Campaign Strategy 101
Planning an integrated marketing campaign is no easy feat. It requires time to step back and plan, and it is often a heavy lift in terms of asset creation, copywriting, and even media spend. It can be hard for a small teams to take time away from other ongoing projects and invest the resources required for a truly integrated campaign. But the dividends often exceed the investment, and once you find a mold that works for your brand, building on your campaigns will come easily.
Set your vision
It all starts with a clear vision and set of goals. A vision tells you what your campaign will do at the highest level - Are you celebrating your customers? Shining a light on an issue relevant to your business? Highlighting your core differentiation from the competition? Goals tell you specifically what your campaign will achieve - elevate brand awareness through X impressions, drive Y sales of your product, increase product engagement by Z%. Goals are important for any project to help you determine what success looks like, but vision is what will drive your messaging, your creative assets, and the feeling your audience gets from the campaign. Your vision will ultimately determine how successful you are at reaching your goals.
Give yourself ample time to plan
Work backward from when you want to launch your campaign. Give yourself time to plan a strategy, gather feedback and buy-in from any relevant stakeholders, get clear on your messaging and calls to action, define success metrics, develop copy and creative assets, and test your content. You may also want to build in a little extra time for a soft launch or any promotion you may need to gather content in advance of your campaign. If this is your first time launching a campaign, give yourself even more time than you think you need. You won’t regret it, and moving at a steady pace will help ensure the campaign doesn’t take over your regular marketing efforts. Last but not least, make sure you give yourself time to reflect! Plan at least a meeting or two after the campaign to figure out what worked, what didn’t, and record your thoughts for next time.
Develop channel-specific tactics, including a clear project plan for creating all assets
Figure out what you need to create, how long it will take, and who will be in charge. Whether it’s social content, email, ads, blog posts, or a landing page, each project needs an owner. If the only owner is you, be very realistic about how many pieces you can manage. Maybe in year one you start with a simple social media campaign, and next time you build on that with an email series and blog post. If you give yourself the time to plan and execute well, each element you create should serve as a template you can use for future campaigns.
A case study for consideration: World Kindness Week
While working for a brand focused on kindness and empathy, Christina developed a campaign for “World Kindness Week” centered on the international holiday, World Kindness Day. This was the company’s first true marketing campaign - meaning it was a coordinated effort across multiple channels, occurring over an extended period of time, and grounded in a specific theme and action-oriented goal. The team wanted to test whether the campaign could lead to increased product use among a target audience. The campaign ran over a six-week period and included a landing page with a pledge for users to take action during World Kindness Week. They created unique organic content for social media, social ads, an email series, and print materials for the campaign.
Through a clear vision, thoughtful planning, and seamless execution, the campaign led to the highest product usage ever for a single week, 3x mentions on social media, and the brand’s most efficient media spend for the year. Perhaps most importantly, there were a number of lessons learned about what the team needed to do to better prepare for, execute, and analyze a campaign, which gave them the confidence to improve efficiency and drive better results in the future.
