ARTWORK BY Naomi Gennery in the United Kindom

You’ve developed a great product and now it’s time to create a marketing campaign for it. You just need to know one thing before you can get started—WTF is a marketing campaign?! I know, campaign can sound daunting and official. It brings to mind election rallies and red, white, and blue posters pushing cheesy slogans. But at its most fundamental, a campaign—political, marketing, or otherwise—is simply a strategic plan to achieve a specific outcome. Hopeful political candidates want to find and appeal to voters; you want to find and appeal to your product’s buyers. So a basic political campaign structure is a useful model for learning how to put together a winning marketing campaign.

The What, Who, and Where of a Marketing Campaign

How does a political candidate get votes? By figuring out how to convey the right message to the right voters at the right place and time. No candidate can appeal to everyone—trying to do so is a sure path to a concession speech. So successful political campaigns get very specific about answering three fundamental questions: What is the message the candidate wants to convey? Who are the voters they most need to convey that message to? And where can they find and reach those voters?

Call these the “Ws” of a campaign. Designing an effective marketing campaign starts with digging deep into the Ws—the more detailed your answers are, the more focused your campaign will be. Let’s take them one by one.

What is your message?

Products exist within larger markets or industries. Just as a US political candidate must first let voters know whether they’re a Democrat or Republican or belong to some other party, a drink product, for example, must first let buyers know whether it’s a sugary soft drink or a beer or a health tonic of some kind—that is, where it’s positioned within the larger drinks category. And just as a Republican candidate needs to then show how they stand out from other members of their own party vying for a spot on the same ballot, a sugary soft drink must convey to buyers how it differs from the other sugary soft drinks shelved next to it in a convenience store cooler.

The position of a product in a market can be easy or tricky to define. The design and price tag of Teslas automatically puts them in a narrow category within the car market—luxury electric cars. But what about a sporty Subaru station wagon? Is it an all-purpose family car or a rugged outdoorsy vehicle? The answer is either or both—Subaru can choose how they want to position it. And this is where campaign messaging becomes important. The messaging you use in your campaign tells buyers what you’re selling and how it’s different (and better!) than similar products.

It’s important to get crystal clear on your product positioning and messaging at the outset of planning your marketing campaign. Because if you don’t understand where your product fits into the larger market, buyers will be confused too. At Olivine, we urge our product marketing clients to start thinking about their product’s position and message from day one, as soon as they begin developing it. What need or want does it satisfy? What problems does it solve, and what value do those solutions have? Crucially, these questions help you understand who your product will appeal to, which answers the next W question:

Who is your target audience?

Understanding who your target buyers are is key to running an efficient campaign—one that uses its resources (money, time) as productively as possible. Political campaigns look at the demographics of their district, the messaging of their political rivals, and myriad other factors to determine exactly which voters they need to win over. You can use the same approach to clarify exactly who your campaign should be targeting.

Look closely at your competition: What other products claim to satisfy similar wants or provide similar solutions, and who are those products appealing to? Do you want to market your product to the same buyers as your competition, using your excellent messaging to let buyers know that your product is better? Or is there a section of potential buyers that your competitors have overlooked and aren’t serving yet for some reason? Once you’ve decided which buyers you want to get “votes” from, it’s time to figure out how to reach those buyers.

Where is your target audience?

How do your buyers prefer to shop? Who influences their buying decisions? Do they use social media? Listen to podcasts? The more you can get to know your potential buyers, the more strategic your campaign will be. Politicians work to understand where their voters hang out, who they get advice from, what kind of media they consume, and more. This allows them to hit as close to the bullseye as possible when planning their campaign stops, media buys, etc. Progressive Democrats who want to reach liberal young voters might campaign on TikTok, for example, while Midwestern Republicans who want farmers’ votes hold small-town town halls.

The best way to get quickly acquainted with your target buyers is to create personas, which are exactly what they sound like—renderings of your potential audience. Defining personas is an exercise in getting detailed. (And asking more W questions.) Sit down and figure out where your audience works, what their needs are, how they entertain themselves, who they’re friends with—the more pointed your questions are, the better you’ll understand where to connect with your buyers.

The Tactics, Timing, and Tracking of a Marketing Campaign

Once you’ve addressed all the Ws, the next step is to create a plan of action. When planning a political campaign, coordinators first decide which messaging tactics will best achieve their goals. Will they run TV ads? If so, in what markets and time slots? Where will they hold meet-and-greets? Will they produce posters and buttons? They weigh the potential effectiveness of each tool against their time and money budgets and decide which tactics are the most, well, tactical.

Then they create a detailed calendar to manage their campaign timing—scheduling appearances, producing schwag, deploying social media campaigns—to make sure everything gets done in order and on time, before election day arrives.

And throughout the campaign, they obsessively watch polls and measure turnout, tracking how well their candidate is performing with voters.

These are the “Ts”—Tactics, timing, and tracking—where things really become strategic. How can you employ them to make the most of your marketing campaign?

Choosing effective tactics

This relies heavily on the work you’ve already done. Knowing the Ws of your campaign allows you to quickly weed out ineffective marketing channels and focus on those that will bear the most fruit. Maybe your messaging will reach your audience most directly through YouTube videos or blog content. Or perhaps it’s better to run TV ads during the late night shows or on a sports network. Maybe you’ll sponsor or arrange to be a guest on a podcast your target audience listens to.

The cool thing about skillfully employing tactics is that you can do a lot with a little. Marketing campaigns can be expensive, but they don’t have to be. A bit of creativity added to the foundational work you’ve done can really stretch your financial budget. Just make sure you’re also paying attention to your other budget—time.

Planning your timing

Timing can be the determining factor in whether a marketing campaign flies or flops, so don’t rush this step. Slow down and do some project management. Using software, spreadsheets, or even just a notepad, decide when you want your campaign to launch, if it will roll out in stages or all at once, and in what order steps need to happen to ensure everything comes together.

Budget time to film a video or write a blog post if you plan to make those part of your campaign, for example. Or if you want your campaign to coincide with a holiday, use your timeline to get everything done before the day arrives. Give yourself some wiggle room, because life. And then stick to the plan.

Tracking your results

Tracking allows you to both validate the work you’ve already done and save yourself future work. As you plan your campaign, determine how you’ll measure results once it goes live. What are your success milestones? How many “votes” do you expect to get and where do you think those votes will come from? Track your social media follows, newsletter sign-ups, free-trial subscriptions, and, of course, sales—whatever metrics are pertinent to your campaign tactics. Which of your strategic marketing moves were the most successful?

The more granular you get with your tracking, the better you’ll understand what worked and didn’t, and the more efficient your next campaign will be.

Following Up on and Fine-Tuning a Product Marketing Campaign

Even winning political candidates know they can perform better the next time around. And they always have their eye on future elections. Political campaign teams consistently conduct thorough post mortems; they know how valuable the information they’ve gathered is and want to use it to their advantage the next time they hit the campaign trail. You should do the same, using the “Fs”:

Following up

After a campaign, sitting down and asking formal, detailed follow-up questions and recording your findings gives you a trove of good info to use in subsequent marketing efforts. What went as expected? What surprised you? Did your audience respond the way you thought they would? Did you get some leads or sales or likes from unexpected places?

Fine-tuning

And all marketing efforts, like all political campaigns, benefit from constant fine-tuning—you’re always learning, and that experience is gold. Use the metrics you’ve tracked and insights you’ve turned up from your follow-up questions to make each new campaign more brilliant than the last.

That’s it! Now you know how to use a political campaign model to design a product marketing campaign that wins every time—all you need to remember is “W.T.F.”!

WTF is a marketing campaign? Who, what, where, and how