Marketing campaigns function as powerful vehicles to propel brands forward, engage audiences, and drive purchases. Strategic campaign management ensures that your campaigns reach and resonate with the target audience and resonate, convincing them to try your offer. Campaign management involves meticulous planning, timely execution, and deep insight into the audience, all of which can be challenging to keep track of without a proper plan.
In this guide, we walk you through each step of the marketing campaign management process and showcase how campaign management software can enhance your marketing operations.
What is Marketing Campaign Management?
Marketing campaign management refers to a consecutive process of planning, executing, tracking, and analyzing marketing campaigns across various marketing channels, such as social and traditional media, advertising, and email newsletters. It streamlines and orchestrates the entire lifecycle of a campaign, from its conception to the assessment of the results.
The goal of a marketing campaign is to guide its target audience toward a specific action, whether it's making a purchase, registering for an event, or upgrading their purchase. Campaign management in marketing ensures this outcome by analyzing the audience and crafting compelling content and events to engage and persuade them to take the desired action.
To conduct comprehensive campaign management at scale, you need marketing automation systems that help build multichannel marketing campaigns and track and analyze their performance.
Why is Marketing Campaign Management Important?
The campaign management process ensures your marketing campaign resonates with customers, showcases your brand strengths, and optimizes your company's budgeting and hiring processes. To transform your campaign from disjointed events into a seamless, customer-centric experience, you need to establish a master plan.
For instance, consistent campaign management for an electric car manufacturer could enable the marketing department to convey a unified message centered on sustainability and disseminate it through channels tailored to its audience. Otherwise, their marketing efforts would be sporadic, with social media posts, email newsletters, and promotional offers addressing different customer needs.
The benefits provided by marketing campaign management include
- Consistency of your marketing activities across channels.
- A structured customer path that guides them through the funnel.
- Alignment and collaboration of various team members and departments.
- Data-based insights that improve your marketing strategy.
What Tasks Does a Campaign Manager Typically Do?
The campaign manager oversees the entire lifecycle of the campaign. She is responsible for planning and executing the campaigns and communicating all the plans to other marketing specialists.
Here’s a short list of the campaign management tasks they carry out:
- Setting measurable goals for the campaign, i.e., number of leads, social media buzz, event attendees, newsletter signups.
- Assigning tasks to social media managers, copywriters, designers, web developers, PCC specialists, etc.
- Tracking, analyzing, and reporting campaign results to colleagues, executives, and other departments.
- Overseeing and approving all campaign content, including designs, copies, landing pages, and emails.
- Communicating plans and managing collaborations with internal product and sales teams.
- Hiring freelancers and agencies for content production and PR if needed.
Overall, campaign managers act as the supervisor for the various marketing activities included in the campaign. Let’s now go through these activities and see what campaign management entails.
How to Plan a Successful Marketing Campaign in 8 Steps
Marketing campaign management suggests a workflow to plan and execute successful campaigns. These steps are structured to streamline the work of marketing departments and satisfy customers.
Step 1. Determine campaign goals
Every marketing campaign starts with the question, “What do we want to accomplish?”. Most companies have the same aims: raise brand awareness, generate leads, build reputation, and foster customer loyalty. It can be helpful to start with one of these broader goals and then hone it into a specific and measurable objective.
For example, if your initial goal is to increase brand awareness, the final version that you’ll present to the team may be: “To get X mentions in the industry media, X social media mentions, and get X more social media followers in one month.” This detailed and tangible objective already suggests an approximate path to take and the metrics to measure the success of the campaign.
Step 2. Analyze and segment your target audience
Understanding your audience is a crucial part of campaign management.
Audience segmentation is done to separate potential customers into several groups so that a campaign manager can create tailored content and messaging for each group. Some of the factors that influence segmentation include
- Demographics such as age and gender
- Geography
- Psychographic factors, i.e., customer pains and preferences
- Behavioral factors that show how the customer makes buying decisions
- Devices they use to engage with your campaign, and more.
Examining these factors allows you to understand potential customers and divide them into audience segments.
Step 3. Design customer journey and determine the channels and content format
The knowledge of your audience enables you to plan a sequence of actions that will lead them to purchase. This sequence is often referred to as the customer journey and is often visualized in a customer journey map, a visual schematic representation of all the events that turn a person into a loyal customer.
A depiction of general customer journey stages
For example, let’s say a person comes across your company’s post on LinkedIn. She finds it interesting and follows the profile and then sees an announcement of the webinar you’re planning. She goes to the page to register but gets distracted and doesn’t complete the process. Later, she sees an ad promoting the webinar and signs up. The webinar convinces her to try the product – and the rest is the responsibility of the Sales team.
In a perfect world, the process would look like this: Social media follow - Webinar registration - Purchase. But, as you see, it involved additional steps across multiple channels. And we didn’t even consider audience segmentation in our example – a customer who doesn’t use social media would have a different journey to purchase.
Based on customer journeys, you can determine channels for the campaign and content formats. Examples of channels include social media platforms, newsletters, influencers, online and traditional media, websites, and advertising.
As for content formats, they can be ads, videos, articles, infographics, and more. Determining formats before you start designing the content itself helps you better plan resources. For instance, if you want to launch a video-heavy campaign but don’t have a video producer and editor on the marketing team, you’ll have to assign resources for that.
This step provides a clear outline of marketing tasks to complete within a specific timeframe.
Step 4. Revise your resources and determine the marketing budget
With the previous step, you should have an idea of what resources the campaign requires. These resources can be categorized into:
- Knowledge and skills AKA professional resources. For example, for an influencer-heavy campaign, you may need to hire or outsource influencer marketing managers.
- Marketing tools, including content creation, marketing automation, and marketing analytics software. To save money, look for a solution that supports multiple tasks like marketing automation and analytics.
- Paid marketing budget for digital and traditional advertising.
Now you are ready to build the campaign budget. If you have it, use the data from previous paid campaigns, freelance or agency costs, and typical customer acquisition expenses – it can make your projections more accurate.
Some marketing teams don’t have the liberty of determining their budgets and have to work with the numbers suggested by the executive department. Engaging in discussions about the company’s revenue and budget with stakeholders can ensure realistic expectations. To bridge this gap, you can explore cost-effective resources like free infographics generated with AI, along with other free formats such as videos and images, to enhance your campaign while staying within budget.
Step 5. Create content
The campaign content you create should be based on the customer research you carried out previously and be:
- Personalized. The content you create should be based on your audience data and incorporate language, visual references, messaging, and narratives that resonate with them. For example, if you’re promoting vitamins, a health-conscious audience will want to know about the ingredients, while parents will also be interested in taste.
- Valuable. Aim to provide your audience with insights that extend beyond mere product descriptions. Offer informative and helpful content that demonstrates how your product fits within the larger context of the industry landscape and your audience's lives.
- Actionable. While not every asset needs to lead to a purchase, make sure each content piece leads a person further down the customer journey. For example, an informative article can end with a CTA to sign up for a newsletter. This way, you ensure that all marketing activities are coherent and serve the ultimate goals.
- Focused. The content’s role is to guide customers through the journey one step at a time. For this reason, keep your assets focused on one action.
- Engaging. No matter how uninspiring your industry is, your content needs to invoke feelings. The content that brings up emotions is much more memorable and effective in prompting action.
- Search-optimized. Your content should be easy to find – this can be ensured by selecting the relevant channels and spaces for your audience and optimizing content for social media and search engine algorithms.
Step 6. Embrace marketing automation
Many routine marketing operations can be automated with the help of proper software. It doesn’t just save time for your team – automation also enables quicker responses to customer actions and ensures your prospects have a smooth experience with the company.
The most common example is email automation software. Imagine a customer who shares their email address and gets regular emails triggered by specific actions or time intervals.
Marketing automation software can focus on a specific type of marketing (for example, Mailchimp for email automation, Buffer for social media, or ActiveCampaign for marketing campaign management ) or enable wide adoption of automation across your marketing operations (for example, Marketing Creatio for end-to-end marketing automation). Choose the appropriate services based on your goals and use cases.
Set up trigger events and follow-up actions in the software of your choice in line with the customer journey. Once you launch the campaign, you can change these settings as you learn more about customer behavior.
Step 7. Launch the campaign
At this stage, you deliver all the content to the appropriate channels and engage with your audience. However, launching the campaign shouldn’t be limited to clicking “Publish.”
Take each campaign as an opportunity to run marketing tests. For example, doing A/B tests for the campaign’s landing page demonstrates which copy and layout works better for conversion, resulting in more leads and valuable insights you can utilize in the next campaign.
You can start these experiments prior to the wide rollout or run them simultaneously. Just make sure you don’t perform several tests for the same asset at once, otherwise, you won’t be able to attribute the results properly.
Step 8. Analyze results
Compare your results with the goals established at the start of your campaign to see what’s working and what needs improvement. Continuous monitoring safeguards you against surprise failures at the end of the campaign. Regular updates give you the flexibility to adjust your campaign as it progresses rather than be faced with inadequate results once it ends.
Moreover, analyzing the data and identifying mistakes and weaknesses helps you create better marketing campaigns in the future. Just remember, if you’re analyzing data that may qualify as personal information, various data privacy laws, like the GDPR, require you to create a privacy policy that discloses the use of user data.
Types of Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns can be classified by the campaign's purpose or the main channel it uses. The standard classification includes the following types.
Product marketing
Purpose: Increase sales
This type of marketing campaign aims to position the product on the market and highlight its advantages, generating sales.
Brand marketing
Purpose: Boost brand awareness and recognition and improve reputation
Do you know these Coca-Cola ads that don’t say anything about the taste of the drink? They just show people having fun together with a lot of Coke bottles around them. This is a great example of brand marketing – it aims to build a brand image that isn’t directly dependent on a specific product.
Content marketing
Purpose: Generate leads, build brand awareness, and increase retention
This type is defined by the medium rather than the marketing purpose. It entails creating video, audio, visual, and written content geared for various marketing outcomes.
Email marketing
Purpose: Increase recurring sales and nurture leads
Email marketing covers all the newsletters and automated emails your brand sends. It’s often employed for taking leads further down the sales funnel and generating recurring sales.
Paid marketing
Purpose: Reach new audiences
Advertising allows you to reach beyond your organic audiences. Moreover, considering the challenges of social media algorithms and Internet saturation, sometimes paid marketing is the best way to promote your product even to your existing followers.
Improve Marketing Campaigns With Creatio
Marketing Creatio is a powerful omnichannel marketing automation software based on a no-code platform that enables limitless customization. It offers advanced capabilities to budget, execute, and track marketing campaigns and projects of any complexity, with a rich visual campaign designer and intuitive analytics.
Marketing Creatio allows you to build multichannel campaigns using the simple visual campaign designer. The system allows for the setting up of criteria for target conversion rates and campaign completion and defines conditions for transitioning between campaign stages. It also offers tools to monitor campaign progress in real time.
Campaign automation in Creatio
It covers a plethora of marketing channels, including social media, email, SMS, landing pages, and customer forms.
Creatio offers a thorough customer perspective through an in-depth customer profile. It contains demographical, social, behavioral, and financial data, as well as data pertaining to the customers' and prospects' reactions to previously launched campaigns. This information is employed for effortless audience segmentation, achievable with just a few clicks.
A diverse range of customizable analytical reports, charts, and dashboards offer a detailed analysis of campaign flows, their outcomes, and overall effectiveness. In addition to that, Marketing Creatio offers AI and machine learning tools to analyze your customer and performance data and identify trends that influence your marketing campaigns. Thanks to AI, you won’t miss any valuable insights and will be able to optimize all your campaigns for maximum efficiency.
You can sign up for Marketing Creatio free trial and test drive its excellent campaign builder yourself.
Explore the benefits of Creatio for effective marketing campaign management
Empower Your Marketing Team with Campaign Management
Achieving marketing success doesn't require a Don Draper-like genius; there's no secret formula to a successful campaign. All you need is efficient planning and modern campaign management software that supports your processes. With this guide and Marketing Creatio, you’ll be able to run memorable, engaging campaigns with maximum efficiency.
