The absence of a marketing playbook leads to the biggest mistakes that companies make in designing marketing campaigns — they focus on marketing channels rather than the target customer.

In some companies, even teams are structured around channels — paid acquisition, SEO, social media. Having specialized teams definitely has its advantages. However, organizing teams around channels creates a culture where no one looks at customer experiences and customer lifecycle as a whole, instead focusing on their own initiatives, which leads to fighting over budgets and inconsistent marketing strategy.

Start with the target customer, market segmentation, and only then moves to messaging and channels.

Before designing your next marketing campaign, make sure you answer the following questions:

• Who is your target customer?
• What is the goal of your current marketing campaign?
• Can you split your market into meaningful segments?
• What messages do you want to use?
• What are the best channels for your marketing campaign?
• How do you align marketing and sales?
• How do you track and test the success of your marketing campaigns?

Segmentation is crucial to running effective and efficient marketing campaigns.

It’s worth exploring how your market can be segmented into an economically viable set of customers.

Journeys and the pattern of customer/prospect engagement are more insightful than first-touch /last-touch attribution analysis.

An account-based marketing strategy can help narrow your market even further and focus on reaching your target on many levels in organizations with different value-based messages for each stakeholder