Campaign Planning and Execution

The Campaign vs. The Content Hamster Wheel

In the previous lesson, we explored positioning, messaging, and brand voice. Now let’s build on that foundation. Most marketing teams are stuck on a hamster wheel: publish Monday’s blog post, schedule Tuesday’s social posts, send Wednesday’s newsletter, repeat forever. Everything is isolated. Nothing builds on anything else.

A campaign is different. It’s coordinated. A product launch campaign might span six weeks, where week one builds awareness, week three handles objections, and week six drives conversion—all reinforcing the same message through different channels.

AI makes campaigns practical for teams of any size. What used to require a team of five working for two weeks, a solo marketer can now plan in an afternoon.

The Campaign Blueprint

Every campaign needs five elements:

1. Objective — What specific outcome do you want? Not “get more leads” but “generate 200 qualified leads for our new enterprise plan in 6 weeks.”

2. Audience — Who are you targeting? Pull from your personas. Which segment is this campaign for?

3. Narrative Arc — What story unfolds over time? Awareness → Interest → Consideration → Decision. Each phase needs different content.

4. Channel Mix — Where will you reach them? Each channel plays a specific role in the campaign.

5. Success Metrics — How will you know it worked? Define these before the campaign starts, not after.

Building a Campaign with AI

Let’s build a real campaign. Here’s the brief:

Create a 6-week product launch campaign.

Product: ContentEngine AI writing platform
Target: Solo content marketers at SaaS companies (10-100 employees)
Positioning: "Content that sounds like you, at 10x the speed"
Objective: 200 free trial signups, 40 paid conversions
Budget: $5,000 (modest, mostly organic + some paid)

Available channels:
- Blog (weekly posts, 2,000 visitors/month)
- Email list (3,500 subscribers)
- LinkedIn (company page + founder's personal account)
- Twitter/X (800 followers)
- Paid: LinkedIn ads ($2,000 budget), Google Ads ($1,500)
- Product Hunt launch (one-time)

Create a week-by-week plan with:
- Theme for each week
- Content for each channel
- How pieces connect to each other
- Specific CTAs for each phase

Include our brand voice: Confident, direct, example-first,
no jargon, no clichés.

AI produces a structured campaign like this (abbreviated):

Week 1-2: Problem Awareness

Theme: “The content quality vs. quantity trap”

Week 3-4: Solution Introduction

Theme: “What if AI could actually learn your voice?”

Week 5-6: Conversion

Theme: “See it working with your content”

The Narrative Arc in Detail

Notice how each phase serves a different purpose:

Weeks 1-2 (Awareness): We don’t even mention the product much. We’re validating the problem. If the audience doesn’t feel the pain, they won’t want the solution.

Weeks 3-4 (Consideration): Now we introduce ContentEngine as the solution. The content shows how it works, not just that it exists.

Weeks 5-6 (Conversion): Social proof, trial offers, urgency. The audience already knows the problem and has seen the solution—now we remove friction.

AI understands narrative arcs, but you need to specify them. Otherwise, it’ll generate six weeks of “Try our product!” with no buildup.

Quick Check: Campaign Alignment

You’re in Week 2 of the campaign (Problem Awareness phase). Your sales team asks you to publish a “limited-time 50% off” promotion. What do you do?

A) Publish it—discounts always work B) Delay it to Week 5 when the audience is ready for conversion messaging C) Ignore the sales team entirely

The answer is B. Running a discount in the awareness phase means you’re asking strangers to buy at a discount. They haven’t even understood the problem yet. Save conversion messaging for when the audience is primed.

Creating Content Variants

For each campaign piece, generate multiple variants:

Write 3 variants of our Week 1 blog post.
Topic: Why AI content sounds generic
Target: Solo content marketers at SaaS companies

Variant 1: Story-driven (open with a specific scenario)
Variant 2: Data-driven (lead with a surprising statistic)
Variant 3: Contrarian (challenge a popular assumption)

For each variant, write:
- Headline (5 options each)
- Opening paragraph
- Key subheadings
- CTA

Use our brand voice: direct, example-first, no clichés.

Three variants in five minutes. Pick the strongest, or A/B test them if you have the traffic.

The Content Calendar

Turn your campaign plan into a detailed calendar:

Convert our 6-week campaign into a day-by-day content calendar.
Format as a table with columns:
Date | Channel | Content Type | Title/Topic | Status | Owner | Notes

Rules:
- Blog publishes every Tuesday
- Email sends Monday and Thursday
- LinkedIn posts daily (mix of organic and engagement)
- Paid ads run continuously with weekly creative refresh
- No more than 3 content pieces per day (team capacity)

Start date: March 1, 2026

AI creates a calendar you can drop into your project management tool. Every piece has a date, a channel, a purpose, and a connection to the larger campaign narrative.

Adapting Campaigns On the Fly

Real campaigns rarely go according to plan. AI helps you adapt:

Our Week 2 blog post "Why Your AI Content Sounds Like
Everyone Else's" got 3x our normal traffic and was shared
heavily on LinkedIn.

Given this signal, how should we adjust Weeks 3-6?
Should we:
1. Create more problem-awareness content since it's resonating?
2. Accelerate the timeline to conversion?
3. Something else?

Here's our current plan:
[paste remaining campaign plan]

AI helps you think through the implications: maybe the high engagement means the audience is more aware of the problem than you expected, so you can shorten the awareness phase and introduce the product earlier. Or maybe you should create a follow-up post that rides the viral wave before moving on.

Budget Allocation with AI

For campaigns with paid elements:

Allocate our $5,000 paid budget across this 6-week campaign.

Available channels and estimated CPCs:
- LinkedIn ads: ~$5-8 per click, good targeting for B2B
- Google search ads: ~$3-5 per click for "AI writing tool" terms
- Google retargeting: ~$1-2 per click

Campaign phases:
- Weeks 1-2: Awareness (content amplification)
- Weeks 3-4: Consideration (demo/trial promotion)
- Weeks 5-6: Conversion (retargeting + trial offers)

Suggest allocation by week and channel, with reasoning.

AI might suggest front-loading LinkedIn for awareness (broader reach), shifting to Google search during consideration (high-intent queries), and heavy retargeting in conversion (cheapest, highest converting).

Practical Exercise

Plan a campaign for your own product or service:

1. Define the campaign objective (specific, measurable)
2. Choose a 4-6 week timeline
3. Use AI to generate a week-by-week plan with narrative arc
4. Create content variants for your first week’s content
5. Build a content calendar with specific dates and owners

Even if you don’t execute it, the planning exercise forces you to think about marketing as a coordinated effort rather than a collection of random activities.

Key Takeaways

• Campaigns are coordinated efforts with clear objectives, narratives, and timelines—not random publishing
• Every campaign needs a narrative arc: awareness, consideration, conversion
• AI generates campaign structures in minutes that used to take weeks
• Create multiple content variants for each campaign piece to test what resonates
• Build detailed content calendars so execution stays on track
• Be ready to adapt—use AI to re-plan when signals change

Next up: email marketing. The most personal marketing channel, and the one where AI-powered personalization has the biggest impact on conversion.

Up next: In the next lesson, we’ll dive into Email Marketing and Automation.