“We need a campaign.” Do you?
It’s a phrase every marketing and BD person has heard. A new service has launched, a sector isn’t generating enough work, a team wants to raise its profile, or a partner has spotted an opportunity in the market. And the solution, apparently, is a campaign.
So you get to work. You arrange a meeting, develop the messaging, create some content, plan a webinar, build a landing page, draft the social posts and put together an email sequence.
Three months later everything has gone out, and everyone is quietly disappointed that not much has happened.
The problem might not be the campaign. It might be that you weren’t ready for one in the first place.
A campaign isn’t a strategy
One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is jumping straight from “we want to grow this area” to “we need a campaign”. There are quite a few questions sitting in between.
What are you actually trying to achieve, and who do you want to reach? Why them? What problem are you solving for them, and why would they choose you over anyone else? Why would they care about this now rather than next year? What do you want them to do next, and what will you do if they show an interest?
If those questions don’t have good answers, adding a webinar and six LinkedIn posts isn’t going to fix it.
Start with the commercial opportunity
Before you start thinking about channels, content or creative ideas, you need to understand the opportunity. Why are you doing this at all?
Sometimes the answer is genuinely compelling. There’s a regulatory change creating demand. You have expertise you aren’t currently known for. There’s a clear chance to cross-sell a service into existing clients. A sector is growing, or you’ve developed something that’s meaningfully different from your competitors. That’s something to work with.
Sometimes the answer is much less convincing. You haven’t promoted this team for a while. Your competitors are talking about it. The partner wants more profile. Somebody thinks you need content around this.
None of those, on their own, means you need a campaign. And marketing and BD should feel able to challenge the brief before committing resource to delivering it.
Who exactly are you trying to reach?
“We’re targeting businesses.” “We want CEOs.” “This is for financial services.” “Our audience is HR directors.”
It’s a start, but it isn’t enough to build anything on. The more precisely you understand who you’re trying to influence, the easier it gets to build something they’ll actually respond to.
What type of organisation are they, and what size? What situation are they in and what’s changing in their world? What problems are they dealing with right now? Who else is involved in the buying decision? What would make this issue important enough for them to do something about it?
Without that clarity, campaigns drift towards being broad. And broad campaigns tend to produce broad, forgettable messaging.
Do you actually have something useful to say?
This is worth asking before you commit, because “we’d like to sell more of this service” isn’t remotely interesting to your audience.
What do you know that they don’t? What are you seeing across the market that they can’t see from where they’re sitting? Can you make a complicated issue easier to understand, offer a different perspective, or help them make a decision they’ve been putting off?
If the campaign boils down to “here’s our service, we’re very experienced, please buy it”, you probably need to go back a few steps.
The strongest campaigns aren’t built around what the organisation wants to sell. They’re built around something the audience already cares about.
Is the business prepared to get involved?
This is often where things start to unravel. Everyone wants a campaign, right up until marketing needs something from them.
You need their expertise for the content. Can they invite some clients? Could they speak at the event, or share this with their network? Who are their priority prospects? Can they follow up with these five people?
Suddenly the diaries are very busy, and marketing is left trying to generate momentum around a commercial priority that nobody else seems to have time for.
So agree what the business is going to contribute before you launch, not afterwards. Who’s leading the campaign? Which subject matter experts are involved? Who owns the target relationships? What is BD doing, and who’s responsible for follow up?
If the answer to all of those is marketing, that’s a problem worth raising early.
What happens when somebody is interested?
This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to build a whole campaign without thinking it through properly.
Someone attends your webinar, downloads the report, replies to an email or has a good conversation with you at an event. Now what?
Does somebody contact them, and who is that? What are they going to say? Is there another useful piece of content to send, or something they could be invited to? Is there a genuine reason for a conversation? Does anyone know whether they’re already a client, or being pursued by another part of the business?
Marketing activity and BD follow up shouldn’t be designed separately. The follow up is part of the campaign.
Five questions to ask before you say yes
The next time somebody tells you they need a campaign, you don’t have to say no. But it’s worth asking:
- What commercial opportunity are we trying to capture?
- Who specifically are we trying to influence?
- Why would they care about this now?
- What is the business prepared to contribute?
- What happens if the campaign works?
If you can’t answer those, you’re probably not ready to start building campaign assets yet. And that’s fine.
Sometimes the most valuable thing marketing and BD can do is slow things down at the start. Ask the awkward questions, challenge the assumptions, get the proposition right, agree the audience, make sure the business is properly committed, and design the BD follow up before the first piece of content goes anywhere near a publish button.
Because when somebody says “we need a campaign”, the best response isn’t always “great, what shall we create?”
Sometimes it’s “why?”
Need help?
If you would like help with your marketing and business development, bringing on a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional service firms in London, Kent, the UK, and Europe, specialising as a professional services marketing and bd consultant. Please get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
