A war is made up of a number of campaigns with distinct aims, leading to your ultimate victory. Campaigns should be connected and shaped by the ultimate war aim. For Churchill in 1941, it was the unconditional surrender of Germany and her allies. Every campaign of the war, whether in the air, on the ground or on the oceans was tested against its usefulness in delivering the final victory.
In business, your campaigns should link to your overall aim as a business. If you want to have 25% market share delivering management development programme to FTSE 100 companies in UK by January 25th 2012, then your various campaigns should lead to that result for you.
Campaigning, at its simplest, is deciding where you want to be, what you want to be doing and for whom, deciding how best to let the target know that you exist, and doing it in a way that supports who you are, what you do and how you do it. Campaigning, for a small consultancy firm, is best done simply, repetitively and professionally, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money if you set things up right from the start. A campaign is not a battle, fought over a relatively short time and then forgotten, it’s a longer-term thing.
