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30 October 2026 · 3 min read · Silvia Volpe

Campaign strategy: five questions, the KPIs that matter and a budget that works

Most campaigns start from a deadline and a list of things to produce. A strategy starts earlier, with a few decisions that make everything else simpler. These are the five I ask first.

Start with a decision, not a deliverable

Most campaigns start from the wrong end: a deadline, a budget, a list of posts and ads to produce. A strategy starts earlier, with a few decisions that make everything else easier. If you cannot answer them in a sentence each, the campaign is not ready to start.

Five questions that shape the strategy

• What is the one goal? A single result tied to the business: qualified requests, bookings, sales. Not “awareness and leads and engagement”.
• Who is it for? One audience, described by what they want and what frustrates them. This is where the pain point comes in.
• What are we offering them? The reason to act now, in the audience’s terms, not the company’s.
• Where will they meet us, and what is each channel’s job? Not every channel for everything. Each one has a role: attract, convince, convert or keep.
• How will we know it worked? One main number, a starting point to compare against and a date to look at it.

Keep the idea simple

A campaign needs one idea that can be said in a line and recognised in every format, from a headline to an email subject to a Reel. If it needs a long explanation, it is two ideas. Simple does not mean generic: the idea earns attention, and the system behind it earns the customer.

Plan to learn, not only to deliver

The first version of a campaign is a hypothesis. Build in a moment to look at the results, decide what to keep, change or stop, and write it down. The brands that improve fastest are not the ones with the best first campaign, they are the ones that learn from each round.

The KPIs that matter most

Choose one main KPI tied to the goal, and two or three supporting ones that explain it. Reach and likes can add context, but they rarely tell you whether the business is better off. A useful way to organise them:

• Attention quality: click-through rate and engaged visits, to see whether the message works on the right people.
• Conversion: conversion rate and cost per lead or per acquisition, to see how efficiently attention becomes action.
• Lead quality: how many leads become real opportunities, because a cheap lead that never buys is not cheap.
• Business result: revenue, return on ad spend or ROI, the number the company actually cares about.

How to use your marketing budget intelligently

• Start from the result, not the amount. Decide what a lead or a sale is worth to you, and work backwards to what you can afford to pay for it.
• Concentrate before you spread. A few channels done properly beat many done thinly.
• Keep a slice for testing. Put most of the budget on what already works and a smaller part on new ideas. The exact split depends on the business, it is a rule of thumb and not a formula.
• Set the stop rules in advance. Decide what result means “scale” and what means “stop” before you spend.
• Budget for more than media. Creative, landing pages and measurement decide how far every euro of advertising goes.
• Review on a schedule. Move budget towards what the numbers show, regularly, not only at the end.

Common mistakes

• Too many goals. Everything is a priority, so nothing is.
• Starting from the channel. “We need TikTok” is not a strategy.
• Talking about the brand instead of the customer.
• No way to measure. Then every result becomes an opinion.

The takeaway

A good campaign strategy fits on one page: a goal, an audience, an offer, a role for each channel, the KPIs that matter and a budget with clear rules. If you have those, the creative work gets faster and the results are easier to judge.