524. Campaigns w/ Kira Klaas 🎣
How to run marketing campaigns like Notion does. Plus, free templates to use!
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
I’m really fortunate to have guest-write this week’s newsletter. Kira ran brand marketing at Notion and at Brex, two of the best tech brands in the business. Give her a follow on LinkedIn and check out her amazing Maven course, too.
Over to Kira!
How the best marketing campaigns actually get run
As marketers, we put so much effort into crafting amazing campaign strategies and briefs.
But all too often, those carefully constructed plans get left behind once the real work begins. What if I told you there's a way to transform that static campaign brief into a living, breathing collaboration hub for the entire campaign lifecycle? And that the real unlock to campaign success is the internal playbook behind the work?
Our marketing team at Notion faced this pain point head-on when we first built our campaigns function. Our solution? Well, a few things …
A campaign brief that acts more like a project management database than a nice deck that gets lost in the Google Drive shuffle.
(the real star ⭐️ of today’s newsletter) A campaign communication playbook. It’s a robust template to foster seamless cross-functional coordination from planning to postmortem.
These resources are the behind-the-scenes magic that helped make Notion’s campaigns so memorable and effective—both externally and internally.
The problem: Calling meetings and tracking dozens of different channel workstreams without a long-view of all the work left a lot of room for deadlines, handoffs, and approvals to fall through the cracks.
The solution: We wanted an easier way for the campaign driver to track the communication and tasks that would be critical to the success of each phase of a campaign’s lifecycle—from kickoff-offs and channel planning to creative development and launch execution.
Enter the campaign playbook!
So what makes this playbook so invaluable?
It provides a framework and checklist covering each critical campaign phase:
🤔 Pre-Planning: Nail down objectives, audiences, and high-level strategies
📢 Project Briefing: Get stakeholders looped in on roles and provide initial feedback
👐 Cross-Functional Kick-offs: Dedicated meetings to ensure shared vision and deliverables
📣 Channel Planning: Collaborate on channel-specific tactics, content, and asset needs
✍️ Creative Development: Iterate creative concepts, copy, design—with built-in approval tracking
🚀 Launch: Execute the coordinated launch with clear communication and monitoring
📊 Recap & Retrospective: Analyze successes, challenges, and opportunities
At Notion, we found this project communication workbook to be the ideal tool to help the team (and us brand leaders) create an effective cross-functional campaign process.
The playbook provides a structure and guidelines for planning, executing, and tracking the progress of a project or campaign—and it goes hand-in-hand with this campaign brief template. It’s easy to tailor the template to your org’s unique needs and team structures.
👉🏼 Get Notion’s campaign brief template here
👉🏼 Get Kira’s campaign playbook here
The more we lean on remote work and AI tools to supplement our day to day, the more that cross-functional visibility and insight becomes critical, and having a playbook like this one to do the heavy lifting up front can be the difference between campaigns that fizzle out and ones that resonate with audiences and drive serious business impact … or the ones that get everyone on the team energized and on the same page, versus confused, burned out—you get the picture.
If you want to level up your campaign game, this is the template to try. Your cross-functional partners will thank you!
~ Kira
Kevan note: Bonus for readers!
If you’re eager to deeper on this topic, this template is just one of 25+ you’ll find in Kira’s top-rated Maven course, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders. You can join the latest cohort now through the first week of July to get lifetime access to the course and templates, plus two 1:1 sessions with Kira that you can schedule anytime. You can get 25% off the listing price with code KEVAN.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
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