About the Author
Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.
Many digital marketing strategies are built around campaigns, which are short bursts of activity meant to drive traffic, leads, or awareness in a compressed window of time. They come with flashy names, polished launch decks, and (hopefully) some positive metrics to report. The catch is that campaigns end, and if your marketing engine is built entirely around them, your results will end too.
If you want to generate sustainable growth driven by return on investment (ROI), you need systems as well as campaigns, and that’s where having a plan comes in.
Campaign thinking isn’t inherently bad. In fact, campaigns can be effective for product launches, time-bound offers, or budget-driven bursts of activity. But relying on campaigns alone, without a connected, ongoing strategy, leads to some familiar problems:
- Activity spikes, then flatlines
- Data lives in silos and isn’t revisited
- Teams jump from one thing to the next without clear goals
- Marketing becomes reactive instead of strategic
And when results start to drop, the answer is usually “let’s run another campaign” instead of “let’s step back and look at the system.”
Unfortunately, I’ve seen this all too often when talking with companies after they’ve tried to piece together search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social, email, and content as isolated efforts. They’ve invested in marketing, but without a unifying plan, it’s just a collection of disconnected tactics.
A system, on the other hand, is built for long-term ROI and includes a plan that is connected to business outcomes. It looks past what you’ll do for 30 days and focuses on what you’ll measure, optimize, and scale over the next 12 months and beyond.
Building systems instead of only campaigns starts with planning that is strategic, documented, and driven by ROI. Here’s how to get there.
1. Establish a foundation of clarity.
Before launching another campaign, get clear on the fundamentals:
- Who is your ideal customer?
- What is the full funnel they go through, from awareness to close?
- What marketing activities map to each stage of that journey?
- What do you need to measure to prove ROI?
This is where strategy is important (and why it is the first phase of my START Planning Process). It forces you to zoom out and build alignment before making tactical decisions.
2. Build your mix with repeatability in mind.
One-off tactics aren’t bad, but a healthy marketing system relies on a mix of repeatable, compounding efforts, such as:
- SEO content that builds visibility month over month in both search engines and large language models (LLMs)
- Nurture email sequences that serve leads across long buying cycles
- Ad campaigns that scale through optimization instead of reinvention
- Landing pages and lead magnets that serve multiple entry points
Your digital marketing efforts shouldn’t live and die with one campaign calendar. Instead, build assets and workflows that grow in effectiveness over time.
3. Prioritize process over pressure.
Systems are proactive, and campaigns are reactive. When you build a system, you’re no longer scrambling to spin up something new every time sales gets quiet, because you have a roadmap and a calendar, and you know what’s working, what needs adjusting, and how to keep improving.
That doesn’t mean you stop doing campaigns. It means they’re launched within a system instead of in place of one.
4. Align metrics with business outcomes.
Campaign key performance indicators (KPIs) often stop at vanity metrics like impressions, clicks, and form fills. Systems require deeper tracking:
- How many leads are actually qualified?
- What is the cost per acquisition by channel?
- How much revenue did this customer journey produce?
If you care about tracking ROI, it is important to have all the dots connected and attribution mapped out before you get too deep. For example, the Review phase of START helps connect these dots, so you go beyond reporting performance and measure how your marketing system contributes to business growth.
5. Think like an operator as well as a marketer.
This is the core shift. Building a system means thinking beyond tactics or marketing subject matter expertise, and thinking like an operator, someone responsible for building something that runs efficiently, generates return, and improves over time.
What I call a Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP) does just that. It gives you:
- Strategic alignment
- Tactical prioritization
- A resource plan
- A measurement model
- A calendar to stay on track
That’s a system, and that’s what creates predictability on top of activity. I’m not here to sell you my system, though. I want you to have one no matter how you arrive at developing it.
Systems keep you from starting over at zero.
Campaigns have their place, but if your entire strategy is campaign-driven, you’re constantly starting from zero.
If you’re seeking a framework or approach, I’ll advocate for the Digital Marketing Success Plan® as a way to build something bigger, a system that creates consistency, scalability, and business results. (And, yes, a “DMSP” typically does include campaigns, flights, or sprints within it.) Whether or not you use my framework, I want your efforts to be successful!
If your team is stuck running campaigns with no long-term impact, it’s time to shift from sprints to systems. Let’s build the engine, and the next race will take care of itself. You can also see how VOLTAGE builds a DMSP with clients.