[00:00:00] Mia Fileman
Are you tired of empty promises and stolen ideas? Me too. Got. Marketing is a podcast for marketers and small brands who want real talk and clever strategies without the bs. Running an online business is hard, but everything gets easier when your marketing starts performing. I am Mia FileMan, your straight shooting campaign loving friend here to talk marketing, running a business, pop culture, and everything in between.
Let's dive in.
Hello friend, and welcome back to Got Marketing. I've just returned home to Darwin after three weeks in Melbourne where we hosted a Ripple Festival lead up event F and I did a few site visits at Graceland. I caught up with some Marketing Circle members, including recording last week's [00:01:00] episode with Stef Hansen.
I'm a little bit bleary-eyed because I landed at midnight last night, so today I needed an episode where I was good to go with no notes and no preparation. And that means we are talking about campaigns because your girl does not need to prepare to talk about campaigns and what we're gonna do. Is a bit of a campaign anthology.
So going back through the history of Campaign Delmar, I'm going to take you through all of our major campaigns, what they were, what was the big idea, what was the budget, what was the format, and what were some of the results to inspire you to run your own small business campaigns. So let's go. Okay.
Originally campaign Del Ma was called ID elo, and it was a business partnership and we launched in 2019 and then my business [00:02:00] partner exited and I relaunched as Campaign Del MA in 2021. So our first ever campaign. In this story was called Lessons in Falling, and many of you are familiar with it because I reshared it recently to show you how you can create a really memorable, heavy hitting campaign with very low production and a tiny budget.
The total cost of lessons in falling was $2 49. And that cost was to buy a Instagram stories template from a app called Unfold. And I really liked this template because it had like a torn paper story book type look. And what I did was I went to a cafe and I sat down [00:03:00] and I wrote lessons from seven years of running a marketing agency, which I ended up selling to one of my managers.
But it also talked about my journey with postnatal anxiety with my son. It talked about a team member stealing from me and me needing to get lawyers involved. He talked about. Shutting down my agency and letting go of all my staff, and then a week later, getting a call from the Northern Territory government offering me a $200,000 project.
So I, I brain dumped this entire seven year experience of starting a business, of running an agency while starting a family. And then we turned that into a seven part mini series called Lessons in Falling. And in order to add. Color and emotion and tone to my written words. I went back [00:04:00] through my photo albums throughout my life, and I picked photos that would fit with the stories.
Now, this was not a literal fit. I didn't necessarily get a photo from 2000. 17 that matched exactly what happened in 2017. Some of the photos that we used in lessons and falling were from my wedding, but we chose those photos because there was so much emotion in my face. So that's perhaps our first lesson is that you don't necessarily have to chronologically match up your visuals with your words.
You can have some creative freedom to choose imagery that paints the right tone that you are looking for, and one of the best things I ever did, and I highly recommend this. I scanned all my photo albums because I'm a defense partner that moves around really frequently. I don't want photos to get damaged or lost in the [00:05:00] move, and so I took all of my photos from my life and from my kids' lives before, you know, everything was on your iPhone and we had physical photos and I scanned them and uh, there's like six gigabytes of imagery.
Sitting in my Google Drive and I regularly use that imagery in my content, and it was this imagery, these photos that really helped to bring lessons in falling to life Now. Lessons in Falling was so, so successful for us. It helped us win our first couple of hundred. Instagram and Facebook followers. It also helped to win our first couple of hundred email subscribers, and you know how much I value email subscribers.
With a total cost of $2 49. Now, it was a gut load of work because there were seven installments. They all had to be really well written. [00:06:00] Each one ended on a cliffhanger so that people would be looking forward to the next installment. And then we needed to design Instagram stories for each basically sentence of the story.
So there was hundreds of Instagram stories. So there was a lot of designing on my phone. Getting these stories looking really good, but it was worth it because I didn't have the budget at the time. What I did have was time because we were just launching this business and I was able to invest that time in creating this great miniseries.
We got so many emails and dms about lessons in falling with people, resonating with different parts of my story, such as postnatal anxiety, such as. The feeling of failure, such as having to let go of team members, such as people stealing your IP or people stealing your money. There were just so many relatable bits and it really started to build relationships with our [00:07:00] target audience.
And actually some of our customers today and some of our members of our community will still remember lessons in falling. We then turned lessons in falling into an article that's now published on Thrive Global. And you can also, if you're interested, you can go and revisit lessons in Falling. I'll put the link in the show notes, but we've made it into a seven part email series now, and you can go back and read the whole thing.
And I honestly, it's probably the best example of a quick and. Affordable campaign for a brand, a new brand using storytelling and being vulnerable and showing up in ways that are potentially quite scary, but in ways that could build your brand for years to come. So that was 2019. After that, we [00:08:00] rebranded to Campaign Delmar when my business partner left.
So really the beginning of the campaign, Delmar Journey as we know it now. Is 2021 and in May, 2021 we rebranded. So, uh, we changed everything over to campaign, Delmar, new branding, new website, new offering. And then in August, 2021, we ran our first major brand campaign, which was called The Gurus We Deserve.
Now I knew I needed to do this. If I was gonna call my business campaign Delmar, then I needed to lead from the front and not just tell small businesses that they need to run campaigns, but that I needed to come out with a really impressive, heavy hitting first campaign to show them, not just tell them.
And I definitely feel that I achieve that. So the Gurus We Deserve is an anti-marketing campaign. [00:09:00] I impersonate one of these seven figure megaphones gurus that I like to call out. And, uh, it's a very humorous ad with different scenes. So it's video and I am dressed up as a guru, and the campaign starts.
My first launch generated six figures and cost six figures. So you kind of get a bit of a understanding of very, very tongue in cheek. And because this is a brand awareness campaign, I wasn't necessarily trying to sell any particular products or services. This was really about positioning. Hello, we are campaign delma.
We are very uh, straight shooting no nonsense, zero bullshit truth telling campaign marketers. And I, I feel that we walked this line really well. At the end of the film, I swap back [00:10:00] into Mia and I say, enough with the crap marketing, learn to create marketing campaigns that are right for your business so that you don't need to rely on this guru bullshit.
And so it all wrapped up this comedic. Kind of 92nd video. That was a lot of fun. It brought it home. We brought the message home that when you know how to run strategic and creative marketing campaigns, you don't need to use guru tactics. The gurus we deserve is still, to date my most expensive campaign.
It cost $15,000 and I did not have $15,000 at the time. So this was. Invested by me personally because my business partner had exited the business. We were actually at a loss when she left the business. So we did not have the profit at the time to fund the gurus we deserve. So it was a [00:11:00] capital investment that I made from me, a FileMan to campaign Delmar, and I would have paid double knowing what I know now.
About how much the gurus we deserve has built my brand. It is really the thing that put Campaign Delmar on the map and there are still people today that discover me for the first time through the gurus and say to me, oh my God, I've just seen this for the first time. This is 2021. Mind you that we first launched it.
It is genius. I love this. I'm now following along on your journey and I'm really hoping that we can work together in the future. So I guess that's our second lesson is that you do need to invest in your brand. Okay? And I'm gonna say this and it's gonna come off as harsh, but you know that it's always wrapped in a warm hug.
If you are the sort of person who is just going to rely on organic, always on content. [00:12:00] Social media content, occasional blog, occasional email, and never run campaigns. You are never gonna play in the major leagues. You are just not, I'm sorry, but every major brand in the world runs campaigns and there's a good reason for it.
And so if you are a couple of years into your business. And you are not running campaigns and you're wondering why your marketing is never breaking through and you're not having these milestone leaps in your business. It's probably because you are not running campaigns, right? And you have become quite a slave to social media where you are constantly needing to create social media content and good social media content all the time because you don't have these assets in your business.
That are continuing to build your brand in a big way. So, you know, I talk about this always on marketing is great for business as usual for bubbling below the surface. But if you want real peaks in your business, real [00:13:00] uplift. If you want an actual massive jump in audience awareness in. A really successful launch or uh, offering, then you need campaigns.
That's what's going to drive those peaks. So that's exactly what the gurus we deserve did for us. But campaigns have a long tail, especially brand awareness campaigns, which is what the gurus we deserve, is you don't necessarily get all the results of your campaign. One week, two weeks, three weeks after your campaign wraps, it continues to build and nurture your brand for years to come, especially if you know how to leverage your campaigns.
So if you go to the Campaign Delmar website right now, you can revisit the Guru's campaign. It's in our primary nav. It's got the campaign film, it's got the campaign debrief, it's got imagery from the campaign. All of this is SEO optimized, so that that campaign [00:14:00] still lives on. It is still an asset that is feeding my brand.
So let's talk a little bit about the specifics of the gurus we deserve. I wrote the script and then I worked with an incredible production company in Melbourne called The Tropics, and they took my script. They didn't change any of the script, but they came up with the scenes. For each line in the script.
And this required multiple shoot locations. So we shot in a house, a really, really fancy house in Elwood with this amazing balcony. And we also shot at a theater in Brighton. And that's when you see me on stage saying, uh, don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle. And there's only one audience member, right?
Because I'm, I'm impersonating a guru and gurus participate in a lot of fakery. Like, oh, I'm [00:15:00] so amazing. But there's only one person in the audience, right? And it was their idea to get a money gun spray, paint it pink and me shoot money. I came up with the artwork for my book, my bestselling book, uh, which is called Pow Kapow Sham.
Wow. That's my book and I'm holding it up in one of the scenes. So it was a really great creative collaboration with the tropics. I came with the strategy, I came with the script and they came with the storyboard and the art direction, and then we worked together on the wardrobe and we shot over two days in Melbourne, in around May or June, 2020, and then we launched it in August, 2021.
And off the back of the Gus we deserve, I opened the doors, the enrollments to campaign classroom, and this was the first time we were able [00:16:00] to fill campaign classroom, get 20 spots of people participating in campaign classroom. So super successful from that perspective. Alright, we gotta crack on. So that was August 20, 21, $15,000 budget and I made easily double that in campaign classroom enrollments, plus everything went up.
My Instagram followers, my LinkedIn followers, my email list grew. My website traffic was up 3000% like it was as, as Stef Hanson say. All the arrows went up. Okay, so the year after 2021, I created a campaign called Make Marketing Great Again, and it was a political campaign where I impersonate, again, not a guru, but a politician that is running against the guru's party.
And the reason why I chose a political campaign analogy is that one of the [00:17:00] biggest insights that I had at the time was that people still did not understand what a campaign was. So I had been harping on about campaigns, but people were still secretly, silently saying. Ah, she's really, really passionate about campaigns, but I actually can't really tell you what one is, and the best way for me to describe a campaign is to use a political analogy, is to say, well, think about a politician running for office, right?
They have one unifying message. They have a big idea that underpins their campaign or their platform. They have branding, consistent branding. And they do a lot of things, a lot of different activities throughout their campaign in order to win the election. They don't just post relentlessly on social media.
They show up for town hall meetings. They do press interviews, they [00:18:00] run ads. They buy media, they run events. They do lots of stuff in order to lead up to the desired outcome, which is. The actual election. So if we think about a campaign being a connected series of actions leading to the desired outcome, this political analogy is a really good one because it's like, alright, everything that a politician does leading up to the election is their campaign.
And we, and we know that, right? Because we know what politicians do. So I wanted to bring that into make marketing great again. And because it was a political campaign, it really allowed me to bring in some themes of social impact and our community and social good. And so part of this campaign was a panel called Campaigns for Social Impact.
So first I had a video make [00:19:00] Marketing great again. That video cost $5,000 to produce by the team in the Northern Territory called Global Headquarters, who are awesome. And we filmed it out the front of Parliament House. We had Core flute. Political posters like you do. I was in a blazer in 36 degrees in Darwin at 70% humidity.
It was gross. I was in trousers, but I needed to look like a politician running for office. And we had a really great speech that was the, the script for the campaign. And I worked with Rie Slatter, who is a speech writer, and that was the script for our campaign. And then after we released the video and some clips from Make Marketing Great Again, the campaign evolved from a brand awareness campaign to a lead generation campaign with campaigns for social impact panel.
Now, let me tell you, [00:20:00] pulling together this panel was 10 times more work than the video shoot with global headquarters and impersonating the politician because I needed to get the right mix of panelists, and I did, and I'm super grateful. But holy moly, I seriously underestimated how hard it would be. To get panelists for this panel, but I am so happy with the panel that I was able to pull together, and honestly, a huge shout out to Odette Barry who helped me with some incredible introductions.
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So on the panel we had Christina Hobbs, who is the CEO of Verve Super, an ethical superannuation company by women for women who runs campaigns, and so wanted her on the panel. We then had Ruth Haffenden, who is the global marketing manager of Booty. They make their Australian organic bamboo, cotton underwear and sleepwear brand, and they have run some [00:22:00] incredible campaigns.
So wanted her to talk about product marketing and campaigns. We then had Tim Snape. Who is the marketing director of Heaps Normal, which is, uh, Australia's best tasting, bestselling zero a beer. Their campaigns are so cool, like even cooler than alcoholic brands. They have dance parties and they release albums and rock concerts.
They give away jet skis. Awesome, awesome campaigns for a Zero Elk brand. And then to round out the panel, we had Patricia Kro from the Impact Business School. So really this whole panel discussion was around how to create a campaign, not necessarily for profit, but for impact because. People don't realize that campaigns are fit for purpose.
They're not just to make money, they are for any of [00:23:00] your business objectives. And one of the objectives that is really important to forward-leaning female entrepreneurs who I work with is creating. Impact and creating social change. And to do that, you require a campaign. Vember slip, slop, slap dove, real beauty.
These are all social impact campaigns, right? The lesson here is that pulling together a panel, programming an event is 10 times more work than you ever, ever imagined. Trust me, it is. Oh my goodness. Because I knew who I wanted, but. Depending on who said yes, it would change the other panelists. Does that make sense?
So I wanted a service based business. I wanted a product based business. I wanted a person of color on this panel. And so there was a lot of like. Moving of people and feelings and even how do you reach out to these people and get them to say [00:24:00] yes, like they'd never heard of me before and give up their time.
Uh, for me now, I did pay them, which I highly recommend doing, and that definitely helped things. But I didn't have an existing relationship with any of these people, but campaigns for Social Impact was super successful for my business. We had 300 registrations that were new, so 300 new people on our email list.
What I really loved about Make Marketing Great Again and Campaigns for Social Impact was, uh, our visual identity for this campaign. So the campaign, Delmar Color Palette has a green color, which is a seaweed and it has a yellow color. And when you put those two colors together, it kind of looks like green and gold.
And then we introduced some stars and it looked very political, like you're a political party, basically [00:25:00] like stars and stripes. And we did incorporate some stripes as well, and I thought that this was really clever. Because we were using our existing brand colors, and we are still using our font, but we were able to create a campaign visual identity that was same, same, but different to the campaign Delmar brand.
So it didn't jar, it didn't shock, it didn't compete. But it was different that it had people going, oh, hang on, this is a little bit different. What's this green and gold stars and stripes thing that Mia has got going that looks different from my normal campaign Del Mar branding? And so I highly recommend that as you run campaigns, to think about an attention grabbing visual identity for your campaign.
All right, so that was 2021. Let's move on. In 2022, we ran a campaign called Paradiso, [00:26:00] and this was a very low production campaign and it was specifically geared towards enrollments for campaign classroom. And this campaign cost $1,500. I recorded it in a studio in Darwin at the Global Headquarters Studios in Winne.
I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and my T-shirt said Paradiso on it, which is why I gave this campaign this name. Now, by the way, I name all of my campaigns, as you've probably already picked up. They are my children. They deserve names and I consider them to be assets in my business. And when we have an asset, we should give it a name and the proper love that it deserves.
Paradiso, even though it was $1,500, was a very, very successful campaign for us. It was the first time ever I needed to actually log onto Kajabi and turn off the [00:27:00] purchases for campaign classroom. We'd had too many. 24 people had enrolled in campaign classroom and I just didn't think I could achievably run the program with any more than 24 people at one time.
Um, just so you know, campaign classroom is $3,200 per seat. So times that by 24, that is a lot of money for a $1,500 campaign. And I remember cooking dinner and I saw a notification come through and I was like. I actually have to stop right now. Go onto Kajabi and turn off the checkout page because we've sold too many spots, which was really a highlight in my business journey.
What was great about Paradiso is that this was Mia Raw. The gurus we deserve and make marketing great again. I was impersonating a character. I was either a guru or a politician, and so that had been done. Now it was time for something different, and so what you got was a really stripped back [00:28:00] version of Mia in jeans and a t-shirt, talking to camera in a studio.
And people really related to that down to earth vibe. And this was really important because up until this point, I had spent $15,000 on my first campaign, $5,000 on my second campaign. A lot of small businesses were saying that's still outside my budget. I can't even consider $5,000. So I needed to show them what I could do for $1,500, which all of us.
Can't afford or should be able to afford. So that was Paradiso 2022. In 2023, I didn't run a video campaign. I did a photo shoot and it was all new imagery for my brand. We did it in Darwin at a couple of different locations down at the waterfront. We, uh, filmed at this little Laneway bar, and then we also went to the Trader Cafe, and I [00:29:00] chose those locations because they had that kind of Delmar Amalfi Coast vibe to them.
I worked with a sensational photographer called Helen or, and she captured hundreds of headshot, lifestyle imagery, and just so much great content. And we ran a enrollment campaign for campaign classroom, but we used only photography and not video. And again, super successful for us. We sold out campaign classroom.
We continued to build the brand. Our revenue has increased every year since I started this business in 2021. Then moving on to 2024, we released Takeoff with us, which was the sailing video. It was my first campaign with Steph Hansen, but definitely not my last, and we spent $10,000 on this campaign. [00:30:00] We actually filmed it at the end of 2023.
Uh, ready to launch in 2024. Now, 2024 was the year that I spent 10 months overseas, so I knew I was going to do that. So in December, I flew to Melbourne with Emily and with Remy, who is one of my customers, and she starred in this campaign. And we shot the campaign film and. I knew it was ready to go to to release it in February, 2024 when I had established myself in Canada, and that's exactly what we did.
This was the first time that I had other people Star in my campaign other than me. So I was first time working with Talent and Takeoff with us was the launch campaign for Marketing Circle, which is my membership, and really the only way to work with me now. I could not believe that 27 people [00:31:00] signed up to my marketing membership in its first year while they knew that I was on a year abroad.
I honestly thought people would be like, oh, I'm not gonna work with her when she's on a year abroad. She's not actually going to be available mentally or physically. She's in another country at the other side of the world. But it was so compelling and I had proven to people that while I was overseas, I was still running my business and 27 people invested in my membership in its first year.
And in no small part did this campaign take off with us play in that role. It was also the first time we used drone footage, and the first time we procured a yacht for our campaign, which Steph Hansen did at zero cost. Because when you invest in relationships, it's unbelievable what the universe can give you in return.
Right? Steph? As for anyone who knows, is a [00:32:00] sensational human being. And she does so many things for people, and in this case, I was able to reap the benefit of her just being such a good human and someone graciously lending us the yacht and a captain. Now, takeoff with us was a video led campaign like many of my others, but the actual video itself is not the only part of this campaign.
There are emails, there are static posts, there are carousels. There are clips, there are Instagram stories. There are lots of formats. Generally there is a hero video or a hero design or hero photo, but I can then create lots of different content from that hero video. Like we had teasers, we had still images, we had text-based images, all based off this takeoff with US campaign film now, because it was on a yacht.
[00:33:00] We could use sailing imagery and sailing messaging. And just so we are clear, the video itself is not the whole campaign, it's just one part of the campaign. All the content throughout the campaign makes it part of the campaign, including any PR that I get from my campaigns is part of the campaign. And then finally.
In 2025, we released in Good Company, which is my latest campaign. It costs $7,000. It was shot on location in Lennox Head and it starred current Marketing Circle members. And this was quite a different campaign because. I didn't actually have any lines in this campaign. We used a voiceover, one of my members, Jen Mehan, who has this incredible Irish Australian accent.
It was a storytelling campaign. It had a a few Wes [00:34:00] Anderson vibes to it. And really the members were the heroes of this campaign, and it told their story, and I really, really love that because as a membership. What better way than to run a member-led campaign? Again, we used drone footage again, I worked with Steph Hanson Productions, and this is my favorite campaign to date, even better than Gurus because this campaign.
Is going to make me the most money and it, it already has in good company, has helped us get to 43 Marketing Circle members. Now, you will remember earlier I said we launched last year with 27, and now we have 43 members and we are basically nearly full. But because this campaign is so. Compelling and focused on the bottom of funnel.
It actually will work really hard for us to bring in members. And [00:35:00] interestingly, we were able to sign a Marketing Circle member two days after we launched this campaign film. And it was the campaign, it's itself that the member said, I just love this campaign so much. I'm in Yeah, this, this did it for me.
And that's quite rare, right? Because generally. It's the last couple of days of my campaign after I've shared 30 days of content and emails and posts and podcasts that people take action for someone to enroll in Marketing Circle on day two is a new highlight. Is a is a new, is a new achievement. New achievement unlocked.
Uh, I wrote the script for the campaign, but here's an interesting anecdote. I completely changed the script three weeks out from production. We had a script. It was quite complicated and it was going to be difficult to shoot this, and I had a [00:36:00] last minute change of idea and I completely changed the script.
Completely simplified it, made it so much better, so much punchier, a lot more to the point. As a result, it made shooting this campaign a dream. We were done in a couple of hours. We were early, so we shot the tennis scene the day before, just me and Steph, and we had the most beautiful light, and we got that done in an hour and a half, which completely took the pressure off the next day.
And then in three hours we had completely done this campaign. Mind you, this had a huge cast. It had Janine Brook. Tenay as the stars, and then it had Natalie Fee, Kelly, Chloe, the other Natalie Rena at this pool party. And in the coworking scenes we were working with a big cast. To get [00:37:00] it done in three hours meant that we were 100% prepared.
And that's what happens when you work with someone like me, but also someone with like Steph. Who, you know, eats campaigns for breakfast and is really good at the pre-production and thinking about props, thinking about scripts, thinking about timing and shot lists and wardrobe and catering and all of it so that the actual shoot runs really, really smoothly.
So I have been yapping on now for 40 minutes and I'm gonna wrap this up. But what I've taken you through are our major campaigns each year. But these are not the only campaigns we run. We run multiple campaigns a year, but they are lower production, lower cost, and quicker and faster to pull together. For example, quick and dirty sales campaigns or [00:38:00] mini lead generation campaigns.
What I want you to take away from this episode is that we invest in our brand in a big way at least once a year, and I highly recommend that you do that too. And then run little mini campaigns throughout the year for the rest of your marketing objectives. That's a little bit of a campaign anthology.
I'd love to know from you if you have a favorite campaign, Delmar campaign, and I'd love to know if any of these have inspired something for you. Is there something that you heard here today that you think, oh, I'd like to try something like that for my brand? Please reach out and let me know. I love nothing more than to discuss campaigns, as you've probably already picked up.
So I'm gonna leave it there, and I look forward to chatting with you next week.
I've started a substack as the ideal companion to the podcast. It's packed with extra insights, visuals, and nuggets [00:39:00] that didn't make it into the episodes. Plus, you can revisit past editions, any type if you want more or just prefer to read, you'll love it.
Plus it's a place for us to connect. Want the backstage pass to Got Marketing? Subscribe [email protected]. Thank you. You listened right up until the end, so why not hit that? Subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and they're also the best way to support a small business.
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