes. This was the selling point, the takeaway is that you should find something that makes people uncomfortable (in this case it was bad breath) and fix it with your products our services.
4. Sell Peace of Mind
Today you wouldn’t imagine buying a car without getting insurance. Most people insure their homes and some people even insure their jewelry. Almost everyone has a life insurance policy.
Bad things happen all the time and insurance offers you protection against them. Often, you never collect any money from the insurance that you pay for because the negative occurrence never happens. However, you have peace of mind because you know that should the event occur you will be able to handle it.
The take away from this for you and your marketing campaigns is that peace of mind sells. If you have a product or service that can somehow give comfort to people and make them feel protected from a negative occurrence it’ll be a success.
5. Sell Add-Ons
Once you have a product and service that is popular the next step in your marketing campaign should be to think of a service that you can add on to the successful product in a natural way.
Here’s an example, McDonald’s knew that its hamburgers were very popular. They wanted to find a way to get people to spend more money when they bought a hamburger so they coined the phrase, “Would you like some fries with that?”
This simple phrase revolutionized how we eat burgers. Today hamburgers and fries are sold as a package and most people would not even consider eating a burger without fries as well.
In short, the goal that McDonald’s set out to achieve was accomplished. The takeaway is that when you find yourself with a successful product start thinking of ways to upsell other products or services.
A Final Look at the Best Advertising Campaigns
The best advertising campaigns are those that cause a huge impact. You now have five of the most successful campaigns in history to draw your inspiration from.
Of course, not all of these strategies will work for all businesses but a lot of them will. Take the time to think about your target audience and you will find the style of marketing that will best appeal to them.
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