How to Build High Impact Marketing Campaigns
Marketing is a busy profession, busier than we get credit for. We also get put on blast quite often for sales missing revenue targets, product getting bad press, or customer service being overloaded with tickets. While most of the time, marketing is not actually to blame (and just the easiest scapegoat), there are a number of reasons marketing campaigns fail.
High-impact marketing campaigns fail when strategy is disconnected from top-line business objectives and no one owns outcomes. They succeed when campaign strategy is operationalized into a defined execution system.
If strategy is operationalized into a system, campaigns become repeatable. In this blog post, we’re going to teach you how to turn strategy into execution that produces outcomes.
Marketing Campaigns Must Tie to Business Objectives
Marketing campaigns run for a variety of reasons: demand, pipeline, retention, revenue, recruitment efforts, loyalty, community building, etc. The list could be an entire blog. In marketing, it’s easy to get caught up in a trend, noise from leadership, or trying to one up competitors and losing sight of why you’re running a particular campaign.
When you set up your first marketing campaign of 2026, ask yourself: “What number is this campaign responsible for moving?”
When you clearly tie marketing campaigns to business objectives, they become high impact marketing campaigns even if they fail. Because the failures have loads of data for your team, or sales, or product, or customer service, or leadership to learn from. For example, if leadership wanted you to run a billboard ad in Australia for a skincare line to drive more sales, and you track cost of billboards, impression/traffic by region, and sales — that data can help you identify:
Was it the location?
Was it the messaging?
Is it the product?
Did sales just not follow up and close the deal?
Marketing Campaigns Should Respond to Audience Requests
Marketing strategies are informed by what your audience tells you they want, not internal opinion. This is a biggie. We’ve been in client calls before where someone says, “my daughter and her friends love this product, let’s push it”. But their daughter and her friends don’t actually buy from this brand…their parents do. So a marketing campaign is launched, with the assumption the audience likes a certain product, when in reality, that’s not the case.
You see this often in the tech world with software feature upgrades. Tech companies chase the next shiny object, when all their audience wanted is a feature simplified or a dark mode capability. A campaign breaks if it’s built on audience assumptions and not directly from what your audience asked of you.
When you’re prepping your next marketing campaign, ask yourself: “What signal told us this message would resonate?”
If it’s not a legitimate audience signal, it’s probably not worth your time.
Marketing Campaigns Require Ownership & Accountability
Whether your team is lean or large, there’s a requirement for ownership and accountability. A campaign breaks when tasks are randomly assigned to team members and they aren’t really owning the tasks. What do we mean by, “owning tasks”?
If you write ad copy, ship it to the digital manager and walk away, you did not own that task. You completed the task. But you did not own it. This often separates good from great marketing execution.
Ask yourself: “Who is accountable if this misses its target?”
When you not only ship the copy, but track it’s performance, ask the right questions, and thoughtfully consider how it’s delivering on campaign objectives, you have officially stepped into the world of high impact marketing.
Marketing Campaigns Require Fast, Confident Decisions
Nothing takes marketing from high impact to low impact like slow execution, unclear approvals, and iterations that drag on forever. Reflect on some 2025 marketing campaigns and ask, “how long does it take to ship version one?” Is it ridiculous?
At The 128 Collective, we run tight campaigns from beginning to end. Here’s how:
We create clear timelines in a shared ClickUp board.
We create a communication process, so when that timeline inevitably goes awry, everyone is on the same page and we know how to veer the campaign to ensure it doesn’t lose impact.
Approvals have clear assignees — whoever completed the task is not approving it and only people close to the strategy are approvers.
Decision ownership is something SMEs are apart of. If we take too long on a decision, we just commit to one decision and see it through to the best of our ability.
We’re consinstently reviewing campaign performance so we can continue to tweak and adjust as necessary.
Marketing Campaigns Require an Iteration Cadence
Campaigns fail when there is no defined rhythm for reviewing performance and adjusting execution. If teams wait until the end to decide that something worked, they already lost. Define a process, based on the type of campaign, to regularly measure results against.
We ran a Black Friday campaign in 2025, and had a Warm Up period in October, Early Holiday in November, and then, the big weekend. We had weekly micro reports, and if anything was outside of our target metric range, we took a closer look at the data and considered if adjustments were necessary. We had a 45-minute meeting at the close of each phase to look at longer range metrics, top performing creative, audience signals, etc. and adjusted the strategy as necessary. And at the top of every metrics micro-report, macro report, meeting, etc. - we reminded ourselves of what number the campaign was responsible for moving.
How can you start creating high impact marketing campaigns?
To create high impact marketing campaigns, ensure all campaigns are tied to a business objective, the strategy is informed by what your audience tells you they want (not internal opinion), you have execution & accountability owners for all campaign deliverables, timelines & approvals are clear and written down, and you have a process to regularly review performance and adjust as needed.
If your team needs hands on help implementing this, give us a ring.
