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.
In practice
Leaning on campaigns only. If you are invisible between them, you start building from zero every 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.