The 13 Best Digital Marketing Examples from This Year (+ Takeaways)

The ever-growing number of marketers who are using digital campaigns as their primary sources of lead generation has made the marketing sphere seem more competitive. Marketing professionals are constantly challenged to think of new and innovative ways to speak to their audience.

As a B2B marketing professional, you have a unique opportunity to nurture your audience through different channels and creative approaches.

Here are some awesome examples of digital marketing campaigns that are sure to inspire you to create something truly impressive.

The Foundations of Digital Marketing: What You Need Before Your Campaign Begins

But first, a brief overview of what digital marketing is.

Digital marketing is any type of online effort to attract customers to your brand.

It involves presenting your products or services to another business or consumer that will positively impact their day-to-day life. It can come in the form of formatting your website to seem more attractive or launching an entire campaign that involves advertisements.

Even knowing this could help you focus your marketing efforts on how to better attract your ideal potential customer. However, how do you build a better marketing strategy?

Building a Better Strategy

Putting together your digital marketing toolbox can seem like a daunting task at first but here are four pointers to get you started:

1. Know Your Audience.

You can build your strategy around the buyer persona that defines your business. These are real examples of the types of people that find your company’s products the perfect solutions to their needs. This is where you’ll dive into what digital marketing channel they prefer to shop – Instagram, search engine marketing, Facebook Marketplace, etc.

2. Try Experimenting.

While you can get some incredibly useful information about your audience by looking at how they shop, speaking to them directly does need some practice through trial and error. Knowing where your marketing line should be – like never sending too many emails or direct messaging them on social media – is an important boundary to recognize before you start testing. With new technologies in collecting customer data coming out every day, don’t be afraid to push the limits on your typical marketing effort.

Launch a podcast or a social media page with new content every day that your typical content wouldn’t otherwise include.

3. Observe the Data.

All of the great campaigning in the world isn’t enough if you don’t know what’s working. Understanding your audience is more than just knowing how they like to shop, but knowing what about their shopping experience is best for them.

Where are your customers dropping off of the sales cycle and where do they usually lose interest?

Look for these smart insights before, during and after running each digital marketing campaign.

4. Get Social

While digital marketing doesn’t only mean using social media as a marketing tool, it is a primary solution to attracting customers. 83% of internet users worldwide have active social media profiles, meaning it’s no longer a question of if you should advertise on social media, but how and where.

Your persona research should include where your customers spend their time. While Instagram is known to acquire the highest grossed ROI for marketers, LinkedIn is still the leading social media platform for B2B marketing and is followed closely by Facebook.

Digital Marketing Examples From Highly Successful Campaigns

Now, where to begin?

1. IKEA Japan’s Harajuku with Imma

This augmented reality featured imma, a CGInfluenser who lived in an IKEA room for 72 hours. She demonstrated IKEA furniture by living on it. She rearranged her side table, played music, and made her home life desirable by promoting IKEA furniture. While she wasn’t an actual human, this campaign took a “real-life” view into what your day-to-day life could look like with IKEA furniture.

Why it works: This advertisement was viewable online and in-person by people walking by on the streets. It won awards like the Webby Awards and D&AD Awards because it helped people see what seemingly basic products from IKEA can do for a small space while, and most importantly, connecting with the realities of staying inside during the pandemic lockdowns. In Japan, people may live in spaces where bulky furniture is neither necessary nor practical. This campaign acknowledged that reality and warmed the spaces people create no matter what square footage they’re working with

2. Cashmere’s 19 Crimes

As a launch to a new California red wine line, Cashmere developed an augmented reality campaign based on who they are as a company and who they want to represent. As a result, 19 Crimes was created with the rebel star, Snoop Dogg, as their ring leader.

Why it works: Cashmere made their wine not only recognizable but interactive. They included “social, broadcast, AR experiential, OOH, radio, audio streaming, and influencer marketing” to target their audience in exciting and accessible ways. 19 Crimes developed into a “dogg house” of characters including Swizz Beatz, LaKeith Stanfield, and David Simon.

Where most wine companies stop at interesting label making and traditional advertising techniques, Cashmere ran with their brand and blew it up to epic proportions. They utilized new technology in augmented reality through multiple mediums to create an interactive experience with a brand and an industry that doesn’t normally exist.

3. Wells Fargo’s The Way Ahead

Wells Fargo sets up this commercial to seem like a case study for Zoom. Zoom CFO Kelly Steckelburg has a video interview describing how they adjusted their IT strategy to adhere to the influx of Zoom users after the U.S. lockdown on March 15th 2020.

Here, Wells Fargo used news clips and images in their video to set the scene and propped themselves up as thoughtful business owners concerned about the wellbeing of their employees.

Why it works: They won the Digiday award for Best Branded Content because they successfully achieved telling a branded story while reaching their marketing goals. Even though Wells Fargo is not the focus of the commercial, they do a great job of addressing a topical issue while presenting themselves as problem solvers.

4. Rackspace’s Cloud Talk

The cloud computing company Rackspace launched a podcast that dives into the specifics and insights of technology today. Hosted by Rackspace CTO, Jeff DeVerter, the podcast was recognized by Digiday as the 2021 Best B2B Branded Podcast.

Why it works: Rackspace positions themselves as a leader in the industry by speaking to what they know, inviting interesting guests and creating a new medium between tech industry leaders and the people who work in it. The podcast beautifully demonstrates the power of knowing your audience and reaching them in a unique, but powerful way.

5. The Think Tank & Asendia–7 Destinations Campaign

Working together, The Think Tank and Asendia created a digital content marketing campaign that increased brand awareness through an ambitious range of published content. The international courier approached Think Tank for help in gaining more international recognition and brand awareness.

Why it works: The power of content marketing has never been more apparent when coupled with strategic promotion techniques. Not only did Asendia write helpful eBooks, blogs and landing pages, but these pieces were shared across digital platforms and direct marketing campaigns to reach the right people with The Think Tank’s help.

6. Cosmetifly and Digitaloft’s Cosmetifly Index

Cosmetifly’s platform launch was stellar but lacked consistent engagement. Digitaloft took what the cosmetics comparison platform was trying to do and put real metrics and backlinks onto their page for a truly transformative outcome.

Why it works: By using hard evidence, Digitaloft was able to showcase their findings, position Cosmetifly as a true cosmetic insight leader all while setting Cosmetifly up to be featured in blogs like Vogue and Glamour because of their findings. Utilizing data to support claims in a way that is visually appealing and speaks to the reader can help support link building goals.

7. Joan Creative and the United State of Women’s WoManican

Noticing a gap in CPR training, the United State of Women partnered with Joan Creative to create the WoManican. Driving the campaign was the statistic that women are 27% less likely to receive CPR in public. To address this devastating reality, the WoManican was created.

Why it works: Not only did Joan Creative leverage their agency recognition to create a show-stopping campaign, but they made a devastating gender-gap fact into something they could solve. They created an open-source template for anyone to download the manikin vest and create themselves, a website, a brand and a launch video to highlight the issue and address any questions.

8. Mastercard’s Her Ideas #StartSomethingPriceless

Working off of their iconic “Priceless” campaign, Mastercard decided to publicly announce their goal of mending the gender gap in small business recognition and women-owned small business venture capital loans.

Why it works: The simple commercial was a finalist in the Effie awards because it reached its goal of reaching female entrepreneurs and building brand equity. Often, commercials of business owners include men and only 13% of venture capital dollars go to startups with a women-dominant startup team. Mastercard is working towards closing that gap.

9. Mastercard and McCann’s Acceptance Street

In light of political discord against the LGBTQ+ community, McCann launched the Acceptance Street campaign in New York City on Gay Street and Christopher Street.

Why it works: While the average B2B marketer might not have the funds to change the name of a street in New York, the lesson here is about creating a campaign that can be picked up across platforms. This campaign gained 3 million impressions in the first three weeks of launch because it was a destination to take pictures in front of, tag and share on social media, and featured on radio, news and print.

Social Media Marketing, Influencers and More: Examples From Social Networks

Making your marketing campaigns sharable is not a new concept but social media is bigger than ever post-pandemic. Here are a few brands that launched knock-out social media last year.

10. The LA Times’ Plants

A fun and whimsical way to connect with their Los Angeles audience, the LA Times launched their @latimesplants Instagram page. If pets are the new children then plants are the new pets because COVID-19 impacted the way people viewed their green loved ones.

Why it works: Nominated for the 2021 Art and Culture Social Media Webby Awards, this campaign successfully connected with where LA Times readers were in the time of the pandemic. It features beautiful pictures, provides plant advice and much-needed comic relief in an otherwise gloomy time.

11. Washington Post’s Dave on TikTok

Not all business social media marketing pages need to be kitschy and animated. The Washington Post page is both informative and entertaining, and leverages the strengths of their team, brand and audience.

Why it works: Washington Post connects with younger audiences on TikTok to communicate information that is relevant, important and accurate. Many newspaper organizations are turning to new creative ways to report the news to their audiences in places where their audience prefers to consume content.

12. Off Madison Ave and Arizona Office of Tourism’s Barbie Visits Arizona

Their long-standing professional relationship of assisting the AOT in increasing their state tourism developed into this eye-catching social media campaign that nominated them for the Best Influencer 2021 Weebly Award.

Why it works: Barbie has always been an influencer of the times. In recent years, those times almost always include Instagram brand promotion. Here, they took a recognizable icon, a well-known social trend and worked it into a campaign to promote state tourism. The results were astonishing.

13. MAC’s Digital Opening

While brand awareness is an important goal of those advertising on Instagram, the platform also features a great way to shop online. By tagging items on your business profile, you can guide followers to your product landing pages without ever leaving the platform. MAC used this functionality to create a digital launch party where everyone was invited.

Why it works: MAC utilized Instagram features like product tagging, live videos and location tags and expanded on the social media staple of hashtags to create a virtual world. They included celebrity influencers that were available to “mingle” with during the party, playing into the MAC audience’s desire to feel part of the celebrity inner circle. While social media may seem like a huge world of complicated – and changing – features, brainstorm how your brand can use everything it has to offer to engage audiences in unique ways.

Giving Your Next Digital Marketing Campaign the Best Shot at Success

Marketing campaigns are designed to reach audiences at certain points in their buying journeys. Whether you’re meeting yours at their research stage like the WoManican or zeroing in on their buying stage like in the MAC campaign, you can use creative marketing ideas to engage your audience and achieve your business goals.