A digital marketing campaign involves executing a marketing strategy across all digital channels where consumers engage with a brand, typically to improve a company's conversion rate. To start a campaign, marketers need to understand who their customers are, where to reach them, and anticipate the next action they will take.

A campaign is no longer a simple marketing action; it is the deliberate orchestration of multiple touchpoints with the primary purpose of improving a company's key performance indicators, most notably its conversion rate.

Given this complexity, it is essential to distinguish between a marketing strategy, the campaigns that fall under it, and the tactics used to execute those campaigns. This hierarchy provides the necessary structure for aligning marketing activities with broader business goals.

• Strategy: This is the highest level of planning. A marketing strategy is broad, multi-faceted, and typically spans months or even years. It is a long-term, comprehensive plan that establishes the overarching goals and priorities that align with the company's core business objectives. For example, a business objective might be to increase market share by 15% in the next two years. The corresponding marketing strategy might be to position the brand as the premium, most innovative solution in the industry. Fundamentally, it answers the question: "What are we trying to achieve as a business, and how will marketing help us get there?"
• Campaigns: Campaigns are the bridge between strategy and action — they are time-bound, focused initiatives designed to achieve a specific, measurable goal that contributes to the overarching strategy. They have a defined start and end date, a clear target audience, and a specific message. For instance, to support the strategy of being the "most innovative solution," a company might launch a Q3 new product launch campaign with a clear objective (successfully launch the new product) and a defined timeframe (Q3).
• Tactics: Tactics are the granular, actionable steps executed within a campaign. They are the "how" of the campaign plan. For the Q3 new product launch campaign referenced earlier, tactics would include specific actions like creating a series of teaser videos for social media, running targeted pay-per-click (PPC) ads on specific keywords, sending a sequence of announcement emails to a subscriber list, or publishing a detailed blog post outlining the product's features and benefits. Each tactic is a discrete task that contributes to the campaign's success.

By understanding this hierarchy, marketers can ensure that every tweet, every ad, and every email is not an isolated act but a purposeful component of a larger, strategic effort.

Digital Marketing Channel Comparison.

How does a company launch a digital marketing campaign?

The first step is to gain insight into the customer and understand their needs and characteristics. Marketers need to identify which customers are already actively engaging with the brand — specifically, those who are opening emails, clicking through ads, or visiting the website.

The second step is to act on the insights gathered from consumers. By understanding past behavior, marketers can anticipate what consumers are likely to do next and tailor future marketing efforts accordingly. Based on a customer’s past behavior, a marketer might decide to send an email offering a discount code, make an upsell offer, or display an ad featuring a new product that may appeal to the customer.

If a company can understand its target audience and anticipate what they're likely to do next, it’s able to provide compelling experiences. Creating a personalized experience ultimately comes down to the content, regardless of the touchpoint.

Why are omnichannel digital marketing campaigns important?

For some marketers, a digital marketing campaign may refer to a strategy focused on specific channels, such as search or display. In general, though, the most successful online marketing campaigns cover all the different channels a customer might engage with, because most consumers engage with a brand through more than one channel or touchpoint.

Customers, unlike marketers, don’t view their interactions with a brand in terms of channels. When they want to find out information about a brand or ask a question, they use whatever touchpoint is more convenient for them. To implement a successful digital marketing strategy, marketers need to connect with the consumer where they are in the journey, not where the marketer thinks they should be or wants them to be.

By focusing solely on one or two channels, a marketer may miss the opportunity to interact with consumers effectively. Instead, they should adopt an omnichannel approach and meet consumers where they are, with the right content and message.

A digital marketing campaign can also be integrated with traditional or physical channels. Suppose a customer calls a company’s help line or walks into a physical location — does the employee on the other side know who the customer is and what marketing efforts have already been delivered? By connecting a digital marketing campaign with non-digital channels — thus becoming truly omnichannel — a brand can create a holistic view of a customer and offer the most relevant and timely experiences.

But omnichannel might not always be the best option. If a company is getting nearly all its engagement on one specific channel, it might not make sense to spend money on channels that don’t drive engagement and revenue.

Each brand should know which channels their customers are using and how to reach them. For one brand, mobile might be the best channel to focus on. For example, nearly all of Uber’s customer engagement was driven through the mobile app until recently. Everything from booking a ride to leaving a review afterward occurred through the app. A hotel, on the other hand, might rely more heavily on directing people to the booking website through display or banner ads. Another company might focus its efforts on search engine marketing, utilizing either search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC), because potential customers are more likely to find their products by asking questions on Google.

If a company wants to add channels to its content marketing campaign, it can use existing information to identify additional channels for reaching consumers. Uber, for instance, though a mobile-first company, has expanded its marketing to include email campaigns.

How do you measure the success of a digital marketing campaign?

To determine success, a company needs to have full visibility across all the touchpoints used in a campaign. They can then see if they are driving engagement while ensuring the right attribution for a particular action or response to the appropriate touchpoint.

Since customers make purchasing decisions after interacting with a company through various channels, it is sometimes unclear which channel led to the conversion. Companies can utilize analytics solutions to track where and how customers interact with them, and use that data to determine the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign.

How does a company determine the goals of a campaign?

The campaign goals should align with the company's overall objectives. For a travel company, for example, the overall goals for the company could be to drive loyalty, increase revenue, and reduce costs. The digital marketing campaign should have similar goals. Each industry, and each brand within an industry will have goals they want to work toward, and a successful and effective digital marketing campaign will make that possible.

What are the benefits of a digital marketing campaign?

If it's all digital, it could potentially be less expensive than a more traditional campaign that uses costlier channels, like direct mail or print advertising. SEO and social media marketing are examples of free or low-cost channels digital marketers can use. Digital marketing can also deliver an experience wherever the customer is and enable responses to their actions in real time, which can be a more efficient approach than traditional marketing.

What pitfalls do companies run into when launching digital marketing campaigns?

Major problems occur when marketers fail to cultivate a comprehensive understanding or profile of who their consumer is, relying on a limited piece of information to drive their strategy. This creates a fragmented experience, where a brand fails to connect with the consumer’s needs or wants according to where they are in the journey. Without a full picture, a brand is unable to provide a cohesive experience, missing out on learning from previous results and successes.

By gathering data and using it effectively to anticipate consumer behavior, companies can offer better personalization and more relevant experiences, while avoiding turning consumers off to the brand.

Another challenge a company may face is overlooking physical experiences. Digital marketing can’t account for the entire customer journey, so it’s essential to connect to those physical channels as well.

How do companies balance creating personalized experiences with customer data privacy concerns?

Marketers have a wealth of information about their customers, but they need to use it wisely and in ways that builds trust. It comes down to understanding who the consumer is and providing not just relevant and personalized experiences, but also deeply human ones. When consumers are offered experiences they can relate to, trust begins to form. As that trust grows, they become less apprehensive about sharing data. If the data is used responsibly and the consumer trusts the brand, they’re more likely to accept it.

How will digital marketing campaigns change in the future?

The promise of artificial intelligence and machine learning in marketing is immense. These technologies are eliminating much of the guesswork from campaign planning and execution, streamlining operations and enabling a level of personalization that was previously unimaginable.

AI is pushing marketing beyond broad audience segmentation toward true hyper-personalization, which involves tailoring marketing messages and experiences to individual customers in real time based on their specific behaviors, preferences, and needs. This trend is accelerating rapidly — Gartner has predicted that by 2025, 80% of marketers will be using AI to support their personalization efforts.

AI has the following capabilities:

• Predictive analytics: By analyzing vast datasets of past customer behavior, AI models can forecast future trends and anticipate customer needs, often before the customers themselves. This allows businesses to optimize campaigns proactively and fine-tune their strategies to maximize ROI.
• AI-Powered automation: An increasing number of marketing tasks are being automated by AI-driven tools. Software platforms are now capable of handling repetitive, data-driven tasks in content marketing, email marketing, social media management, and customer relationship management. This automation frees up marketers from the drudgery of tactical execution, allowing them to focus their time and energy on higher-level strategy, creativity, and innovation.

While AI has been utilized for analytics and automation for some time, the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) marks a significant paradigm shift, particularly in the realms of content and creative development. GenAI is not just a tool for automation — it is a powerful engine for rapidly scaling personalization.

• Content production at scale: Traditionally, creating highly customized content for small consumer subgroups has been prohibitively expensive and logistically infeasible. GenAI shatters this limitation. A marketer can now use GenAI to brainstorm ideas, write baseline copy, select appropriate imagery, and then instantly generate hundreds or even thousands of versions of a single ad or email, each tailored with specific copy, tone, and visuals to resonate with a different micro-community.
• Enhanced creative workflow: GenAI is positioned to enhance the entire content production lifecycle. It can assist content creators in the production and versioning phase by brainstorming concepts, writing text, and even selecting the optimal format (e.g., static image vs. video) for a specific audience. In the activation phase, GenAI tools can process requests to retrieve assets from a central digital asset management (DAM) system and automatically deliver them in the correct file size, resolution, and format for each specific channel. Additionally, GenAI can automatically tag all final assets with detailed metadata, enabling more granular performance tracking and analysis.

Bruce Swann is a product manager at Adobe. Bruce supports Adobe Campaign, which is the product within Adobe Experience Cloud that allows marketers to plan, launch, and measure experiences across different touchpoints where consumers engage. Bruce has more than 15 years of experience working with digital marketing disciplines like web analytics, social media, mobile marketing, and email marketing.

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