How to run effective campaigns
Part 3 of 3 in Growth Marketing Strategy Series
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If your marketing team is not setting a strategy and operating effectively, you’ll know instantly when you try to run a big campaign. Everything will break down. On the flip side, if you can pull off a successful large campaign, your marketing team is probably collaborating effectively.
For something so core to marketing, running campaigns is a complicated art that’s rarely done well.
To get campaigns right, you need combine the right marketing “fuel” with the right marketing “engine”, at the right time, for the right people.
This newsletter covers how to run campaigns more effectively. The goal is to teach you how to run campaigns that drive meaningful—or even step-change—growth.
This is part 3 of 3 of my growth marketing strategy series. Reading the first two newsletters first will be helpful, but here’s a quick summary:
Part 1: How to build your growth marketing strategy.
Understanding the 4 high-level ways to drive growth
Analyzing and understanding the 3 marketing strategy drivers (your inputs)
Identifying and making room for big bets
Part 2: What are the best channels for your startup?
How to choose channels that are a fit for your growth marketing strategy
How to determine if a channel is working
Part 3: How to plan and execute campaigns - this newsletter!
What is a campaign anyway?
My approach to running campaigns as a team of 1 or 30 marketers.
High-level examples of various types of campaigns
Thanks to our sponsors…
We only include sponsors when we’ve received a positive recommendation from the MKT1 community or our portfolio companies.
Closing Media
Closing Media partners with companies like Divvy, Unity, and Headspace to fuel their paid media engines. We’re a small team of two focused on making your life easier with efficient, revenue-generating campaigns--on LinkedIn and Google.
Why MKT1 recommends Closing Media: We’ve been recommending Max and August at Closing Media since the early days of MKT1. They have deep knowledge of LinkedIn and Google and the complexities and nuances of running campaigns on each platform. They’ll become a true extension of your team and can help you go from scratch to scale quickly.
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Ten Speed
Ten Speed is a content optimization agency for early and growth-stage SaaS companies like Bitly, Workvivo, and Visible. We dive into your marketing strategy, find low-hanging fruit, and grow your awareness, engagement, and MRR with proven SEO strategies and revenue-focused content.
Why MKT1 recommends Ten Speed: We’ve been referring Ten Speed to our portfolio companies for a couple of years now—long before they decided to sponsor our newsletter. If you need help creating content that fits with your growth strategy, repurposing existing content, or scaling SEO, reach out to Ten Speed.
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RevenueHero
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Why MKT1 recommends RevenueHero: You can set up the perfect campaigns on exactly the right channels, but if your prospects don’t convert it’s all for nothing. That’s where RevenueHero comes in—to help you improve conversion. We’ve been recommending RevenueHero since we wrote a newsletter on improving demo request flows a couple months back. So, if you don’t have a book a meeting step in your conversion flow, try RevenueHero.
Offer: Mention MKT1 for 15% off, for MKT1 subscribers who close by the end of Dec 2023.
Back to the subject at hand…
What exactly is a campaign?
“Campaign” is one of those words like “growth”, nobody shares a definition.
Here’s my take.
I use a pretty broad definition: campaigns are marketing initiatives that involve both fuel & engine.
Campaigns are typically focused on a specific segment or segment(s) of your audience.
Campaigns are often oriented around a “theme” (creative concept, product or content launch, event, trend, etc), etc.
Campaigns often span across channels and funnel stages.
Campaigns should have a specific goal and time horizon.
Adding more complexity and ambiguity…campaigns can originate from anyone on the marketing team–whether on the fuel side (content, brand, product marketing) or the engine side (growth, demand gen).
Product launches, content distribution, demand gen and account-based marketing initiatives, and events…all campaigns. This is convenient because you might have thought that you need completely different processes for all of these things. You don’t.
For some, the idea that an event or a product launch is a type of campaign might be new. When you think of all these things as campaigns, you’ll be more effective at creating and reusing processes and prioritizing across all of your marketing initiatives. For a list of what I consider campaign types, see the roadmap example in this newsletter.
5 principles for running campaigns that drive growth
Running campaigns is a true test of your marketing team’s strategic and execution abilities. But there’s a lot of gray area when it comes to campaigns—from how to plan them to getting the hand-offs right to determine what’s working. And where there’s gray, there’s room for error.
Here’s our attempt to remove some of that gray area and provide guidance on how to run campaigns:
You need to actually run campaigns (this one may seem obvious, but many teams don’t effectively combine fuel and engine activities )
Plan campaigns in advance—and be ready to make tough prioritization decisions
Each campaign needs a single DRI and tight coordination across all of marketing
Campaign briefs are not busywork, they’re a requirement
Double down on campaigns that work—don’t keep reinventing the wheel
Let’s dive into each…
1. Actually run campaigns
One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to campaigns is just not doing them. You can’t just create content and build out channels separately—you need to think in terms of coordinated initiatives.
Many marketing teams fall into this trap…
They never think about how to combine fuel and engine in creative ways.
They don’t plan for big moments.
They don’t think about how to reach specific audience segments–and what channels or creative work to do for that segment vs other audiences.
They don’t have a tight feedback loop between what’s being made, how it’s being distributed, what’s actually working, etc.
They have either way too much fuel, with no focus on building an engine to distribute said fuel. Or they spend all their time building a perfect engine with no fuel to drive it.
For more on our fuel / engine metaphor for building a marketing machine, check out this newsletter.
2. Plan campaigns in advance—be ready to make tough prioritization decisions
Campaign ideas come from marketing strategy work. The first newsletter in this series talked about how to build a marketing strategy that drives impact and plays into your strengths. I covered how to:
Stack rank the 4 highest-level ways to grow
Deeply understand your audience before anything else
Use your GTM motion to guide your marketing activities
Identify your marketing advantages and build your marketing strategy around these strengths
Identify your core storylines or the “perceptions” you want to drive. More on this in our perceptions newsletter.
How to use MKT1’s “4 high-level ways to grow” exercise to help prioritize campaigns:
First, stack rank the 4 high-level ways to grow as part of your quarterly planning process. Then, pick the campaigns that align to the top ways you think you will grow.
e.g. If you plan to primarily grow by reaching new market segments, choose campaigns that help you reach them, not campaigns that go after your existing audience.4 ways to grow:
1. Go after new market segments
2. Gain more market share in your current market
3. Increase conversion rates
4. Increase revenue per customer
Goal setting & universal campaign prioritization
When you do this strategy work, it becomes much easier to figure out the initiatives that can change your trajectory as a business.
And after you do this work, you’re now ready to set goals as a marketing team–and make the tough choices as to which campaigns to include. This is easier said than done, it’s often hard to pick which campaigns are the highest leverage–especially since campaigns can impact different funnel stages.
Here’s how:
Identify your big bets and big moments (aka campaigns!) early in the quarterly planning process.
Work together as a team to stack rank the campaigns that will have the most impact (base your definition of “most impactful” on your stack ranking of the 4 high-level ways to grow).
When setting goals, don’t just set KPI-based goals, but also project, experiment, and ops goals. Large campaigns are “project goals” and you should be planning for these initiatives in advance.
Add these to a campaign roadmap. Here’s an example roadmap:
Don’t set your campaign plans in stone
While you need to set goals and make roadmaps to prioritize the right things, the common mistake here is being inflexible. We recommend revisiting and reassessing your quarterly plans monthly. Things may come up in that planning period that drive a new campaign idea, for example:
A trend or event can surface in your market you want to jump on.
You may get a few referenceable customers from a competitor or in a certain segment and want to go capture more of that audience quickly.
You could have a lot of success with an ad campaign and want to double down on that creative type and segmentation on more channels.
In short, be ready to swap out one campaign priority for the next.
3. Each campaign needs a single DRI and tight coordination across all of marketing
Campaign ideas can come from any sub-function in marketing—whether on the fuel or engine side of the house. But as I mentioned, almost all campaigns involve cross-marketing collaboration. This can make the process of planning campaigns and executing them complicated.
To avoid that, you need a DRI (directly responsible individually) and tight feedback loops across the team. Early on, it’s typically the role of the head of marketing to help universally prioritize and lead campaigns. As your team grows, the DRI can be someone from any marketing sub-function–even if their core job is typically owning a channel or content creation.
This diagram shows what each sub-function of marketing should bring to the table (and if you are a marketing team of just 1 or 2 people, make sure you are thinking through all of these areas when planning for a campaign). The DRI needs to make sure the loops, handoffs, and cross-team collaboration happen.
More from MKT1
✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here, including access to a campaign brief, roadmap, and launch plan in Google Docs that work well for product launches, demand gen campaigns, content distribution, etc.
🧑🚀 Job board: See roles from the MKT community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.
👁️ Related newsletters: Choosing the right channels, How to measure marketing activities and funnel mapping.
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes how to use campaign briefs (they are a requirement!), double down on campaigns that work, and 8 different campaign examples.