Seasonal Marketing Campaign Checklist

Identify which ICP tier the campaign targets and pull the audience from the CRM or CDP (Salesforce, HubSpot, Segment). Note expected list size, geo split (US / EU / CA — relevant for consent rules), and which existing lifecycle segments the campaign will suppress against.

Pull last year's send dates, offers, and creative from the top three competitors. Check Semrush or Ahrefs for paid-keyword overlap and Meta Ad Library for current creative. Note when their seasonal lands so your send window doesn't collide.

Brief lives in Notion or Asana with: objective, KPI + target, audience, offer, key dates (build / QA / launch / end), channel owners, and creative requirements. Circulate to creative, paid, lifecycle, and sales for sign-off before any production starts.

Headline, subhead, primary CTA, secondary CTA, proof points. Run it past the messaging house / brand voice doc — seasonal language drifts toward generic ('this holiday season...') if not pinned to the positioning statement.

Designer pulls assets from the DAM (Brandfolder / Bynder / Frontify). Deliverables typically include: 1200x630 social/OG, 1080x1080 + 1080x1350 paid social, 1200x600 email hero, 728x90 / 300x250 / 160x600 display, and any Reels/TikTok 1080x1920 vertical cuts.

Subject line + preheader for email (test 2-3 variants), three headline options for paid, full landing-page copy with H1 / H2 / proof / CTA. Include FTC disclosure language for any influencer or partner posts (#ad or platform-native paid partnership tag).

Stage in CMS (HubSpot / Webflow / WordPress). Apply UTM convention from the link-builder doc — source / medium / campaign consistent across email, paid, and organic. GA4 conversion event mapped to the actual form submit, not button click. Confirm GTM fires only after consent on EU traffic.

Creative + legal + brand sign-off goes here with a timestamped record — not a Slack DM thread. Substantiate any comparative or performance claims (Lanham Act exposure) with a citation file before approval.

Push to Litmus or Email on Acid; check Gmail, Outlook desktop / web, Apple Mail, iOS, Android. Outlook is where dark-mode and table layouts break. Confirm physical address in footer (CAN-SPAM) and working unsubscribe link routing to the suppression list.

EU recipients require GDPR lawful basis (express consent for marketing); CASL recipients in Canada need express or implied consent on file. Apply suppression for unsubscribes, hard bounces, and the 6-month-quiet sunset segment to protect sender reputation.

Walk every CTA path in GA4 DebugView. Common gotcha: conversion event firing on button hover or email-blur instead of submit success — this inflates reported conversions 3-5x. Confirm UTM parameters land cleanly in source / medium / campaign reports.

Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn campaigns built but paused. Audiences attached, lookalikes seeded, frequency caps set. Pixel fires post-consent on EU traffic — verified through the consent-management platform (OneTrust / Cookiebot).

Document each blocker, owner, and ETA. Re-run the affected QA gate — inbox test, GA4 validation, or pixel check — before the campaign is reopened for launch approval.

Send broadcast through MAP (HubSpot / Marketo / Klaviyo). Unpause paid ad sets in Google, Meta, LinkedIn. Notify sales in #pipeline-alerts so reps know inbound leads from the campaign source are landing.

Watch open / click rates against historical baseline, spam-complaint rate (cut-off 0.1%), and bounce rate. Paid pacing: spend on track for daily budget, CTR not collapsed, ROAS within tolerance. If complaint rate spikes, pause and investigate.

72-hour read: shift spend toward ad sets above target ROAS, pause the bottom 20% by CPA. Refresh the worst-performing creative if frequency is over 4. Don't kill an ad set inside its attribution window without checking view-through.

Community manager works the Sprout / Hootsuite inbox daily through the campaign window. Hide brand-unsafe comments per the guidelines doc; route product complaints to support; flag PR-sensitive threads to the comms lead.

Mid-flight check with SDR lead: are MQLs from the campaign source converting to SAL? If lead-quality score has dropped, tighten audience or form qualification before more spend goes through.

Reconcile the GA4 / MAP / paid-platform numbers — they will not match exactly because of attribution windows and de-duplication. Source-of-truth is typically the CRM for pipeline, GA4 for site behavior, and the ad platform for spend.

30-minute structured retro: what worked, what didn't, what we'd do differently. Capture creative-level winners (top three ads by CTR and by CPA) and document any deliverability or QA misses for the runbook.

Triggered when the campaign missed target. Isolate where the drop happened — audience size, list quality, creative CTR, landing-page conversion, or sales follow-up. One owner per failure point with a corrective action before the next seasonal.

One-page summary in Notion / Confluence: KPI vs. target, spend vs. plan, top creative, key learnings, and three concrete inputs for the next seasonal brief. Link from the editorial calendar so the next cycle's planner finds it.