Examples of Digital Marketing Campaigns

Digital marketing is getting more sophisticated. You can see it in examples of digital marketing campaigns that made a mark. The numbers reflect it, too. The digital marketing spending in the United States alone should reach close to $120 billion in the 2016-2021 period. At the time when marketing budgets are increasing slowly, digital channels get the lion’s share of the total marketing budgets.

Different types of digital marketing encompass different types of activities. They also use different types of platforms. We’ll show you examples of digital marketing campaigns that were successful at using different kinds of tools.

Social Media Marketing — Disney’s #ShareYourEars Campaign

The premise of the #ShareYourEars campaign was simple. People take a photo wearing Mickey Mouse ears. They post it online using the #shareyourears hashtag. Disney gives $5 to the Make-a-Wish Foundation for every photo. The total of donations was first capped at $1 million. The campaign reached the cap in record-breaking time, so Disney decided to double the original amount to $2 million.

#ShareYourEars was a charitable campaign that aimed to provide help to children. There was every reason to believe the campaign would be successful. Still, it’s one of the best examples of digital marketing campaigns that succeeded using user-generated content. Disney made it as easy as possible to join the campaign. People were even allowed to join if they improvised their Mickey Mouse ears. A worthy goal and removal of barriers to entry made the campaign explode overnight.

Content Marketing — Frontline Education

Frontline Education is the winner of the 2017 Content Marketing Award for Project of the Year. Within a year, the company managed to navigate a difficult transition. It rebranded itself and narrowed its focus on a specific segment of the market (K-12 education). Then it switched to digital marketing from using direct mail marketing.

Frontline won the award because their efforts delivered great results. And much of it was due to the high-quality content the company created. Their content was highly relevant to the company’s target market. The success of the campaign was powered by using original research and industry data to create relevant content. This is one of the examples of digital marketing campaigns that succeeded by increasing the value of their content.

Email Marketing — Grammarly

Grammarly is a software company whose main product is a spellchecking tool. They offer it for free, as a web app, browser add-on, and MS-Word plugin. They also offer a subscription-based Premium tier.

In 2016, Grammarly launched a weekly email called Grammarly Insights. The sent users stats about their activity. Users see the number of words they’ve written, corrections made, unique words they used. Users saw see how they compare with the rest of Grammarly users. They also saw the top three grammar mistakes they’ve been making. The email contains two calls to action, one that leads to Grammarly’s blog, and another one that leads to a sales page. What makes this campaign one of the best examples of digital marketing campaigns that succeeded is the way Grammarly leverages its data-gathering capabilities. They use them to provide interesting and valuable insights and then shift the attention to its content or sales page.

It seems that marketing is slowly turning into a digital-first activity. There’s a steady stream of new players coming into the markets. This brings an increase in competitiveness. It’s more important than ever that every dollar spent on digital marketing is purposefully spent. Every digital marketing campaign needs to be well-developed, implemented, and analyzed. These examples of digital marketing campaigns show you it’s possible to do all that and still be interesting and innovative.