Marketing Campaign Management: A Marketer's Go-to Guide

‍📸Newsflash: If your marketing channels are not producing the results you should be getting, please accept my apologies in advance because chances are your business won't do well.

‍Why? Millions of marketing and ad campaigns are released every minute globally, and if you are underestimating your marketing channels or not maximizing them for optimal results, don't be surprised if your organization keeps missing out on the publicity and conversions it should be getting.

It's simple. If you’re running a business supported by different marketing campaigns running constantly, it'd get to a point where your tired self would ask, "Why are we even running these campaigns in the first place?" Well, this happens especially when it's hard to keep everyone on the same page and your campaigns aren't properly planned and timed. 

This article aims to teach you what marketing campaign management is, the different types of marketing campaigns and when to use each type; plus tips on how to set goals and successfully manage your campaigns. Dive in!

What is marketing campaign management?

Marketing campaign management is a collection of carefully planned and executed activities and marketing strategies aimed at delivering successful business outcomes. These tasks span the entire lifecycle of a marketing campaign, from inception to launch to an evaluation of results.

Since the world is more digitally-inclined, below are some of the marketing channels used to spread the word:

• Social media.
• Email.
• Web, (e.g., Blogging).
• Events — webinars, conferences, podcasts, etc.
• Print.

Generally, marketing campaigns are designed to:

• Engage, attract and convert more customers.
• Build brand visibility.
• Attract organic traffic.

What goes into managing a marketing campaign? The marketing campaign management process

Think of a marketing campaign as a roadmap to all the marketing activities you will measure and monitor. This could include specific goals, budget, plus the tools and platforms you will use in your campaign.

The process of developing and managing a marketing campaign is explained below:

‍Define your goals & identify metrics for success 

It’s not just 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? Setting a goal that keeps you on the right track means using the SMART goal framework — That's an acronym to ensure your goals are:

• Specific.
• Measurable.
• Attainable.
• Relevant.
• Time-bound.

For example, if you want more sales, that means asking, "How much do I want the company's sales to increase from?" It could mean being as specific as wanting to record over 120 percent increment in sales. 

Additionally, it's important to tailor your goals to your business needs. For example, if you wanted to gain customer loyalty and brand awareness, you could measure both metrics by setting a goal for increased customer retention.

If you’re trying to generate 1,000 new customers, identify 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.

Having clear goals ensures that you can create a campaign that captures and measures results, and also identifies the resources you need to meet those goals.

Some examples of goals you might want to set include:

• Qualifying leads to achieving follow-up with potential customers based on their timeframe and likelihood of buying.
• Nurturing existing leads, reminding them of your value, and offering information to move them along the sales funnel.
• Enhancing brand visibility through effective branding services, improving awareness of your company, product, and/or services.
• Determining a measurement for direct sales, such as the number of units sold.
• Encouraging current customers to upgrade their existing products, to increase the quantity or frequency of their purchases.
• Encouraging current customers to buy related products or services.

Define your audience

When validating goals and tactics, keep your audience at the top of mind.

Ask yourself, "Who are you targeting and what sort of campaign will resonate with that group?"

Defining your audience helps you understand them, speak directly to them, and improve your response rate if your marketing campaign is relevant and meaningful to them. Below are some of the best 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 — Tailor your marketing campaigns to target demographic information such as age, sex, income level, race, employment, location, home ownership, and level of education. Other demographics can categorize people by hobbies, lifestyle, etc. 
• Customer Profiles — Use purchase history, surveys or quizzes to learn about your customers’ interests, buying preferences and behaviors. Once you know their preferences, you can target offers and products to them. 

Identify your marketing campaign channels

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. 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.

Scribe top tip: Select the platforms that will best meet your goals and audience needs. 

Identify the resources & responses

Irrespective of the size of your company, ensure that you have the resources needed to handle the response to your marketing campaign. How will you monitor traffic to your site, order fulfillment, website content, comments, and more? 

Define budget

Your budget should include all the costs associated with your marketing campaign: advertising expenses, 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.

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 and via social media?
• Deliver valuable content. Share information with your audience that tells 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. 
• 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.

Create & monitor your workflow & timetable

Marketing campaigns don’t stop once content is created. 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

Test & evaluate your marketing campaign

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.

Map the customer journey

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 also 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.

Types of marketing campaigns & when to use them

One of the most important decisions when developing a marketing campaign is deciding what type of campaign you want to run and when to run it. 

Here are some types of marketing campaigns to consider: 

1. Acquisition marketing campaign

A customer acquisition campaign is one that not only raises awareness about your brand’s solutions but also results in acquiring new email subscribers and customers. Customer acquisition isn’t one simple funnel setup or just one campaign. Instead, it’s a continuous process that uses different marketing campaigns to accomplish the goals of more leads and sales. 

When to use

‍Use acquisition marketing campaigns when you want to make cold leads aware of your brand and product. This involves moving them from the awareness stage into the conversion stage. Your acquisition marketing campaign must engage prospects with educational content so that they decide to opt-in to your email list. This content includes blog posts, pictures, videos and social media posts. 

Scribe top tip: Acquisition campaigns are less about profit and more about acquiring subscribers and buyers. While that might appear counterintuitive at first glance, know that the goal isn’t ROI (return on investment). If you don’t profit upfront, then the goal is to generate profit further down the sales funnel.

2. Product marketing campaign

A product marketing campaign consists of three main components:

• Messaging and positioning.
• Making sure customers understand the product’s value during launch.
• Driving continuous product demand and usage.

The campaign starts to take shape when the product’s messaging and positioning become clear. Feedback from customers also helps to refine the process so that the marketing team knows whether messaging is hitting home correctly. 

Ultimately, meeting sales goals or not dictates the types of adjustments or new tests that must be done throughout the ongoing sales process.

When to use

‍Use product marketing campaigns to demonstrate full mastery over messaging and positioning of your brand in the market.

3. Content marketing campaign

A content marketing campaign differs from a content marketing strategy, which you should already have running. Use a campaign over a period of 30 to 90 days and keep it focused on a specific audience or topic. 

Set definite goals and decide whether you want to generate leads, raise brand awareness, generate additional social media engagement or make a blog post go viral.

When to use

‍Use content marketing campaigns to not only generate more brand exposure, but leverage internal assets like your blog to bring in more profit in the long run.

4. Email marketing campaign

Email marketing campaigns are one of the most popular tools in a marketer's toolbox. Reaching customers (and potential customers) via email is still one of the best ways to communicate with them, as 90% of adults and surprisingly, over 70 percent of teenagers, use email regularly. Tracking email marketing metrics helps in evaluating the success and effectiveness of these campaigns.

Launching an email marketing campaign gives your company the chance to talk to people 1-on-1 in their inbox, and encourage them to take a look at your latest product, or even just keep them updated on events.  

When to use

‍Use email marketing campaigns when you want to:

• Improve welcome sequence to educate leads about your value.
• Promote content engagement, such as raising awareness about a new event or product. 
• Nurture subscribers more effectively.
• Re-engage inactive subscribers.
• Segment subscribers so that you can deliver more relevant content.

5. User-generated content campaign

User-generated content (UGC) consists of UGC video, blogs and social media posts that your customers use to share their love for your brand and products. The power of user-generated content is obvious: 

• They’re directly telling their friends and family that they need to check out your brand.
• Your audience is creating content for you.

Start your user-generated content campaign by deciding on a platform. Using a unique hashtag is critical when employing these types of marketing campaigns. It will help when it’s time to find and aggregate all the content that the campaign generates for your business.   

Scribe top tip: The most important part of running a successful user-generated content campaign is to respond to and engage with your audience when they participate. This process shows your customers that the campaign is just as important to you as it is to them. The more you engage, the more the campaign will take off. 

When to use

‍ Use UGC campaigns to boost your brand's trustworthiness since the content comes from a relevant source—the users themselves.

6. Brand awareness campaign

A brand awareness campaign only has one goal: to spread the word about who you are and what you do. Your campaign should communicate what your business does and what makes you different from your competitors. Many of the most successful brand awareness campaigns also convey a company’s values.

When to use

‍As the name implies, use brand awareness marketing campaigns to get your brand out in front of as many people as possible.

7. Social media marketing campaign

A successful social media campaign consists of four important parts: 

• Well-developed plan.
• Defined goals.
• Cross-channel promotion.
• Final analysis.

Having a well-developed plan means analyzing your existing social media accounts and followers; and having a social media marketing funnel that converts. You should have your team in place and assign roles so that promotion, design and messaging responsibilities don’t overlap during the campaign. Don't forget to set your budget as well.

Regarding goals, consider the following goals during a social media marketing campaign.

• Increase brand awareness when you need to set yourself apart from competitors or if the business is relatively new.
• Increase website traffic by driving social media followers to website landing pages.
• Improve conversion rates via web forms where social followers sign up for discount offers or newsletter lists.

When to use

‍Social media marketing campaigns can support a wide range of different goals. They can help you build brand awareness, retarget visitors who have bounced from your website, or even nudge customers to complete an abandoned cart transaction.

How to set goals & successfully manage the marketing campaign process

Here are guaranteed tips to consider when managing the marketing campaign process. 

1. Have a clear brief & define roles 

As a marketing campaign manager, you should lead the meeting and set common goals within the team, assigning everyone’s responsibilities and managing expectations. The objective is to ensure everyone is aligned from the start and create a solid marketing management process.

The team should then reference the campaign brief throughout the campaign, to ensure they are sticking to the messaging, objectives, and maintaining the standards required to meet the goals. 

Ensure that everyone has access to the brief, the resources, and the information they need to complete their work –which can be accessed via a project management software like Scribe. Instead of answering the same questions daily, Scribe’s central library of step-by-step guides helps you answer employee questions faster. Plus, you can embed how-to guides into wikis and other internal resources and organize each marketing campaign checklist/plan (Scribes) under various categories (Pages).

2. Motivate & empower your team 

As a marketing campaign manager, you should delegate tasks to the right experts, give feedback and celebrate small wins to keep the team motivated. Hold regular check-ins and keep everyone on track. As the campaign progresses, you will benefit from asking for your team’s feedback to tweak processes or adjust execution, where needed. Empower them to take full leadership and accountability.

3. Measure campaign analytics often

Once the campaign is running, you should track progress against the KPIs you have set at the beginning – whether it’s promoting a new launch, generating brand awareness, driving click-through rates (CTR), or raising conversion rates (CR).  

4. Use The right campaign management tools

Using the right campaign management tools is important for getting the best results. It will help you increase your productivity and maximize your business. You can use a combination of different campaign management systems to:

• Record your marketing campaign process and generate a step-by-step guide. 
• Assign tasks and deadlines to team members with project management tools.
• Generate a unique campaign dashboard to track the progress of your campaigns and have in-depth and instant analytics and reporting.
• Automate process documentation and run automated campaigns
• Integrate your campaign with other marketing tools including CRMs.
• Optimize workflow and scale multiple campaigns at the same time from a single interface. 

5. Debrief correctly with your team at the end of the campaign

Don’t simply collect and send results to advertisers or partners at the end of the campaign – but also, assess performance with your team to identify strengths and areas of improvement. 

‍

Get the most important details before the next campaign comes around. The data you gain is valuable because you can repurpose it in many ways to optimize future campaigns and generate brand awareness – for example, via evergreen content on your blog.

How to measure marketing campaign success

Establishing and measuring the success of a marketing campaign involves using key performance metrics (KPIs). Some of the KPIs to help you measure the success of your campaigns are:

1. Total visits

This metric helps marketers measure how many users have visited their web properties (determine the popularity of your entire web asset). You could evaluate the entire website or just a single page.

2. Unique visits

Unique visits function similarly to total visits, but only counts each visitor one time. So, if a single user visits your website on five separate occasions during a specific time period, it will count as one unique visit. This allows you to track one visitor’s activity across your website, instead of looking at all visitors holistically.

3. Session duration

This metric calculates how long a user spends on your site during a single browsing session. As they jump from page to page, you can estimate how long they spent reading and/or interacting with the page. The timer will stop when a user exits the page or idles for a pre-determined amount of time.

4. Branded keywords

Branded keywords help you determine how many people are searching for your company or products directly. For example, instead of Googling “documentation software,” a customer may google “Process documentation software."

5. Open rate

When you send an email to a certain audience, your open rate will explain how many subscribers opened a certain email. This can help you figure out if your subject line is compelling and can be compared alongside metrics like clickthrough rate to measure email effectiveness.

6. Email ROI

Email ROI helps to determine how effective your email strategy is by tracking the efficiency and profitability of one or more campaigns. 

Email ROI = (Revenue – Marketing Cost) x 100 / Marketing Cost.

How to simplify the marketing campaign process 

It can be frustrating, difficult and overwhelming to manage and monitor different campaigns at the same time, even if you're an experienced marketer. Experience with running campaigns means that you're familiar with the following challenges:

• Inability to keep everyone on the same page.
• Collaboration and communicating information issues.
• Inability to track and manage campaign goals properly
• Having to create templates for every campaign from scratch.
• Inability to automate process documentation.
• Lack of time and resources to manage everything.
• Difficulty in setting and meeting deadlines across your campaigns.

Planning, managing, and executing these new marketing initiatives is no easy feat. Most teams use a complex network of spreadsheets, emails, and meetings to track. However, this can become challenging to manage as the number and complexity of campaigns increase.

Fortunately, software documentation tools, campaign management and collaboration tools like Scribe can help you and the marketing team run marketing campaigns seamlessly and efficiently. 

Here's how: 

Defining roles & responsibilities during campaign kickoff

Anyone working on a campaign is usually referencing the brief constantly to ensure they're staying true to the overall goal and message. Putting the brief or project scope in the description of the project or tasks makes it easily accessible anytime, saving campaign managers from constantly getting pinged to get clarification on the brief.

With Scribe, you can easily assign or share new Scribes (tasks) to the appropriate team members to ensure transparency about who is working on what.

Mapping out project plans with a clear timeline

Before launch, marketing campaigns have many critical deadlines and dependencies that need to be taken care of. A timeline helps you map these out in your plan before you start to ensure all the pieces fit together to achieve your goal.

Via integration with other workplace tools, Scribe allows you to easily check if any important events are colliding and reschedule them, simply by dragging them. If there are tasks that are to be completed in a certain order, you can create dependencies between them. It also shows you the critical path which should be followed to meet the deadlines on time. You can also save your initial plan as a baseline for future reference.

Capture relevant creative brief details to meet deadlines

Creative briefs help marketing teams capture important details about a campaign’s goals, audience, and requirements. Such documents should be easily accessible to your team at all times because they can slow down the entire process if not completed on time.

You can easily create a Scribe under a Page (think of a Scribe Page as an online file cabinet and your Scribes as the paper files you store in the cabinet), attach the docs to the task itself or share feedback and important information directly via task comments and mentions — which makes it easier to keep track of everything and implement briefs and feedback at the earliest.

Scribe also allows you to add stakeholders to the task, and tag them in comments for review and approval. This helps your team collaborate better, work faster, get approvals quickly, and hit deadlines on time. 

Here’s how you can create a Scribe — in seconds.

Prevent duplicate work

Campaign work often ties into other marketing activities — maybe as part of a sales activity, customer service, or product launch. Other teams might not be aware of the work happening on other projects, which means they spend more time coordinating or might even end up working on the same thing twice.

Or the marketing campaign manager has to explain twice.

However, with Scribe, you can create the same task under multiple projects without duplicating work or managing the same task in two places. This saves time and prevents teams from putting in extra effort on the same task.

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Prevent disorganization

Having a disorganized dashboard might be easy to manage, but for a marketing campaign manager handling various campaigns, that's a nightmare you should avoid at all costs.

Scribe automates process documentation & SOPs. It prevents hours lost copying and pasting screenshots. You can instantly turn any process into a step-by-step guide by simply turning on the Scribe recorder and conducting business as usual —Scribe creates your process document in seconds! 

Additionally, you can have all marketing campaign-related documents organized in one central platform. Scribe allows you to create Pages (think of it as a Google Drive for all of your marketing collateral) and organizes Scribes (tasks or documents) under them. 

Here's how to Scribe for the first time!

Save time on every campaign with templates

While each campaign varies, there are some identical tasks that must be completed, irrespective of the type of campaign. Rather than recreating the plan for each campaign from scratch every time, you can build projects and save them as step-by-step guide templates in Scribe.

As long as you've saved your project or process as a template, you can use it repeatedly for future campaigns or make edits when needed.

Create your marketing campaign management process for free today!