Campaign
Strategy and planning
Strategy and planning
A campaign is a set of connected activities with one goal, one message and a start and end date — online, offline or both.
What makes it a campaign is the boundary: a period, an audience, a message and a result you judge it on. That can be a product launch, a promotional period, a recruitment push or a brand campaign aimed mainly at awareness.
Offline means radio, outdoor, print, events, sponsorship and direct mail; online means search ads, social, email, display and partnerships. In practice they reinforce each other — people who saw you outside search for you afterwards — so do not measure them as separate worlds.
Mind the double meaning. In Google Ads or Meta a 'campaign' is also a technical level in your account with its own budget and objective, which is not the same as the commercial campaign spanning several channels.
A campaign is temporary by definition. Structural work such as findability, content and customer contact runs on and should not be squeezed into a campaign deadline.
Tip
Build structural visibility alongside your campaigns, such as findability and content. That way you keep building on what is already there between campaigns, instead of starting from zero each time.
Related terms
- Media mixThe media mix is how your budget is split across channels: search, social, email, display, offline and everything between.
- MarketingMarketing is everything you do to create value for a group of people and deliver it to them: understanding what they need, shaping an offer, pricing it, making it available and communicating about it.
- KPIA KPI is a number you steer on because it links directly to a goal, such as qualified enquiries per month or cost per customer.
- SEASEA is advertising in search engines: you pay to appear for queries, usually per click.