Planning Your Campaign
Need help getting started? Learn how to plan, create, execute, and analyse a successful marketing campaign.
What is a campaign?
A campaign is a fundamental building block to executing a successful marketing strategy. It doesn’t include all marketing efforts for a brand, but it groups together a series of planned tasks and actions. They all work towards a common goal with a clear start and end date.
Campaigns communicate a specific message to targeted, segmented audiences through a clear call to action. They help us identify what our audience needs, define the product or offer we want to promote, and help us choose the best channels to promote it on.
Content marketing vs campaigns
Combining both approaches offers the greatest success. Content allows you to create long term engagement with your audiences. It builds trust and is released over a longer period.
A campaign enables you to reach new followers. It is often used for product or service launches, brand awareness or reputation building.
Using both approaches helps you to nurture both new and engaged audiences throughout their decision-making journey.
Our 8-step guide to campaign success
Campaigns make us memorable. They showcase our personality, our identity and reinforce our parent brand. Here’s our 8-step guide to help you plan, deliver and report on your campaign.
Step 1: Set your goals and performance metrics
It’s best to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your campaign. What are your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals and objectives?
What type of campaign do you want to deliver? You could focus on brand awareness; driving event registrations; launching a new course; or re-marketing for example.
You also need to think about how you’ll measure your campaign’s success too. Identify the end goal or goals for your campaign, quantify them and explain how you’ll measure this result.
For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness of a new course you might measure:
- web traffic to your course page and the source of this traffic
- sign-ups to receive more information about the course
- click through rates (CTR) from your paid media ads
Step 2: Understand your audience
Audiences are the foundation of any campaign. You need to understand who you are looking to attract and who you’re creating content for.
This will increase your audiences’ engagement and responsiveness. It will also give you a better understanding of their pain points.
Consider:
- your market segmentation (specific information about your target audience or persona)
- what they need and why
- what you would like them to do
- where you can reach them (for example channels, platforms, networks)
You can also boost your audience understanding with market insight.
Step 3: Set your budget
Not all campaigns require a budget. It all depends on what resource you have and what your channel mix is.
You’ll need to prioritise your budget, thinking about how much you should spend and where to spend it. This will help you see a good return on investment for the budget and resources available to you.
Your budget will depend on a few variables:
- do you have an in-house team to support your campaign?
- will you need to work with an agency or freelancer?
- the duration of campaign
- how you intend to reach your audience
- what assets you will need to create and in what format
You might decide to scale up or down elements of your budget to fit the total amount available. This all needs building into your return on investment (ROI) as part of your campaign performance.
Step 4: Who’s in? Creating your campaign team
Make sure you have the right people who can help with all the outputs and deliverables you need.
Your campaign team are the people you are relying on to deliver your campaign. It usually consists of you as the campaign manager and colleagues who have expertise or ownership for specific channels.
Step 5: Pick your content formats
Content formats are different ways of presenting your content, such as blog posts, podcasts, and infographics. Focus on quality over quantity to convey your message.
When budget and resource are tight, invest in high-value content you can used for multiple campaigns. Think about how you can maximise your content across channels, tailoring your messaging for each channel or audience. You can then repurpose this bite-sized content for quick consumption.
Step 6: Choose your channels
When planning your campaign, think about how you will distribute your content and messaging.
You may already know from market insight, how your audiences search for products, services, or content like yours. You’ll also have a good understanding of the channels you have access to or can gain access to through the University Marketing team or an agency. Compare the channel options available to you to assess the pros and cons of each channel.
Your channel choices should help you maximise reach and connect you with the right audience.
Step 7: Set your deadlines and plan your tactics
Set your start and end date for the campaign alongside your launch date and milestones. Work backwards to map out the tactics and tasks needed for each channel, allocating who is responsible for each one. Use a project or campaign management tool to help you and your campaign team:
- manage communication
- track tasks
- monitor the status of your campaign
There are plenty of campaign management tools available. We use Wrike but you could also try Trello or Teams Planner as part of the Microsoft suite.
Step 8: Measure the success of your campaign
Measuring and analysing your campaign against goals and metrics can provide insight into your:
- audience behaviours
- channel performance
- spend
It will also help you shape recommendations for your next campaign. What worked, what didn’t, and what you can better?
We recommend setting up a campaign dashboard to track as you go, as measurement shouldn’t be something you just do at the end of the campaign. This will also help you track campaign performance across platforms and channels.
If you see a particular ad, call to action, piece of content or channel performing well, you can optimise your campaign to focus on or move budget to support this.
Top tips for managing your campaign
We’ve learnt a trick or two from managing our own campaigns:
- regularly monitor and optimise your campaign activity and spend for the best ROI
- communicate the status of your campaign with your colleagues
- create a consistent visual experience across your marketing content and channels
- focus your content: respond to a pain point, an information need or something actionable (like signing up for an event)
- you won’t get things 100% right, so don’t be afraid to test, learn and improve