Marketing plan or Marketing campaign

Hi everyone and welcome to my Wednesday wisdom. So, today I thought I would talk to you about what the difference is between a marketing plan and a marketing campaign. A lot of people get them slightly confused with each other and I thought I would just let you know what the difference is.

So when you start to think about these things you have in mind whether or not you need a plan or a campaign. So for me, marketing plans are the high-level they are very much about looking at getting your marketing ducks in a row. Does your website work for you? Is it structured well enough? Is the copy right? What’s your blogging strategy like? What’s your social media strategy? All of these types of things are very very important as part of the marketing plan because it gets everything up and running and gives you a baseline.

Once you have your baseline you may then want to start thinking about marketing campaigns. Now for me a marketing campaign has a very specific objective, it could be to do with a specific service that you’re offering or specific product and it might be that you want to increase sales for instance on a new service that you’re offering. So that marketing campaign is very much focused on what is it that you’re trying to achieve? How you get there? What marketing channels were used? This is when you will need to use your website for maybe a landing page for that new service or a social media campaign specifically aimed at that new service or articles or content all based around that exact thing that you need.

So for me a marketing plan is very high level and then you look at a campaign that kind of sits underneath it and it could be for a particular service line and that’s when you start thinking about what channels, what content, what leads you want, all of that kind of stuff. 

I would definitely suggest before you even start thinking about whether or not you want to do a campaign is trying to nail the objectives. Alot of the people that I meet very much want to rush into doing something and my questions are always well what is it that you want to achieve and sometimes they can’t answer that.

So before you rush into a campaign and definitely make sure that you know what it is that you want to get out of it and also whether or not you actually need a marketing plan because the marketing plan is very much that high-level structure that will give you that robustness and clarity when you are trying to do your marketing going forward anyway.