There are different types of marketing campaigns: native advertising; partner marketing; SEA; influencer marketing; email marketing; social advertising. Read more about these types here.
How well you create, execute, and assess your marketing campaigns in your field is what will make your business stand out from the competition – leading to higher revenues, generating awareness and better brand marketing. But even the most creative campaign won’t succeed if it is not implemented and evaluated thoroughly and effectively.
This is why we have already shared the top qualities required to become an effective performance marketer. Next, we’ve compiled this clear guide to provide a no-fuss process for effective marketing campaign management.
What is “marketing campaign management”?
A marketing campaign is a strategic initiative designed to drive results on a specific business goal. This could include: promoting new and existing products, promoting an event, boosting brand awareness, or driving click-through rates (CTR) on certain call-to-actions (CTAs).
Marketing campaign management involves the planning, execution, tracking, and analysis of said marketing initiative. These tasks span the entire lifecycle of a marketing campaign: from inception to launch, to the final evaluation of results. Campaigns normally involve multiple pushes of targeted messaging to a specific audience of potential customers, through a variety of marketing channels, content, and media. Some popular formats are email, social media, surveys, giveaways, and more.
There are many elements involved in marketing campaigns. For example, in the case of performance marketing, advertisers may team up with publishers and affiliate partners. This way, they can secure advertising space on desktop or mobile apps in the form of banner and video ads. By working with third-party tracking platforms (also known as affiliate networks), the affiliate partners can easily track campaign performance and gain valuable analytics.
What are the steps for effective marketing campaign management?
1. Plan your concept and campaign resources, including budget
Start with the basics. What is the concept of your marketing campaign? How will you create it and who will assist you in this task? For example, you might want to do a campaign centered around Black Friday or Christmas to achieve new conversions by promoting a special offer or product.
Once you have a concept, you’ll need to draw up a realistic budget that fits your needs and strategy. Do you need specific resources, such as external creative or operational teams, services, or marketing tracking tools?
Having the right team and talent on board is crucial. According to eMarketer, marketers shared that their biggest challenges to effective marketing campaign management are a lack of time and resources. So, perhaps you’ll need to hire external partners to support your in-house team.
From setting goals and identifying the audience, to creating content and tracking ROI across multiple channels, there are many responsibilities that make it difficult to create successful campaigns. Using an automation tool could also be useful in cutting down on manual jobs, so you can focus on strategy (more on that in step 4!).
2. Define your audience and their channels
Who are you targeting? This depends on your campaign and the type of marketing you are running. In the case of performance marketing, your audience needs to be highly targeted and focused.
It’s very unlikely that the same exact concept and messaging will appeal to universal audiences, so you need to get specific.
First, you need to define what step of the customer funnel your potential customer. Are they in the Awareness, Consideration, or Decision stage of the buyer’s journey? Are you targeting a new or returning customer?
Then, draw up a profile (aka a persona) for your ideal customer, or use the data that you have already gathered across your marketing channels. Ask questions like:
- What is their age, location, job, and income? What are their interests and how do they spend their time?
- What are their pain points? What kind of problems do they have that my service or product can potentially solve?
- What kind of content gets their attention? What publications and types of content do they usually like to read?
Once you know who you want to reach, get well-acquainted with your audience. This will help you define key messaging and content (step 6).
3. Define your goals and how you will measure success
“What’s the purpose and goal of this campaign?” should be one of your first questions. Then, turn this into a SMART goal (a proven tactic used across different industries). It should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example: “The goal of this marketing campaign is to gather 50 leads from an Instagram boosted post promotion of our services by October 1st, 2021.”
Next, think about how you will measure your campaign and quantify success. If your goal is generating revenue, you would be tracking leads, sales, and upsells. If you want to boost user engagement, it could be blog shares, social shares, email interactions. For brand awareness, it includes social mentions, brand sentiment, and press mentions.
What metrics will you be monitoring for your marketing campaign? Set your KPIs across each medium or channel, whether it’s email marketing (bounce and open rate), social media (CPC, CR, etc), SEO (bounce rate, time on page), or user acquisition for your app (retention, LTV, CPI/CPA, etc).
Consider implementing mini-goals on the way to keep track of progress and celebrate the small wins. This will help keep your team inspired and motivated too.
4. Identify your marketing campaign tools and other resources
You may need additional tools to plan, manage or measure your campaign, especially if it’s running across multiple channels, countries, or if you’re looking at very granular data.
You can use automation tools for campaign scheduling and content creation. This ensures a consistent, cross-channel brand experience across social media, CMS, CRM, and mobile. Or you might use it to segment customers and analyze campaign metrics. As a performance marketer, using a service like Swaarm can help with offer-testing and data-driven campaign optimization.
Choosing an automation technology like a marketing campaign management software enables you to cut down on manual tasks and focus on your strategic success. We covered that topic here by sharing some of the proven expert tools to measure your campaigns.
5. Distributing and amplifying your marketing campaign
Find the marketing channels (e.g. Facebook, Linkedin, partner networks; or platforms like AppLovin and Unity) that give you access to your target users. Focus your efforts on those that already have a strong presence and engagement.
Also, ask yourself: is your target audience paid, earned, shared, or owned? How frequently will you publish campaign content? You’ll need to build a campaign timeline around your posts to keep track, whether manually or with a third-party platform.
If you’re in the field of affiliate marketing, check out our proven best practices for successful strategies for 2021.
6. Create your marketing campaign content
Now that you know which channels you’re using, you can tailor that content to your audience.
What type of language and calls to action will resonate the most with your audience? Using the right medium and message will drive consumers towards the SMART goals you defined – whether it’s gaining leads and data or generating sales.
High-converting content needs to include a combination of strong copy and visual assets like pictures and videos. So, make sure that messaging, content, and visuals are on on-brand and consistent omnichannel, whether it’s:
- Mobile apps
- Landing pages and lead generation forms
- Emails
- Website and blog
Here are some examples of successful marketing campaigns in 2021, shared by the marketing experts at The Drum to inspire you.
7. Test and evaluate your marketing campaign
The final and crucial step of your marketing campaign management is to spend time with your team reviewing your campaign. Analyzing your campaign data will provide important and unique insights into your marketing channels, budget, and audience.
What could have been done differently and better operationally? How could we have saved up on budget? If anything went wrong, why and how could it have been avoided? Success is not all about reaching the KPIs and SMART goals, but learning throughout the process and being able to apply those learnings in future campaigns.
It’s important to also review the data during the campaign, so you can tweak and optimize where needed. Using a performance marketing tool like Swaarm can help you gain more visibility across your performance marketing campaigns, saving you budgets and time.
Conclusion
If you follow these seven steps to effective marketing campaign management, you are going to be successful. Given all the elements involved in running a successful marketing campaign, developing a clear and definite strategy is essential. Make sure everything is in place and that you have an effective marketing campaign management process before you start implementing your campaigns.
Your marketing campaign may be time-limited, but you can repurpose it to create evergreen content that raises your brand awareness and advocacy – for example by promoting it on your blog, building more bylines, or creating rich media out of it.
Contact us today to find out how our innovative technology can help you achieve your marketing goals and grow your business at scale. Our team of industry experts will be happy to answer your questions.
