Campaign prototyping and why you need it to help your marketing strategy

What is campaign prototyping?

Campaign prototyping means testing and planning your campaign ahead of time. We’ll look into the specifics later on, but let’s first find out why campaign prototyping is a great way to use your marketing resources most effectively:

• You put customers’ needs and wants first
• You make marketing decisions based on strategy
• You focus on the right outcomes and goals

Get to b(u)y

Now let’s dive into the ‘how to’. The best starting point for any campaign is a clear objective. What do you want to achieve with your marketing efforts? An easy way to write this down is the ‘get, to, by’ strategy: 

• The ‘get’ defines who you want to reach (your audience) 
• The ‘to’ is what you want your audience to do 
• The ‘by’ is how you’re going to get them to do it 

For example, imagine you’re a new marketer at GAMMA. Congrats on the promotion! GAMMA focuses its next campaign on new homeowners (‘get’). They want new homeowners to order furniture from the GAMMA website (‘to’) and are planning to achieve this by sending personalised content featuring new furniture the new homeowners might like (‘by’). 

That’s it – your strategy is formulated in just one sentence: 

Get new homeowners to buy furniture from the GAMMA website by sending personalised content featuring new furniture.

Different stages of your campaign marketing

Perfect, step one can be ticked off. Let’s move on to the actual prototyping. Be honest – most of your marketing efforts are focused on consumers with strong commercial intent. Are we right? If that’s the case, you might be missing out on lots of chances to connect with a broader audience. That’s where the first step in prototyping comes in – the ‘see, think, do, care’ approach. 

This approach divides your audience into four groups:

• The ‘see’ stage collects consumers that might want to use your product, but don’t know it exists and don’t know your brand. 
• The ‘think’ stage represents consumers who know your product or your brand but don’t want to buy it as of now. 
• The ‘do’ stage consists of consumers who know of your brand and the product and want to buy it right now (this is mostly where marketers focus their attention). 
• The ‘care’ stage represents customers who’ve bought your product at least twice. 

Strategy first: get, to, by

You probably reckon that each stage requires different content. And you’d be right! To overview each stage, you can use the template we’ve designed for you. Take a look. First, your ‘get, to, by’ strategy is formulated so you know what you’re working towards. We’ve used GAMMA as an example for the template. 

Audience, angle and content

Each stage is now populated with a certain audience. Now you’re going to think of what type of content your audience needs at each stage to convert them to the next stage. You’ll divide both into angle and content.

You can do so by labelling your content using the ‘hero, hub, hygiene’ method: 

• Hygiene content focuses on helping your audience by answering questions (in our GAMMA example, about couches). 
• Hub content is used to inspire your audience, for example by sharing how different couches look in multiple interior styles. 
• Hero content is content you only use once or twice a year for a targeted campaign. 

Take a look at our template to see which is which. 

Note: it’s more than normal that some stages have more ‘hub content’ and other stages have more ‘hygiene content’. The aim is to understand what your audience is looking for at each stage. The template helps you structure this. 

Don’t forget to measure success!

Each type of content then has its own way of being measured. Write down how you will measure success for each new piece of content. Once you're done filling in your campaign, you can create an entire content calendar for a year in the ‘planning’ tab.

By dividing your content into ‘hero, hub, hygiene’, you’ll know where you’re spending most of your marketing time and see where you can make adjustments to balance it out a little more.

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Contact the NedWorks team if you need digital talent or advice