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CAMPAIGN LAUNCH CHECKLIST
4 tests to run before launching any marketing campaign in 2026...
Niall Ratcliffe
November 23, 2025
In partnership with
Morning!
What a week it’s been. I feel like I’m running 100mph into Christmas and everything is coming at once. I spoke at B2B Marketing Live in Londong on Wednesday, we hit “Go” with 2 client campaigns on Thursday, and we launched our last and biggest campaign of the year this week - with nearly 500 people download
ing our Customer Acquisition Playbook so far (see the launch video here).
It’s been wild.
But after a manic week, I took some time on Friday to reflect on the campaign and think about what we could have improved and what we’ll do differently next time.
What it resulted in was a list of tests I’m calling our ‘Campaign Launch Checklist’. I thought I’d share them with you here, with some examples of why I think they’re so important.
(Feel free to steal these in your campaigns for next year)
Let’s get into it!
THE ESSAY
Every Friday, we hold an All Hands meeting, where we bring together every person in the agency to discuss the week’s events and updates for the entire agency. In this week’s, I reminded the team of something that has been made more and more obvious to me over the last few years…
“99% of marketing mistakes come from overcomplicating things.”
Because in its simplest form, marketing is just about clearly communicating something of value to someone who needs or wants it.
Where we go wrong is when we try too hard to say fancy things in the name of “differentiation” or “creativity”. Yet sometimes the most creative thing you can do is simplify.
My aim with this list of tests (or ‘Campaign Checklist’) was to force us to simplify every aspect of our campaign to its clearest form before it goes live. To pull any nonsense out and nearly guarantee its success.
Don’t get me wrong, nothing is guaranteed in marketing, but I do think if you run through these 4 tests before launching any campaigns in 2026, your campaigns will be much better for it.
Test 1: Does My Mum Understand it?
My mum is amazing, but she’s not a marketer. And ironically, that’s exactly why you sometimes need someone who isn’t a marketer and isn’t close to the project to look over your work.
I’ve realised that when you’re building campaigns, even if you’ve got 10+ people involved, you’re all standing too close to the canvas. You hear every debate, every tweak, every half-formed thought that led to the final idea. So with every meeting, your brain absorbs more and more context.
It starts to log:
The reason behind every decision
Why things were done a certain way
How you think people will react
That context is helpful while building the campaign, but it becomes a liability the moment you expect a cold audience to understand the idea. Because if the idea is confusing or over-engineered, you won’t notice it. You’re too close. You’ve been in every conversation that explains it.
This is why, once you’ve got the core idea, you need to ask: “Does my mum understand it?”
And the easiest way to answer that is to show it to someone who wasn’t involved. Your mum, your dad, your brother, a friend. If they don’t get it, that’s a major red flag.
We had this exact thing happen with a campaign we ran for ourselves. Nat, our Video Lead, showed the launch video to her partner. His response: “I don’t get it.”
After she explained it, he started to understand it. But that’s the problem, no one else gets the explanation. They only get the launch video on it’s own. If they don’t get it right then and there, it won’t perform well.
Take our Playbook Launch this week. There were a few concepts blended together in the launch video:
We were giving away our best customer acquisition strategies for £1.
We were giving away £1000 for every 1000 downloads.
And the launch video talked about how you can’t get anything for £1 anymore and how the UK economy is going downhill.
To us, internally, this all slotted together perfectly. It felt tight and clever.
But because we didn’t run the mum-test until it was too late, the clarity wasn’t there. I’m pretty sure a lot of people watched the video and had no idea what they were supposed to take from it.
So from now on, we’re running this test every time. Because if my mum gets it, our audience will get it too.
Test 2: Is It Pre-Validated?
Probably my most used phrase to any person in the noticed. team is, "Is it pre-validated?" Mainly because, in marketing, you can't afford to miss. That means you need to test a lot. If you want to skip the queue and avoid running endless experiments, the easiest shortcut is to find concepts and ideas that are already pre-validated.
What I mean by this is something you know has already worked for someone else, which you can then adapt for yourself. A simple example in content is this:
I see Jake Ward publish a carousel on LinkedIn called ‘OLD VS NEW SEO’ and it goes viral…
So I know that the ‘Old Vs New’ theme works, Jake did the test, so I don’t need to. Instead, I can take his pre-validated idea and apply it to my niche and create a carousel on Old Vs New B2B Marketing. Which I did, and guess what…
It also went viral with 100,000s of impressions.
The same applies to any marketing campaign. It is stupid to risk tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pounds on a concept that is not pre-validated. Instead, you want to find ideas and themes that you know already resonate with your ICP, then find a way to apply them to what you are promoting.
Example: Kevin the Carrot became a huge sensation in Aldi’s Christmas ads. So maybe a company like Holland and Barrett could create a cute character for their Christmas campaign and start selling it in stores as well.
It is not the greatest example, but you get the point. You want to find themes, ideas and concepts that you already know have resonated, then build from them.
If your campaign is not pre-validated, your campaign is at risk of being a huge flop.
Test 3: If We Doubled The Price, What Would You Change?
One of my first bosses always used to say this one phrase: “If you added 10x the value but had to deliver it for 10% of the price, what would that change?”
He was talking about service delivery and improving what you offer, but it applies directly to marketing campaigns too, especially when you are launching a resource or a sales asset. When I say resource or sales asset, I mean something tangible. It could be an ebook, a webinar, an in-person event, a calculator, or a free trial of your product. Anything in that category is what I consider a sales asset.
Most companies give these things away for free. But a very simple question to ask yourself is, “What if you added a price?” If it was free, what if you charged £5? If you were going to charge £5, what if you charged £10? What would you change?
It is very easy, when you are giving away something for free, to treat it like a free product and build the whole campaign with that mindset. You tell yourself the landing page does not need to be that good because it is free. The launch video does not need to be that strong because it is free. The emails do not need to be dialled in because it is free.
But what if you doubled the price?
That question forces a shift in mindset. You start thinking, “If this cost £10, no one would convert unless I did this, this and this.” And the things you list out in that moment are exactly the things you should be doing anyway, even for a cheap or free product.
So now, whenever we launch a free campaign, a free product or any sales asset, I ask myself, “If we were charging ten pounds for this, what would I change?” Then I go and make those changes.
For our own campaign recently, we actually did end up charging for it. We were originally going to give away the playbook for free, but we felt like we added so much value that we should charge something. So we decided to set the price at £1. And by adding that £1 price tag it made us rethink everything about the landing pages. We pushed so much harder on them because we were charging for it, even if it was only a pound.
Test 4: Who Should I Send This To?
A great way to figure out if your positioning is clear is to message someone and say, “Hi, do you know anyone you think we could help?”
If they say, “No, not sure,” or if several people say the same thing, that is a major red flag. What they are really saying is that they do not understand what you do, because they do not understand who you help. What you want them to say is something like, “Yes, I have a friend who needs SEO,” if you are an SEO agency.
The same applies to any product or campaign you launch. If you can send someone the launch video and ask, “Do you know anyone who would enjoy this?” or “Who should I send this to?” and they cannot give you a clear answer, then you have not made it obvious who the campaign is designed for.
For example, if I opened a video with, “If you are window cleaner in Lancashire, this is for you,” it is instantly clear who it is aimed at. If I then asked, “Do you know anyone I should send this to?” they would say, “Yes, send it to my window cleaner,” because it is obvious who the message is for.
(This is why people like Alex Hormozi start their ads with lines like, “If you’re a business owner”.)
You will notice that most of these tests rely on an outside perspective, someone who is not close to the campaign and has no context. That is the theme here. You need people who are not involved in the project because they give you the most honest and useful feedback.
If you send your campaign or launch video to someone and ask, “Who should I send this to?” and they cannot name anyone, there is a very good chance you have not made it clear who it is for.
I might honestly put these into a bit of a resource in itself and distribute it to the team for the next year because they are so so so important for any campaign. I hope you found them as useful or as interesting as I did.
Oh and if you haven't already checked out our Customer Acquisition Playbook and downloaded it, I will leave a link HERE. It includes all of our best customer acquisition strategies (the ones our clients pay us tens of thousands of pounds for), and we are literally selling it for one pound.
(I’d love to hear your feedback if you have already got it too!)
Like I said at the start, for every one pound we get, we're going to give it to a small local Manchester business that needs it more than we do right before Christmas. So please do go get the playbook and let me know what you think.
But that's all for now. That's all I've got for you.
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
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