The Definitive Guide to Marketing Campaign Management

A marketing campaign is your roadmap to all the marketing activities you will measure and monitor. It includes specific goals, a budget, and a set timetable, as well as the tools and platforms you will use in your campaign.

The process of developing and managing a campaign can be broken down into the following steps.

Step One: Define Your Goals and How You Will Measure Them

It’s not enough to say that you want more customers; you also need to be specific. Do you mean you want more sales, more new customers, more existing customers to buy more of your products, or more former customers to buy something new? How much do you want your sales to increase from any or all of these segments? For example, Lay’s goal for year-over-year sales during the 2012 “Do Us A Flavor” campaign was three percent. The actual sales increase was 12 percent. 

Your should also tailor your goals to your business needs. Say you want to gain brand awareness and customer loyalty: One way to measure that is to set a goal for increased customer retention. If you’re trying to generate 1,000 new customers, figure out how many leads you’ll need and when you’ll need them. You might find it easier to start with annual goals and work backward to determine the amount and kinds of campaigns you need to generate those leads during the year. The more detailed the goals are when you create the program, the easier it is to measure progress and see which campaigns produce the highest return.

With clear goals, you can create a campaign to capture and measure results, and also identify the resources you need to meet those goals. Some examples of goals include:

• To improve branding to increase awareness of your company, product and/or services
• To determine a measurement for direct sales, such as the number of units sold. Will you measure profit or net revenue?
• To qualify leads so you can follow up with potential customers based on their timeframe and likelihood of buying
• To nurture existing leads, reminding them of your value and offering information to move them along the sales funnel
• To encourage current customers to buy related products or services
• To encourage current customers to upgrade their existing product, to increase the quantity or frequency of their purchases

Step Two: Define Your Audience

When validating goals and tactics, keep your audience top-of-mind. Who are you targeting and what sort of campaign will resonate with that group? Defining your audience will help you speak directly to them, and you will improve your response rate if your marketing campaign is relevant and meaningful to them. Here are some ways to define, categorize and segment your audience. 

Stages in the marketing funnel or customer journey mapping: Where do people interact with your business? What do you want them to do next? 

Audience Demographics: You can tailor marketing campaigns to target demographic information such as age, sex, income level, race, employment, location, home ownership, and level of education. Other demographics can group people by hobbies, lifestyle, and more. For example, you may want to target Millennials (born 1980-2000), a group with defined buying patterns and characteristics.

Customer Profiles: Use surveys, quizzes, or purchase history to learn about your customers’ interests and behaviors. Once you know their preferences, you can target offers and products to them.

Step Three: Identify Your Marketing Campaign Tools

A marketing campaign connects the company to your audience. Once you’ve identified your goals and your audience, you need to pinpoint the best ways to reach them. Tools range from a blitz of TV commercials to brochures to social media campaigns. While you may not be able to afford a multi-million dollar ad campaign, you can still create effective marketing with a range of tactics. The trick is to select the platforms that will best meet your goals and audience needs. 

Don’t limit yourself to one medium. Today’s customers seamlessly go from mobile to desktop to retail and more. Your campaign should reach them across the customer journey. An omnichannel marketing campaign approach uses a combination of platforms to reach customers.

Step Four: Identify the Resources and Responses

Whatever the size of the company, make sure you’ve got the resources to handle the response to your marketing campaign. How will you monitor traffic to your site, order fulfillment, website content, comments, and more? If you are asking people to sign up for a newsletter, make sure you have the resources to manage the list and that the newsletter is regularly delivered. Do people want a software demo? Assign someone to coordinate those follow-ups.

Step Five: Create a Budget That Fits Your Campaign Needs and Strategy

Your budget should include all the costs associated with your marketing campaign: advertising expense, staff salaries, web hosting, media buys, and content creation. However, remember that larger marketing campaign budgets do not always guarantee success. Rather, the budget should align with your goals. Here are some approaches to consider: 

Arbitrary Allocation: Managers set the budget at the level they think the firm can afford or the amount that they think should be spent.

• Advantage: Managers make educated guesses based on their expertise and past experience.
• Disadvantage: These allocations can be arbitrary and only as good as the people making the decisions. 

Percentage of Sales: The budget is based on a percentage of total sales. For example, a company may decide to budget 10 percent of its total sales for marketing.

• Advantage: This is an easy way to calculate your budget.
• Disadvantage: Without previous data, it can be difficult to accurately set the percentage of sales. 

Objective and Task: Once you’ve identified the objectives and tasks of your campaign, this budget estimates the cost for each task.

• Advantage: The budget is tailored to what is important to your company and customized to your campaign.
• Disadvantage: This method works best if you have a lot of data about your business processes. It requires multiple calculations to link objectives with tasks and company priorities.

Meet the Competition: Spend the same amount as your competitors.

• Advantage: If you’re unsure how much to spend, you can use your competitor’s spending as your guideline.
• Disadvantage: It’s not easy to find out what the competition is spending. At the same time, they base their decisions on factors (sales, profits, size) that may not apply to your company.

 Once you determine your budget, you can use any of these 12 free marketing budget templates to start planning.

Step Six: Create Your Marketing Content

Your customers — and the people you want to become your customers — are flooded with messages every day. In a crowded media marketplace, your content has to grab their attention. Here are some points to consider:

Find content that resonates. What type of content that you’ve done is popular? What failed? What are the topics your audience is talking about: in blog comments, on customer support, on social media?

Deliver valuable content. Share information with your audience that tells the more than specific product or service details, but also about the marketplace for your business. Be informative and helpful about how your product sits in the larger space.

Keep your content focused. Your goal is to move customers one step at a time. Don’t tell them about all your products. Tell them about one at a time, with a clear call to action about what step you want them to take next.

Brainstorm a lot of ideas. Make sure to organize and prioritize the ideas by those that have the most potential and define the scope. Don’t spend a lot of time with ideas that you don’t have the time or money to actually create.

Personalize your content. If you know which products and services appeal to certain customers, you can target future campaigns specifically. Maybe they’ve shown an interest in patio furniture in the past, whether they’ve shopped online or filled out a survey in your retail store. When you introduce a new product line, you can target email and direct-mail brochures to that segment of your audience.

Your content should be easy to find. If your content doesn’t surface when using a search engine, then it won’t matter how much time you spend writing and designing a campaign. Consider using SEO tactics, but stay focused on your audience. When you are relevant to your customers, your company will be easier to find through search engines.

Download from a wide selection of free content marketing templates to support your content marketing efforts.

Step Seven: Create and Monitor Your Workflow and Timetable

None of the great ideas in the world will garner success unless you identify who is going to be accountable for executing each step of your campaign. Who will do the writing and design? Who will send the emails and social posts? Who will approve the work as it’s being done? You should diagram the workflow so everyone can see what they are responsible for and what steps depend on the work of others.

Marketing campaigns don’t stop once content is created. Also identify who will fulfill orders, respond to customer service questions, and monitor comments on your site or feedback received via email. All these elements must work smoothly together for your campaign to be a success.

Your workflow should also set specific deadlines. For big projects, it also helps to set due dates for smaller pieces of the work, including outlines, drafts, and final content. Make sure to include time in your schedule for approvals and revisions. Set the launch date of your campaign and work backward to determine the dates for completing elements in order to hit your target.

Step Eight: Test and Evaluate Your Marketing Campaign

Even the smallest of marketing campaigns is not finished once you’ve hit “send.” Before you start the major rollout, you can test variables with a smaller audience. Which subject line gets the highest open rate? Which wording in your call to action (CTA) gets the most clicks to your site? Limit your testing to one variable at a time, otherwise you won’t know which one is generating the intended response.

Testing helps you see trends, and potential trouble spots, before you spend your entire budget on your campaign. Keep the testing cycle going throughout your campaign. Monitor your response rates and ROI with each element you roll out. Compare your results with the goals established at the start of your campaign to see what’s working and what needs improvement. Are you on track to get the number of Facebook likes you wanted? Are you meeting your revenue projections? Continuous monitoring ensures 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 scramble for success in the waning days.

Step Nine: Map the Customer Journey

Customers move from retail stores to mobile ads, to social media posts to desktop computers continually. Your campaign should be able to track where they start on their journey and where they actually complete their purchase (or stop looking).

You can create unique URLs in your social and web content to track which ones generate clicks. You can use unique phone numbers in print and broadcast ads to see which ones get the most calls. Once they’ve shown an interest in your product, personalize your content to follow them from platform to platform. Did they show an interest in a new kind of ice cream? Email a coupon to get them to try it, or use this information to generate new leads with a two-for-one offer.

For additional resources, visit "Free Marketing Campaign Templates and Guide."