Creating a 360° marketing campaign

5 min read

There are so many different ways for you to connect with your customers that a detailed, planned approach is vital for standing out above the noise. And because those customers interact with different channels in very different ways, a generic copy-and-paste approach just won’t cut it: only coordination and variation between all your marketing channels will set you up for the best possible results.

The term ‘360° marketing’ may be new to you, but it represents a major opportunity for you to turn interest into leads, and leads into conversions. By creating a 360° marketing campaign, you ensure that every touchpoint in the customer journey is strategically crafted to enhance brand recognition and nurture relationships with potential customers.

In this guide, we’ll take a look at how 360° marketing campaigns work, the five-step process for getting them right, and how technology can help you bring it all together with ease.

What is a 360° marketing campaign?

The simplest way to describe a 360° marketing campaign is that it covers every base through a variety of marketing channels. Like a 360° circle, your marketing is comprehensive and targeted in all directions. They are integrated campaigns that have carefully crafted messaging placed across several digital marketing channels and traditional methods. These points of contact can include (and are not necessarily limited to): email marketing, content marketing, PPC advertising, asking for customer feedback, social media posts, and even print media or direct mail.

This might just sound like normal marketing practice, but where a 360° campaign differs is that the message is varied from channel to channel, depending on the target audience and how they typically interact with the content. For example, a short and snappy tweet doesn’t really work in an email, so a longer, more detailed approach is required instead.

Nevertheless, the overall message and intention remain the same across every channel: it’s the delivery of that messaging that is altered. This is where a 360° campaign differs from multi-channel marketing - not only does a 360° campaign make use of multiple channels, it keeps the customer experience consistent across all of them, for a fully immersive effect.

How should you plan out a 360° marketing campaign?

A good 360° marketing campaign is well thought-out, data-driven, and makes it easy to accurately measure success. That’s why we advocate this five-step process to getting these marketing campaigns right every time:

1. Choose your channels

Start by giving plenty of consideration to the channels you want to use in your campaign: it’s highly unlikely that you’ll need or want to use all of the channels available to you. Picking the right marketing channels will ensure the value of your marketing efforts is maximized and that you get the most effective results.

As well as the cost of each channel and your overall goals, you should also take into account the demographics of your target audience. For example, if you’re selling a product or service to a particularly young demographic, then your potential for success with posts on Facebook is limited as its users tend to be older nowadays. Additionally, incorporating Google Shopping Ads or paid advertising can help you reach a highly targeted audience, increasing your visibility and driving conversions.

2. Plan your impact measurement

With your channels selected, the next step is to define and quantify what a successful campaign would look like in detail. This should ultimately be a numbers game, attempting to drive a certain number of page impressions, click-throughs, or conversions, or could be a financial figure of how much is generated in sales on the back of the campaign.

As well as establishing these figures, you should also work out how you will collect that data. This is where technology can help in aggregating performance information, often in real-time, so you can gauge overall success in one place rather than having to check each platform in turn. Technology can help you measure performance across multiple channels to get a deeper understanding of your customers.

3. Design campaign actions

Now you can get to work crafting your content and deciding where and when it will be sent out to your customers. Ideally, you should have a steady stream of messaging being posted on a regular basis throughout your campaign.

At the same time, you also need to decide whether your campaign flow will be fixed or dynamic: that is to say, whether or not you’ll make changes during the campaign based on performance data. Taking a dynamic approach can help you make improvements where needed for better results, but it requires quick responses and near-instant access to data to keep the campaign running smoothly.

This stage also involves utilizing search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies to ensure your content ranks well on search engines. This way, when potential customers search for relevant products or services, your campaign can show up in search results, driving more traffic to your landing page.

4. Action the campaign

With everything ready to go, your 360° marketing campaign swings into life as your content starts to get posted and your performance metrics start to build.

You should keep a close eye on messaging that’s been posted, and on your performance metrics, throughout. This is to make sure everything is running as planned and so you can quickly respond to any issues that arise; this applies whether you decide to run a campaign that is fixed or dynamic.

By leveraging paid advertising on platforms like Google Ads, as well as incorporating your strategic brand strategy, you can drive additional traffic to your campaign and further solidify your brand’s position in the market.

5. Quantify your success

Connected to the previous point, regularly checking your data can help not only in measuring overall success but also in seeing if you got your planning right to begin with. If your results are falling short in certain areas, then you may be able to pinpoint areas in your marketing strategy, channel selection, or messaging strategy that weren’t quite right. Alternatively, it may be that your planning was right at the time, but that trends and sentiment within your target audience have changed, requiring you to shift your approach.

Either way, detailed data from all your marketing channels can guide the way and help you succeed with future campaigns just as much as a current one.

How Apteco software can help

Bringing all of the above together can be tricky, especially if it relies on lots of different processes and platforms that aren’t coordinated or integrated.

This is where Apteco can help: giving you a single platform from which you can build powerful 360° marketing campaigns quickly and efficiently. Integrations with all of your chosen channels mean you can design and build holistic campaigns that target the right customers, with the right messaging, on the right channels, at the right time. In-built reporting and tracking, along with automated intelligence that delivers extra insights, makes it as easy and intuitive as possible to measure performance and benchmark against your targets.

Take a more detailed look at how Apteco software can support your 360° marketing initiatives here.