If your marketing activities these days feel more like a giant game of whack-a-mole than a series of intentional strategic moves, you’re not alone. It’s common for marketers to shift their focus to immediate projects over long-term strategic planning. Without quick wins to remind leaders of their importance, marketing budgets can easily find themselves on the chopping block. Maintaining stakeholder support is crucial, as highlighted by a HubSpot survey showing that 16% of marketers see this as a significant concern. However, the frenetic focus on day-to-day activities leaves little room to think about long-term strategy. Without a way to implement smart and efficient campaign planning, building for the future can seem impossible without more headcount.

The Challenges Facing Marketing Campaigns Today

Marketers are facing numerous challenges, particularly with increasingly limited budgets. Here are some of the most common issues:

• Driving Traffic, Pipeline, & ROI: A CMO survey found 80% of marketers see generating predictable pipelines as their top challenge. Additionally, 19% say generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge, and 20% of senior marketers cite proving ROI on marketing expenses as a top concern.
• Siloed Data & Processes: 17% of senior marketers need more actionable insights from their data.
• Retention, Upselling, & Expansion: Focusing on these areas is becoming more important. Many tech stacks are built in silos, and a shift towards meeting business needs over features is crucial for success.

With these challenges being top of mind for most marketers, the real question is, “How do I overcome them?” The answer: realistic campaign planning — and for many, that means adopting an always-on campaigns framework. This approach helps teams drive consistent engagement and results without constant manual resets.

Campaign Planning: An Approach Tied to Revenues and Rooted in Reality

What is the value of campaign planning if it’s not linked to business outcomes? While it provides structure for deploying demand generation tactics, sales teams and leadership care about tangible business results.

Here are some tips for a revenue-centric campaign planning approach:

1. Start at 30,000 Feet
   Campaign planning involves both strategic thought and numerical analysis. Identify whether your goals can be met and where gaps exist in your planned programs. For example, to generate 100 marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) with a 10% conversion rate from “hand-raiser” to MQL, you need a program to generate 1,000 hand-raisers within a certain timeframe.
2. Understand Business Goals
   Collaborate with your counterparts to develop an aspirational statement about the future of your business, detailing market opportunities, target audience, revenue potential, and value propositions.
3. Define Campaign Objectives
   Focus on your campaign audience and what they find compelling. Establish how to achieve campaign goals through relevance and how to measure success.
4. Develop Campaign Strategies
   Get into the numbers, planning the number of touches and projected conversions based on agreed benchmarks. Different benchmarks may be needed for inbound, always-on, outbound, and field marketing activities. When done right, this becomes part of a broader strategic planning process that connects marketing initiatives directly to organizational priorities.
5. Implement Program Strategies & Tactics
   After setting goals and objectives, specify your program strategies and tactics. For example, a program strategy could include a series of local workshops with tactics like email campaigns, social posts, and outbound calling to encourage registration.

Adopting a revenue-based approach to campaign planning can be daunting but also eye-opening. It helps demand generation teams transition from “batch and blast” to customer-driven, solution-oriented marketing. For an even deeper look at how structured planning transforms performance, explore The Transformative Power of Strategic Campaign Planning — Inverta’s guide to smarter, faster, and more impactful campaign design.

Inverta Can Help

At Inverta, we understand these challenges because we’ve faced them ourselves. We have the expertise to help you build a campaign planning motion, but can also leverage our experience from hundreds of successful campaigns to offer a turnkey solution for campaign design and activation as well - taking you through the campaign planning process in real life! 

If that sounds like something that would be helpful to you and could free up your team to focus elsewhere, let’s talk.