A successful PR campaign can be instrumental in helping your business grow and reach new heights – but it isn’t all plain sailing. From well-known slogans that stick in your head to questionable taglines, a campaign can either propel your business, or leave you in hot water.
Here, work experience team member Scarlett looks at what businesses can learn about creating a successful campaign.
Throughout my week at Prominent I have completed a range of tasks developing valuable skills.
One task I enjoyed was researching successful campaigns – finding what I like about them and why they had such a big impact. Here is some of what I’ve learned.
During my research I discovered a few trends in the diverse range of campaigns I looked at.
One thing I found that was important when creating a campaign that would stand out was making something relevant to the time and attitudes of society.
Whether that’s creating emotional ads reflecting global issues like Covid or producing stronger, punchier ads combating discrimination certain communities face, it always makes campaigns increasingly successful.
It’s always important to understand the audience and issues these audiences face if you want to make campaigns that have a lasting impact and can connect with individuals on a deeper level.
Another common strategy to making eye-catching campaigns is featuring big celebrity names – these celebrities can reflect the brand in values or attitudes to have a larger influence.
And finally, a campaign should use new ideas and ways to put across their ideas to set themselves out from the crowd and competitors.
One of my favourite campaigns I researched was ‘Like a Girl’ by Always which explained the stigma behind playing sports “like a girl”.
The image was clear and aligned with the values of their brand and consumers. Always acknowledged the audience but also issues they face, creating a larger impact.
The campaign had a lasting effect, inspiring communities and building a customer base supporting their passions and values.
Another campaign that deeply connected to its audience was Apple’s ‘Creativity Goes On’.
This emotional ad reflected the time and the pandemic and approached a wide topic from a different angle. It had a positive impact which was needed at the time of low spirits among the nation.
The Google ‘Best Phones Forever’ campaign based itself on the famous Apple vs. Google argument but had a different approach.
In the ad the two phones were friends, not rivals, and every disadvantage Apple found, Google had an advantage to counter that.
The depiction of Apple wasn’t condescending but instead genuine, making the ad more attention grabbing because of this different spin.
The ad was also relatable to viewers and played on the natural human tendency to compare ourselves to others.
Finally, “You’re not you when you’re hungry” by Snickers was another widely successful campaign.
It included celebrity features and used comedy to show their product can combat the widespread issue of being ‘hangry’, I thought this was not just witty, but also relatable.
There can be many reasons that cause a campaign to fail.
For example, a lack of creativity won’t capture attention. You must set yourself apart from competitors and dull campaigns will not have this effect.
Not understanding your target audience is another mistake, otherwise campaigns won’t resonate with people, connect on deeper levels or have a lasting impact.
Or sometimes, brands just aren’t sensitive to viewers who may watch their ads or campaigns.
There have been many examples of this, one including the Co-op’s ‘Be a Good Egg’. This printed ad showed the newspaper inviting people to reward their daughters for ‘doing the washing up’ - receiving backlash for sexist messaging.
At Prominent we have delivered numerous successful campaigns for our clients, recently this has included a national campaign for our client Hey Girls.
The social enterprise surpassed its 30 million period product donations milestone in March 2023 and we created the Hey 30 Million campaign to share these successes.
The main objectives were to raise brand awareness for Hey Girls, raise awareness about period poverty and increase engagement on their social media platforms.
This received great media coverage and was featured in large publications, including a Mirror Online exclusive with over 100 million monthly website visits.
Hey Girls also received an increase in followers across all their social media platforms with all their pages having an increase in profile visits. Across Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook there were more than 1,600 engagements.
Does your business have something to shout about? We’d love to work with you and build a successful campaign.
Contact us today via 01473 276126 or email us here.
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