Every B2B campaign launch checklist you’ll find online tells you to verify your links and double-check your UTMs. That’s solid advice, but it’s not where campaigns actually fall apart.
The breakdowns happen earlier and run deeper:
- Misaligned stakeholders,
- Fuzzy goals,
- Audiences built on stale data, and
- Channels that technically “launch” but never actually coordinate with each other.
By the time the symptoms show up in your pipeline report, you’ve already burned the budget.
This checklist is for the moment just before you hit go. Not to remind you to test your forms (though yes, test your forms), but to make sure the campaign underneath the assets is actually ready.
If you haven’t built your campaign plan yet, start with The Marketing Ops Guide to Omnichannel Campaign Planning. Come back here when you’re close to launch.
Work through these 15 questions. If you can answer “yes” to all of them, you’re ready. If you can’t, you just saved yourself a very expensive lesson.
Strategy and alignment
1. Is this campaign tied to a specific business objective?
“Generate awareness” is not a business objective. “Move 40 accounts from Target to Awareness stage before the end of Q2” is. If you can’t connect this campaign directly to a revenue goal, a product initiative, or a GTM priority, it’s worth asking whether it should launch at all.
2. Do all stakeholders agree on what success looks like?
This sounds obvious until you’re three weeks post-launch and marketing is celebrating click-through rates while sales is asking why pipeline hasn’t moved. Align on metrics — and what those metrics mean — before launch, not after.
3. Does sales know this campaign is happening, and do they know their role in it?
Marketing launching a demand gen campaign that targets the same accounts sales is cold-calling is the B2B equivalent of two people texting the same prospect from different numbers at the same time. Awkward for everyone involved.
Before you launch, sales should know which accounts are in the campaign, what those accounts are seeing, and when they’re expected to engage. Better yet, put it in writing: a simple SLA that defines when marketing hands off a qualified account, how quickly sales is expected to follow up, and who owns the account if they don’t. SLAs aren’t bureaucracy, they’re the thing that keeps “we’re aligned” from being a polite fiction.
4. Is there a named owner for each deliverable?
“Marketing” is not an owner. “Priya, who owns the LinkedIn ads and has confirmed her creative is approved and scheduled” is an owner. Every channel, every asset, every workflow should have a specific person accountable for it — not a team, not a function, a person.
Audience and targeting
5. Is your segment built on real-time data and not a static list?
A CSV someone exported last month is not a segment. It’s a historical document. Accounts change. Contacts leave. Intent signals expire. Your audience should update dynamically based on current ICP fit, buying stage, and behavioral signals — not a snapshot from whenever someone last had a free Tuesday afternoon. This is why dynamic intent signals outperform static CRM data as a segmentation foundation: they reflect what accounts are researching right now, not what they were doing when someone last ran an export.
6. Have you mapped messages to buying stage, not just persona?
A VP of Demand Gen in the Awareness stage and a VP of Demand Gen in the Decision stage are in fundamentally different headspaces. They need different content, different proof points, and different calls to action.
7. Do you know which accounts are already in active sales cycles?
Before launch, reconcile your target segment against open opportunities in your CRM. Accounts with active deals should either be excluded from top-of-funnel messaging or routed to a separate track built for deal acceleration.
8. Have you suppressed the right audiences?
Current customers who aren’t candidates for expansion. Accounts that recently closed lost. Contacts who unsubscribed. Competitors. If these people are in your segment, you’re spending money to create friction instead of pipeline. Check your suppression logic before you launch, not after a customer emails you asking why they’re getting acquisition ads.
Content and creative
9. Does every asset have a clear next step?
Every email, ad, and landing page should have one job: move the prospect toward a specific next action. If someone downloads your whitepaper, what happens next? If someone clicks your LinkedIn ad, where do they land — and what are they supposed to do when they get there? Trace the full path for every touchpoint.
10. Is your messaging consistent across every channel?
Run a quick gut check: if a prospect saw your display ad on Monday, got your email on Wednesday, and received a sales call on Friday, would those three interactions feel like they came from the same campaign with a coherent point of view? Inconsistent messaging is one of the most reliable ways to erode trust at exactly the moment you’re trying to build it.
11. Have you QA’d every link, form, UTM, and landing page?
Yes, this is the tedious one. Do it anyway. Broken links and misconfigured tracking parameters are the kind of thing that seem minor in the moment and become major when you’re explaining to your CMO why you have no idea where your pipeline came from.
Measurement and tracking
12. Are your KPIs defined before launch?
Post-launch metric selection is how teams end up reporting the numbers that look best instead of the numbers that matter. Decide in advance: account progression rates, pipeline influence, stage-to-stage velocity, buying group engagement. Set the bar before you see the results, or the results will set the bar for you.
13. Is tracking configured and verified across every channel?
Your CRM, marketing automation platform, ad platforms, and analytics dashboards all need to capture the right signals from day one. A campaign that runs but can’t be measured is a campaign you’ll have to argue about at the end of the quarter instead of learn from throughout.
14. Do you have a defined cadence for reviewing performance?
“We’ll check in if something seems off” is not a review cadence. Block time for a weekly pulse check during the first month of any active campaign. Know in advance which metrics will trigger an optimization tweak versus which will trigger a more fundamental strategic conversation. Reactive measurement is just slightly delayed guessing.
Orchestration and execution
15. Do you have a plan for what happens when an account engages?
This is the question most pre-launch campaign checklists skip entirely and it’s the one that separates campaigns that build pipeline from campaigns that produce activity reports.
When an account opens three emails, clicks a LinkedIn ad, and visits your pricing page in the same week, what happens? Does a workflow push them to the next buying stage? Does a sales alert fire? Does someone get a task? If the answer is “I think Marketo handles something” or “sales usually notices,” the campaign is not ready.
Engagement without a defined response is just noise. Build your downstream handoffs — your alerts, your workflow branches, your sales triggers — before you launch, not after you realize accounts progressed without anyone noticing.
If you hit a “no” on any of these
A “no” before launch is information you can act on. A “no” you discover three weeks post-launch is a post-mortem.
The most common gaps we see are questions 3, 6, and 15: sales alignment, stage-based messaging, and post-engagement response planning. If you’re only going to pressure-test three things before you go live, make it those.
And if you’re still building the underlying framework — the segment logic, the workflow architecture, the cross-functional alignment model — The Marketing Ops Guide to Omnichannel Campaign Planning covers the full six-step process our own team uses, including a free campaign planning template. This checklist will be here when you’re ready to launch.
Campaign Strategy Pressure-Tested? Great! Now Let’s Automate It.
