
In this lecture you take one campaign apart into the four moments that decide it, the moment before the brief when you decide whether the campaign is needed at all, the moment before launch when you write down the result you will be judged on, the checkpoint in the middle when owners and dates are checked, and the review after the close that almost everybody skips.
This course is built from six disciplines: marketing leadership, audience research, marketing channels, campaign strategy, project management and performance measurement.
The map of the course
A simple dictionary for reading lectures recorded for other fields as campaign work
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Campaign Checkpoint Calendar and fill in one line after each lecture.
Where to start when you take the function over
The fourteen-day audit: team, channels, effectiveness
Ten questions to ask the chief executive
The action plan for the first thirty days
Putting a competitive analysis together quickly
Methods for assessing a competitor's unit economics
Where insights come from, and how to turn them into decisions
The strengths and weaknesses table
Building a strategy senior management will actually sign
The frameworks: 4P, STP, the Ansoff matrix, the customer journey
Linking business goals to marketing indicators
The annual strategy template, and the one-page version
Building a marketing budget, and defending it
The key metrics: customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, return on marketing investment
Reallocating budget between channels
The report template for the chief executive and the finance director
Developing the value proposition
Brand architecture and portfolio management
Preparing a complete brand plan
The template with indicators, initiatives and budgets
The funnel from lead to revenue
The channels: search, paid media, social, email, customer systems, content
Performance marketing: attribution, optimisation, measurement
What the dashboard must contain
Building a department that fits the company strategy
The roles: brand, performance, analytics, communications, product marketing
Indicators and reporting for the team
Working with sales, product and the chief executive
Where it genuinely helps: content generation, targeting, analytics
A selection of twenty services worth knowing
Building a roadmap for the department
Cases of integration into a business
The role of surveys in decision-making
The most common types
Automation tools
Market benchmarks
Satisfaction and loyalty studies
Engagement and experience studies
Value proposition studies
Pulse surveys, and exit conversations
Question types, and response options
Using scales properly
The length at which answers stop being honest
Open questions, platforms, and building a form
Setting the task the survey has to answer
Designing the questionnaire itself
Promoting it
Reminders, and what actually lifts the response rate
The report formats, and which sections to include
Choosing chart types
Preparing recommendations
Analysing open answers, and text analysis
What conclusions the data supports
How to plan the actions that follow
Interim surveys to monitor the change
Managing the campaign as a marketing function
Launching a dedicated site
Gamification
Building a community around it, and designing the page
Internal platforms and chat channels
Referral programmes, and how to design one
Tracking systems
Chatbots
Email as a channel
Content marketing and video
Search optimisation
Writing text that gets clicked, and choosing images
Setting up paid search advertising
Web analytics
Remarketing and its formats
Launching the first campaign, with cases
Paid advertising on social platforms
Promotion on the professional and the broad-reach networks
Promotion on video and image platforms
Registering and running the company page everywhere, with cases
The analytics of the whole effort
Cost of acquisition, and time to result
Sources, and the quality that each one produces
Building the performance report
An overview of the market and where it is moving
The key trends and what they mean for your plan
How political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal change affects strategy
The role and responsibility of the person who owns it
The strategy behind the campaign
Who exactly you are building it for
Identifying the target audiences
Researching them, and developing the portraits
Conducting the strategic audit
External market analysis with PESTEL
The research techniques behind a value proposition
Building it, adapting the roadmap, and developing the architecture
Developing the key indicators for your strategy
Defining scope and aligning with organisational goals
Setting the targets
Engaging leadership through analytics, and building the dashboard
Developing and activating the communication plan
Activating the proposition online and offline
The social media audit, and the policy behind it
The ambassador programme, and paid community building against organic growth
Aligning experience with brand position and values
Linking customer interactions with internal ones
The relationship between audience value, customer value and shareholder value
Segmenting the audience, and localising the strategy
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Campaigns rarely fail on the creative. They fail because the brief was written after the channels were chosen, and nobody could say afterwards which part worked.
The reporting nobody believes
You present reach and impressions because those numbers always look good, and everyone in the room knows it. Attribution was never set up, so the channel that produced the revenue and the channel that got the credit are probably different ones. The budget was defended with last year's figure plus a percentage. The audience was never asked anything — the personas came out of a workshop. And when the campaign ran late, it ran late because there was no network diagram, so nobody knew which task was actually blocking the launch.
What this course covers
Forty-six lessons across the whole cycle, ending with one complete campaign taken apart. The strategic frame first: a fourteen-day audit of team, channels and effectiveness, ten questions for the chief executive, competitive analysis and estimating a rival's unit economics, a strategy senior management will sign, 4P, STP, the Ansoff matrix and the customer journey, building and defending a budget with acquisition cost, lifetime value and return on marketing investment, reallocating between channels, the value proposition and brand architecture, the digital funnel with attribution, the department structure, and where AI genuinely earns its place. Then the audience: survey types, questionnaire design, scales, the length at which answers stop being honest, promotion and reminders, the report, text analysis of open answers, and an action plan with interim measurement. Then the channels: landing pages, community, referral programmes, chatbots, email, content, video, search optimisation, copy that gets clicked, paid search, web analytics, remarketing, paid social across six platforms, and measurement by cost, speed, source and quality. Then one full campaign, from market trends and PESTEL through audience research, personas, strategic audit, roadmap, architecture, indicators and dashboard, communication plan, social audit, ambassadors, three-year forecast, and finally production — landing page, creative and ad copy. Then delivery as a project: business case, charter, stakeholders, scope, breakdown, network diagram, Gantt, resource matrix, budget stages, control and closure. Finally the measurement system: four types of indicator, the 10-80-10 rule, critical success factors, design traps, dashboard hierarchy, a three-step rollout, and six myths that break most measurement.
About the worked campaign
Three of the blocks run a campaign aimed at an audience of candidates rather than customers. That is deliberate. Plenty of courses explain campaigns in pieces; very few walk one campaign the whole way through, because almost nobody publishes their real budgets and results. This one does. Paid search, web analytics, remarketing, paid social, cost per acquisition, landing pages and ad copy behave identically regardless of who you are trying to reach, and the sequence — research, positioning, plan, production, measurement — is the sequence for any campaign.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 46 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the fourteen-day audit, the competitor table, the annual strategy one-pager, the budget and report templates, the brand plan, questionnaire design, the network diagram and Gantt chart, critical success factors, and the dashboard hierarchy
One complete campaign shown end to end, not five disconnected channel tutorials
Where to start
Open your last campaign report. If it leads with reach, that is the habit this course replaces. Enrol now and start today.