Most B2B (and B2C) companies have a bunch of campaigns in the market at any given time. But too much content and not enough leverage can create minimal impact. Our VP, GTM Strategy, Max Massengill dives into why.
Having multiple campaigns live at any given time makes sense. To cover all your needs across your products/services, you might have a brand campaign, thought leadership campaigns, multiple demand campaigns focused on outcome-led messaging, product-led demand campaigns, and ad-hoc campaigns responding to sales/competitive/industry pressures. I’m sure there are more types I’m forgetting about. And, chances are, many of these campaigns will be in multiple languages/regions.
From a customer's point of view, it can be confusing. Which is why having a lot of campaigns in-market requires a sophisticated messaging house that creates a connective tissue across them all. Easier said than done, but doable and necessary.
With a great number of campaigns comes a great number of responsibilities
As this section’s title alludes to, the bigger issue is the trade-off for creating so many campaigns.
Inevitably, the more campaigns you create, the less of your working dollars go toward paid media, because you need to invest in strategy, messaging development, content, and creative (and critically, although often not considered, you must do this on an ONGOING basis).
With all these campaigns running, what marketers are forgetting is that the reason they have any impact whatsoever is because of leverage. What gives that content leverage is the investment in paid media behind it.
If you don’t have enough media budget to leverage your content to the point of adequately reaching your target audience, then you probably shouldn’t be creating so much content and running so many campaigns.
So, what’s the sweet spot?
How do you get to the answer of what makes sense for you? Ultimately, this comes down to a conversation of how much you invest in paid media vs. campaign development. The number of campaigns you run should be a function of your overall budget (for campaigns and media) and audience size (TAM).
Let me explain further.
Your target audience has a defined size. There may be 200k people in your target audience, or there may be 100 million. No matter what marketing theory you subscribe to, the bigger your audience, the more budget you need (and most of us will have budget constraints).
If you ensure you have enough media budget to adequately address your target audience, only then should you consider investing further in ongoing campaign development, new content, and a strategy to unify those campaigns.
Now, if you don’t have the budget to reach your audience fully, don’t invest in further campaign development – instead, create more sustainable campaigns within a single GTM architecture. It’s that simple.
Don’t sacrifice your leverage, and make sure you maximize the amount of leverage you have in-market with your content... or else you'll find yourself in a situation where you’ve made a bunch of stuff that no one will ever see or understand, that will have zero chance of impact.
The key takeaways
To wrap this up, here are the steps to optimize your campaigns GTM based on the pragmatic reality of your budget:
- Determine the paid media spend you need to reach your target audience adequately
- Don’t sacrifice this, no matter what
- Determine the remaining available funds you have to invest in campaign development
- Create a feasible campaign GTM architecture that you can sustain monetarily for the long term, without sacrificing your leverage (ie, your paid media budget)
- Execute and scale the process, budget allowing!