What is a Marketing Campaign?

The True Definition of a Marketing Campaign

The phrase “marketing campaign” is one of the most overused terms in marketing and has come to encompass just about every activity in a marketer’s day.

Case in point: How often do you hear people say, “Let’s do an email campaign?”

One email is an activity, not a marketing campaign.

So why has the definition of “marketing campaign” blossomed into this catch-all term? Blame technology vendors. Most marketing technologies were created by engineers who did not hold marketing positions. They needed to call activities executed in their software product something, so “marketing campaigns” became the term of choice. Now, two decades’ worth of marketers use the word loosely, resulting in a significant amount of bad marketing.

Marketing Campaigns, Defined

A marketing campaign is a planned strategy designed to help an organization meet its strategic goals over a set period of time. A successful marketing campaign incorporates messages communicated to a specific audience through various different channels.

Any campaign plan starts with what you want to accomplish and whom you want to reach. If you don’t know what you want to get out of the marketing campaign and you don’t understand the audience and their needs, then it’s likely your campaign will fail. 

Defining Success For Your Marketing Campaign

Before you start writing your marketing campaign plan, ask yourself or your team the following five questions:

1. What is the goal you are trying to accomplish?
2. Who is the target audience of your marketing campaign?
3. What are the messages you would like to communicate?
4. What marketing channels would be most effective in communicating the messages?
5. How do you measure success? Which marketing metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) should be measured for your marketing campaign?

If you can answer these questions first, you can test the feasibility and determine the best approach. Once you do that, you are ready to build your marketing campaign plan.

You can also check out our free marketing campaign template, to help you plan your next campaign.

Or, learn more about Planful for Marketing with our on-demand demo.