I was on my commute recently, running through a client brief in my head, piecing together what a campaign needed to say, who it needed to reach, and how it needed to show up across channels. No laptop open. No dashboard in front of me. Just me, the motion of the train, and the quiet discipline of thinking strategically before acting.
That moment reminded me of something I have seen play out time and again in digital marketing:
The campaigns that fail rarely fail because of poor execution. They fail because of poor preparation.
The targeting was too broad. The messaging was off. The budget was spent trying to find an audience that was never properly defined in the first place.
So before we talk about Google Ads, Meta campaigns, or any other online channel you are looking to explore, let us talk about the thing that makes all of it work: the marketing strategy.
1. Strategy Is Not a Slide Deck. It Is a Thinking Process.
When a new client brief lands with me, my first instinct is never to jump into Ads Manager or Google’s campaign dashboard. My first instinct is to ask questions.
What does this business actually sell? Not just in product terms, but in value terms. What problem does it solve? What transformation does it offer? What makes it different from the competitors the customer considered before landing here?
Then, who is buying it? Not just demographically, but behaviourally. Where do they spend their time online? What language do they use when they search? What motivates them to act, and what makes them hesitate?
This process is what builds the foundation of a campaign. And it is the step that many businesses, and even some marketers, rush past in their eagerness to go live.
2. The Ideal Customer Profile: Your Most Valuable Marketing Asset
One of the most important documents you can build before launching any campaign is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This is not a vague sketch of “men and women aged 25 to 45.” That is an audience category. An ICP goes deeper.
It captures who your best customers are, what drives their decisions, what they fear, what they aspire to, and how they describe their own problems.
When your ICP is clearly defined, everything downstream becomes sharper:
Your Google Ads keyword strategy becomes more intentional because you understand the specific language your customer uses when they search. You are not guessing at intent. You are mapping to it.
Your Meta targeting becomes more precise. Your retargeting structure becomes more relevant. Without this foundation, you are essentially spending money to talk to everyone, which in practice means reaching no one particularly well.
3. Demographics Are Just the Beginning
Demographics tell you who someone is on paper. Age, gender, location, income bracket, job title. Useful, yes. But alone they are not enough.
The real intelligence sits in the overlap between demographics and psychographics. The why beneath the who.
A 35-year-old marketing manager in Manchester, UK and a 35-year-old marketing manager in Lagos, Nigeria may share the same demographic profile but have entirely different motivations, cultural reference points, spending patterns, and responses to creative.
Understanding that distinction is what separates a campaign that resonates from one that merely reaches.
3. How Strategy Shapes Every Channel Decision
Once you understand the business, its audience, and the problem being solved, you can begin to make intelligent decisions about which channels to use and how.
In Google Ads Search Campaign Type, your bidding strategy, whether Maximise Clicks, Target CPA, Maximise Conversions, or a more manual approach, should reflect the customer journey and where in that journey your ads are appearing. A campaign targeting someone ready to buy and call has a completely different approach than one targeting someone still in the research phase.
In Meta advertising, the logic is the same, but through a different lens. Meta is not a search platform. It is an interruption platform. You are inserting yourself into someone’s scroll. Your creative, your hook, and your message need to do a lot of work quickly.
When you understand your customer’s journey well enough, your retargeting sequences can feel less like advertising and more like a timely, relevant continuation of a conversation.
Strategy is not channel-specific. It is universal and then adapted.
4. The Cost of Skipping the Thinking
I have worked with businesses that came to me after burning through significant budgets with little to show for it. In almost every case, the problem was not the platform. It was not even the creative.
Digital advertising platforms are remarkably powerful. But power without direction is just noise.
When you rush to launch without a clear strategy, you end up with impressions but not interest, clicks but not conversions, traffic but not growth. You optimise the wrong things because you never defined what success looked like in terms of the customer, not just the numbers.
5. The Train Ride as a Creative Practice
The best strategic thinking I have done has rarely happened at a desk. It has happened in motion: on a commute, during a walk, in the minutes before a meeting, when the mind is still loose and associative.
Deep thinking requires a certain kind of mental space. When you permit yourself to simply think, without the distraction of dashboards and notifications, you often arrive at sharper clarity than any tool can generate for you.
For those of us in digital marketing, strategy is not something you produce once and file away. It is a living discipline.
Whether that thinking happens in an office, on a whiteboard, or at 7:42 on a train ride, the discipline is the same.
Think first. Then build.
6. Before You Launch, Ask Yourself:
- Do I truly understand this business and the problem it solves?
- Have I built a clear Ideal Customer Profile beyond basic demographics?
- Do I understand where my audience is in their decision-making journey?
- Have I matched my strategy to the intent level of each channel?
- Can I define what success looks like in terms of the customer, not just the metrics?
If you can answer yes to all of those, you are ready to build a campaign worth running.
If you cannot, the train ride might be exactly where you need to start.