Marketing is not a monolith. While all marketing is about communicating with your audience, brand marketing and campaign marketing have wildly different underlying objectives.

Brand marketing is about telling your story. Who are you? What is your brand’s raison d’être? How do you bring something unique and special to your customers? Brand marketing is selling a unique story, a set of values, and a purpose that creates a feeling.

Campaign marketing, on the other hand, is more brass tacks. They are plans focused on putting the right message in the right place, and creating an action.

Let’s look at everyone’s favorite chain Italian food spot, Olive Garden, for a clear example.

Brand marketing: “When you’re here, you’re family.”

Campaign marketing: “Never-ending soup, salad, and breadsticks for a limited time.”

The brand messaging is selling a vibe. When you come to Olive Garden, you’ll feel welcomed and cared for by our team. The campaign tells you to come in for all the carbs and wedges of iceberg lettuce as you can eat in one sitting—right now.

The “endless” offer is front and center, but the copy and creative serve up the brand’s promise: home-style food, coziness, and the Italian-American stereotype of abundance bordering on abuse.

Nailing your brand messaging

Getting brand messaging right can feel intimidating because it’s kind of nebulous. If you tell someone you’ll have unlimited breadsticks, you just need to have enough dough to get you through the lunch rush. If you tell someone they’re going to feel like family in your establishment, though, how can you guarantee that?

Smart companies start with discovery. Branding is who you are; it’s not something you can figure out as you go. Your branding is tied in with your identity and culture.

If you tell people they’ll feel like family at your restaurant, you need to train your staff to be friendly and warm. You also probably need to pay them enough so that they feel well cared for and are compelled to pay it forward. Otherwise, they might be surly or leave your location understaffed.

Get in position

As always, start with the end goal. Don’t call in the copywriters and media planners until you have two things: the objective, the offer.

Objective (aka the overarching business goal to be supported by this campaign): Increase consideration of Olive Garden as a fast-casual lunch option among consumers who associate the brand with family dinners.

Offer (aka the clearly defined value or incentive driving your CTA): Unlimited soup and salad or breadsticks during lunch service on weekdays.

Your brand may not have the option to do a campaign around price, but there are many things of value to a consumer that will catch their attention. The novelty of limited, seasonal product rollouts has value to consumers. You can also build campaigns that up the perceived value of your product, focusing on a single message about your product’s differentiating benefits like subscription options or eco-friendly packaging.

Arguably, even “pure” brand awareness campaigns are selling a value—but it’s that feeling you get from your association with the brand. They’re risky unless your business has a very clear plan for engaging with consumers once they become aware of you.

Draw the connection

Your objective and offer should come from a cold, hard consideration of your business and revenue goals. The campaign creative, however, is where we pull in that squishy branding stuff. Just having something newer or cheaper doesn’t cut it.

Back to Olive Garden, then. The “endless” offer is front and center, but the copy and creative serve up (pun not intended, I swear) the brand’s promise: home-style food, coziness, and the Italian-American stereotype of abundance bordering on abuse. When planning your own campaigns, it’s critical that your messaging pillars always connect to that feeling you’re creating with your brand.

Use targeted advertising for campaigns

One of the best things about our digital marketing world is the ability to customize your campaigns and be targeted about who sees them.

Brand marketing should have universal appeal with your audience, but campaigns may speak to only a particular segment. Digital ads have got you covered! Tools like Facebook’s dynamic advertising allow you to select the right audience for your campaign.

A clothing retailer can make sure customers in the Northeast see ads for winter coats come September, while folks out in SoCal get ads for shorts and sandals. A home goods store can direct campaigns about their furniture sale to folks they know recently bought a new home.

Targeted ad tools save you from feeling compelled to generalize in your campaigns. They allow you to draw a clear line between your brand marketing and your campaign marketing. No one piece of marketing can do both effectively; targeted marketing eliminates the temptation you might feel to ask a campaign to tackle brand or vice versa.

These questions of brand versus campaign are big ones. And I mean big in several ways. Defining your brand messaging is hugely consequential. Learning to create specific campaigns is critical. But it’s also big, as in “a lot to wrap your head around.” Take a deep breath. Don’t rush in. And if you need help, give us a shout.