How to Plan a Marketing Campaign: from Strategy to Tactics – Part 1

Developing a marketing campaign requires a unique combination of creative, big-picture thinking and focused, detail-oriented implementation. It can be challenging to figure out how to piece all the different elements together, but breaking down the process into tangible steps can help ensure that your vision will translate into effective tactics to reach your business objective through powerful creativity and seamless execution.

I have worked with numerous startups, medium businesses, and in large multinational companies, and when it comes to campaign planning and execution, there are common mistakes that can be avoided through careful planning and methodical execution. Whether if you are the person in charge of marketing in a 2-person startup or a brand director supported by 5 different agencies, you should find this two-part series useful.

Generally speaking, smaller companies have limited time and resources, and they tend to skip important steps in the process given their natural bias to action or simple lack of bandwidth. Larger companies often lack the synergic coordination between teams required to make the most of the resources available or fail to properly execute their plan due to the lack of attention towards smaller, technical, yet critical details.

For this reason, I’ve decided to learn from my mistakes and the mistakes made around me and document the process required to plan and launch a successful marketing campaign. In this first part of a two-part series, we’ll be exploring how to put your business objective and target audience to work, creating actionable steps that take you from data analysis to an idea that serves as a solid foundation for your campaign. Continue reading

Late-stage startups should part ways with their growth hacker

Before I even get into the details of what I want to write about, let me set the record straight: growth hackers can often be instrumental in the success of an early-stage startup, and their skill set is undeniably valuable. Finding a great growth hacker for your new business could be the key to make it to Round A.

Also, marketing is not advertising. Advertising is placing a paid message on a media channel, marketing is the discipline of making your product, service, or company something that your target audience cannot live without. Marketing nowadays lives in the center of the Venn-diagram intersection between art and science, data and creativity.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can focus on what I want to talk about: although “growth hacker” is the hottest title in the startup world nowadays, it’s important to understand why this role is only relevant during the early life of a business, and late-stage startups need a Growth Team made of subject matter experts, that include a seasoned Marketing professional.

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