Differentiating Yourself – The Three C’s of Creating Effective Marketing Campaigns

Standing out from the competition with effective content marketing campaigns with the 3C approach

2) The Context

I believe that effective communication is a combination of both content – which is what you say and context or the situation in which you say it or the surrounding materials in the medium by which you deliver it.

Context is also about how you say or explain your content. For example, when writing content that is designed for a specific industry campaign been the industry terminology you use is critical to deliver the right context and can very much help your audience in understanding what you mean. Context can also be given through the use of analogies that relate to the industry that you are targeting. Think about the process or a common way of describing something that your audience in the industry is familiar with and then try to wrap your content in a similar way.

For example, if you’re trying to explain how your implementation process works, think about the fact that an implementation is a series of steps that you go through to deliver a successful outcome which is effectively, the finished product.

In the target industry , for example if you are talking to a manufacturer, are there similar processes they use which you can articulate which are analogous to what you are trying to achieve with your implementation process and draw a parallel with that process.

Another way of thinking about this is “talking the talk”or using language and descriptions that your target audience can identify and understand.

In Demo2Win terms, we call this avoiding The Widget Syndrome demo crime, which is where you demonstrate a scenario that is unrelated to the company you are demonstrating to….you immediately lose the audiences attention…for example talking about their food manufacturing process but using data and examples built for a company that manufactures electronic components.

3) The Carrier

What is the carrier?

The carrier is the mechanism by which you deliver the message. Examples of different carriers include email campaigns, banner ads, landing pages, video content and more.

In order to effectively deliver a marketing campaign, you need to have a combination of all these three C’s. The right content delivered through the wrong carrier will fail – the right content in the wrong context will also fail and of course the right carrier delivering the wrong content with the wrong context will of course, also fail.

So you’re probably thinking, well Richard this is all very simple and clear when you say it in this fashion.

I understand content, I understand context and I understand the concept of a carrier, but how can I figure out what is the right content – what context I can deliver that content in and reinforce my message with and what is the most effective carrier to use deliver the campaign?

This is where the idea of buyer personas can help, because the buyer persona helps you identify the key characteristics of your target for the campaign and keeps you focused on those characteristics during the campaign and hopefully, the subsequent sales engagement.

A buyer persona is a description of the person that you are targeting with your campaign – what they look like or demographics, where you can find them or geographics, how they think or psychographics and of course how they behave.

And this of course is the basis on which all of your targeting from a marketing perspective needs to be done.

You need to begin with your ideal customer in mind, which for most of us operating in a B2B world, is usually a company.

But always remember that your are talking to, communicating with and selling to people and whilst the name on the purchase order or contract may be that of a company – at the end of the day the decision is made by a person or group of people inside that company.