Planning your signature campaigns across a quarter

A single campaign can be improvised. A channel has to be planned. The difference shows after six months: on one side, two banners launched then forgotten; on the other, a continuous sequence of messages, each of which had its exposure time.

Why the quarter

The annual horizon is attractive on paper and does not survive the first surprise: a trade show moved, a launch delayed, and the plan is void by February.

The monthly horizon demands disproportionate steering effort for a channel that should not tie up a full-time person.

The quarter is the right compromise: long enough to chain three to four messages with decent exposure time, short enough to stay realistic and be revised without drama.

The structure of a quarter

A well-built quarter layers two levels.

The company thread. One or two campaigns broadcast to everyone, on subjects that concern all correspondents: a publication, a major event, an institutional announcement.

The team threads. Targeted campaigns running in parallel over distinct scopes: a product banner on sales, a review request on support, a hiring campaign across the whole company if the subject is a priority.

The principle governing all of it: one visible campaign at a time per person. A salesperson must not carry the company banner and the sales banner simultaneously. If both matter, they follow one another.

Setting the dates

The method is mechanical and takes an hour.

1. Place the fixed deadlines first. Trade shows, launches, publications, recruitment periods. Those are constraints, not choices.

2. Set the exposure windows. Two to four weeks for a dated event; one to two months for background content. Below two weeks, some of your correspondents will exchange no message with you during the period and will therefore see nothing.

3. Move the start date back. An event campaign has to start three weeks ahead, not the day before. A webinar is announced two weeks ahead, not six.

4. Fill the gaps. Periods with no dated campaign take a background one: your pillar content, a report, a commitment. The channel should not stay empty.

5. Check overlaps per team. Go through each team and check it never carries two banners at once.

Automating the dates

This is the point that separates a calendar that holds from a theoretical one.

A campaign whose dates are scheduled starts and stops on its own. A campaign managed by hand depends on somebody remembering to remove it — and nobody does. In almost every organisation that has tried without a tool, you find banners announcing a March trade show in October.

Those ghost campaigns are not merely useless: they give your correspondents the impression of an organisation that does not reread itself. Date scheduling is described on the campaigns and banners page.

Worth knowing: set the end date when you create the campaign, never later. It is the only discipline that prevents ghost campaigns, and it costs nothing.

An example quarter

Three observations on that table. Support’s review request runs continuously — it is a background campaign, not an event. Sales never carry two messages at once. And the hiring campaign, at the end of the quarter, takes precedence over everything else because it was judged a priority.

The catalogue of possible campaigns is in 12 campaign ideas, season by season.

The end-of-quarter review

Thirty minutes is enough, and it conditions the quality of the next quarter.

Go back through each campaign: how many clicks, over what period, from which team. Compare them against each other rather than against an absolute value — it is the relative ranking that informs. A banner that produced three times fewer clicks than another at comparable exposure tells you something about the message, not about the channel.

The measurement method and what to conclude from it are developed in measuring the ROI of a banner campaign.