MSM FULL-FUNNEL CONVERSION GLOSSARY
What is a Marketing Campaign?
A marketing campaign is a set of coordinated marketing activity, planned around a single objective and a defined audience, that runs for a set period and is measured as a whole.
THE SHORT ANSWER
The Definition
A marketing campaign is a set of coordinated marketing activity, planned around a single objective and a defined audience, that runs for a set period and is measured as a whole.
Why It Matters Commercially
Campaign budget is usually the largest discretionary spend in marketing, and it's the easiest to waste. A campaign without a single clear objective produces activity that's impossible to judge, so the same money gets spent again the following quarter on the same basis.
How It's Measured
Cost per acquisition from the campaign, and revenue attributed to it against total campaign cost. Impressions, reach and engagement describe activity rather than outcome, so keep them separate from the numbers you judge it on.
Who Owns It
Marketing owns planning and running it. Sales owns what happens to the enquiries it produces. Both need to agree the follow up before launch, because the most common cause of a campaign underperforming is that nobody decided who responds and how quickly.
HOW IT WORKS
A marketing campaign is a set of coordinated activity aimed at one objective, over a defined period, measured as a whole. The last part is what separates a campaign from ordinary marketing activity. If you can't say when it started, when it ends and what it was meant to achieve, it isn't a campaign.
Every campaign worth running has six things settled before anything goes out:
- One objective. Not brand awareness and lead generation and recruitment. One. Everything else is a secondary benefit.
- A defined audience. Specific enough that you'd recognise them, and specific enough to exclude people.
- A single message. The thing you want that audience to understand. If it takes a paragraph, it isn't ready.
- Channels chosen for the audience. Not chosen because you already have accounts on them.
- A destination. Where the traffic lands and what happens there. Campaigns pointed at a homepage lose most of what they generate.
- A measure and a period. What number tells you it worked, and by when.
Where campaigns usually fail
Rarely at the creative stage. Most fail at the destination and the follow up.
A campaign generates interest and sends it to a page that doesn't repeat the promise the advert made, so people leave. Or it produces enquiries that arrive with no plan for who responds and how quickly, so they go cold. In both cases the campaign gets judged a failure when the failure was downstream of it. This is the same gap covered in conversion rate optimisation and customer journey mapping.
Before running a campaign, work out what happens to a lead in the two hours after it arrives. If nobody can answer, fix that first. It costs nothing and it changes the return on the campaign more than the campaign does.
A campaign versus always on marketing
A campaign has a start, an end and a specific objective. Always on marketing runs continuously: your website, your SEO, your regular content, your nurture sequences.
Campaigns create peaks. Always on marketing catches the people those peaks reach who weren't ready at the time, which in B2B is most of them. Businesses that only run campaigns get a spike and then silence. Businesses that only run always on activity grow steadily and slowly. The two do different jobs and neither replaces the other.
A campaign versus a channel
A channel is where activity happens. A campaign is coordinated activity across whichever channels suit the objective. Running adverts on one platform indefinitely isn't a campaign, it's a channel you're spending on. The distinction matters because it changes what you measure: channels are judged on efficiency over time, campaigns on whether they hit an objective by a date.
A campaign versus a promotion
A promotion is a specific offer, usually price led, and it might be the mechanism inside a campaign. The campaign is the wider effort around it. Treating every campaign as a promotion is how businesses end up training their market to wait for a discount.
We plan and run campaigns as part of our marketing and automation work, and the follow up side sits within sales management.
WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
A firm runs a campaign to promote a new service. Adverts, emails to the existing list, a series of posts, and a webinar. It runs for six weeks.
The reporting afterwards covers impressions, clicks and webinar registrations. All up on the previous quarter, so the campaign is judged a success and repeated.
What nobody measured was what happened next. Of the registrations, a third were existing customers. Of the rest, most received one follow up email and nothing further. The campaign generated genuine interest and the business had no plan for handling it, so the second run produced the same numbers and the same outcome.
IS THIS COSTING YOU REVENUE RIGHT NOW?
Before your next campaign goes live, check these:
- Can you state the objective in one sentence, with a number and a date attached?
- Does the landing page repeat the promise the advert makes?
- Does anyone know what happens to an enquiry in the first two hours?
- Is there a plan for the people who show interest but aren't ready to buy?
- Will you be able to attribute revenue to this campaign, or only clicks?
- Did the last campaign get reviewed, and did anything change as a result?
Two or more no answers and you're likely to spend well and convert poorly.
SEE WHAT YOUR COMPETITORS ARE DOING THAT YOU AREN'T
We'll analyse two of your competitors against your own site and show you where they're winning conversions you should be getting.
WHAT WE SEE IN THE FIELD
The campaigns that work aren't usually the ones with the best creative. They're the ones where somebody worked out what happens after the click.
We see the same pattern repeatedly. Good campaign, decent traffic, enquiries arriving, and then a two day wait before anyone responds. The campaign gets blamed and the money moves elsewhere, when the problem was sitting three steps downstream the whole time.
Reviewed by Ian Wilson, MSM.
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