What is a marketing campaign?

Getting your brand noticed isn’t magic — it’s all about a smart marketing campaign. Yes, we’re talking about a well-planned campaign with goals, strategy, and zero chaos (well, almost).

So… what is a marketing campaign, really? And how do you run one without losing your mind?
This tutorial breaks it all down, with nine steps to help you plan smarter, manage like a pro, and maybe even enjoy the process.

It’s pretty simple: a marketing campaign is an organized series of steps and actions that promote a product or service.

There are many types of marketing campaigns, including:

There are even more types, and that’s a lot to wrap your head around. Don’t worry, though—we’ll go through all the key principles and steps in marketing campaign management in this post.

Now that we’ve covered the marketing campaign definition, let’s tackle the next key question: how does marketing campaign management work?

Basically, campaign management is the deliberate process of planning, implementing, measuring, and improving your marketing campaigns.

The key term here is “deliberate”. This means that every step of the campaign has specific intentions. Marketing campaign management always involves conscious decision-making.

This deliberate approach is essential for small businesses and marketing teams. They typically have fewer resources, networks, and experience to draw from.

Every decision must be made with care, at the right time, within budget, and with a specific goal in mind. Eyes on the prize.

You want to follow a clear path for your marketing campaign management. With a step-by-step approach, you can run campaigns worry-free. You’ll know exactly what needs to take place and when.

The parts of each step can change depending on your campaign, but it usually looks something like this:

The first step is to try to fully understand your customer. This includes:

This step is all about making it crystal clear who your target customers are. To make any marketing decisions, you have to know your audience.

This is yet another stage in the marketing campaign management process where you can benefit from AI. AI for market research is a powerful tool that’ll help you better understand who your audience is and what they need from your business.

In the marketing campaign example below from HUCACE (via HubSpot), they created the character of “Tina.” She’s an HR Manager who has trouble hiring top talent.

You can also take a look at our ultimate guide to buyer personas.

If you need to dive deeper into the customer analysis, we’ve got you. Learn how to get to know your customers, how to start an online business driven by your customers’ needs, and the 5 elements of a high-quality sales technique.

And if you’d like to speed up the process, why not try AI for market research? We’re starting to see the positive impact of AI in marketing campaigns, even from the early defining stages.

So you’ve defined your audience. Now, it’s time to set goals for your campaign. These goals should be:

These examples of goals also align with the concept of funnel building. This means they focus on understanding and engaging leads and customers to get expected results.

Your goals might change, and that’s perfectly fine. You can reset your goals as you learn. But it’s always best to have a specific goal in the early stages of managing your marketing campaign.

Even if your company is swimming in money, you should have a budget for your marketing campaign.

Common expenses of a marketing campaign include:

Small teams usually have a limited budget. But once you’ve made a list of all your expenses, you can find ways to cut costs.

To better understand how to use your budget effectively, learn more about how to bootstrap your marketing, competing with big companies as a small business, and the best budgeting software to stay on track financially throughout your campaigns.

You now know who you’re going to reach and what you want to achieve with your marketing campaign. Now, write a marketing plan to clarify when and how you’re going to do it.

First, decide how you’re going to execute your marketing plan. This includes the marketing channels you’ll use.

These channels could be online, such as email marketing or social media marketing. You could also choose offline channels like print ads, flyers, or event marketing.

You need to pick metrics that match your goals. For example, if your goal is to increase sales, choose metrics that track relevant data. That can include:

For offline marketing channels such as flyers, you can use coupon codes to track sales and leads you get. You can also include a QR code for your leads to visit online so that it’s easier to track them.

If you’ll be managing a digital marketing campaign, it’ll be useful for you to know about:

Put your marketing channels, metrics, and tools together in a single document. Add any other resources that will come in handy for your marketing campaign. This will work as your campaign plan.

It can be a minimalist plan or even a detailed, pro marketing presentation.

Since your goals are time-bound, it’s also a good idea to write your plan in the form of a calendar. If you have to get your marketing data from multiple sources, you can use a dashboard tool like Supermetrics to monitor all metrics in one place.

Once you’re confident about your marketing plan, it’s time to allocate resources. This includes your time, team members, and other resources.

You want to make sure that the campaign turns out as close as possible to how you envisioned it.

Here are a few of the tasks that you want to delegate to your team. These can be different depending on each marketing plan:

For most of these tasks, like brand management, copywriting, video, and graphic design, your team can save time and focus on the fun part of the process by using AI marketing tools.

Many project management tools now introduce AI in marketing campaign management. This new era of technology has proved that AI can benefit creatives by speeding up content creation: sparking ideas, polishing details, and streamlining processes.

This is where your creativity comes in. Your goal is to make materials that engage audiences based on what you know about them.

We’ve outlined some of the resources you can use above, including Envato’s Gen AI tools to create fantastic visuals that align with your brand identity and boost user engagement.

But it’s important to only choose what’s best for your marketing campaigns. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to write blogs for an audience that prefers podcasts or short-form videos.

Make sure to develop this content with your audience and budget in mind. Take these insights and get creative to deliver something your audience will like.

With your plan, budget, and team in place, it’s time to follow through with the actual marketing stage.

This is when you’ll see the value of proper marketing campaign management. With every step laid out and scheduled, all you’ve got to do is stick to it.

Using a managed solution, like Termly, makes it easier to automatically update your policies and add a comprehensive consent banner to your website.

Be proactive and adaptable in your marketing campaigns. This will help you keep tackling your customer needs and execute better.

This is the part we’ve all been waiting for: the results.

All brands, especially small teams, need to know if the valuable time and money spent on the campaign was worth it. Earlier in the planning stage, you were able to set and clarify goals. Now, you’ll need to know for sure if you reached them.

Revisit your campaign goals and marketing plan metrics. Were you able to reach your goals and targeted metrics?

Use your results to inform your upcoming campaigns. It’s helpful whether you were successful or not.

Keep in mind that measuring the results of your campaign doesn’t necessarily have to happen at the end. In fact, you should track your results and progress along the way. You’ll be able to adapt more easily in case of problems or opportunities.

Measuring data from your marketing campaign is great, but there’s more to be done. Now, it’s time to interpret what it means for any campaigns you’re planning in the future.

Do this with your marketing team and any other stakeholders who may have good insight.

These are some of the items that should be up for review:

This guide has walked you through the basics of marketing campaign management: you’ve learned the marketing campaign definition and the crucial steps for a successful campaign. We also covered the potential of AI in marketing campaigns, including some AI marketing tools that’ll make your work easier.

If you’d like to get even more tools and resources to get you started, explore the assets available on Envato. From AI tools to professional marketing templates, you’ll find everything you need. Every type of asset, for any type of project.

Get back to this tutorial anytime you want to reassess your marketing strategy. It’ll help you and your team as you work hard to promote your brand and achieve all your marketing goals.