5 Ways to Overcome Campaign Management Challenges

Posted by Alex Zawel, Marketing Specialist, Adobe

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, an effective campaign management solution ensures brands and enterprises deliver relevant, personalized experiences to customers across multiple channels and touch points. But managing marketing campaigns isn’t easy and it comes with its share of challenges: channel overload, ROI attribution, automation, personalization, and more.

So what can marketers do to overcome these challenges and be successful? Here’s a look at 5 ways to get started:

1. CRM Integration:
Today’s customers expect efficient, consistent, and personalized experiences across online, offline, traditional, and emerging channels. For marketers, this means keeping close track of customer data (socio-demographics, transactions, campaign responses, behavioral data, etc.) in order to increase customer communication/loyalty and enhance customer and prospect tracking. That’s a pretty tall order!

To simplify the process of collecting data, marketers can integrate their CRM and website to function together. CRM integration promotes a company’s CRM to essentially “work double-time, automatically bringing in valuable customer lead data directly into the CRM using information already found on the company website.” Instead of spending valuable time mining customer and prospect information, CRM integration can help marketers delegate tasks more easily and spot customer trends as they happen, ultimately streamlining the sales process as leads come in through the website.

2. Real-Time Marketing:
AgilOne research shows 82% of customers research a product before purchasing, making it vital for marketers to leverage customer data that has been thoroughly analyzed to send promotions or deals on products customers may look to buy next. Indeed, these “empowered customers demand a new level of customer obsession [from marketers],” as the research notes.

Real-time marketing such as SoLoMo allows marketers to create a unified customer experience that caters to the individual and satisfies customers’ desire for personalization. Event-triggered messaging is another way brands can leverage real-time marketing and drive higher engagement, revenue, and ROI.

3. Right-Channeling:
The goal of right-channeling is to serve each customer via the most appropriate channel for that specific relationship and that specific organization. But it isn’t just about the customers; right-channeling allows marketers to properly align spend with ROI. In other words, high-cost channels are reserved for high-value customers, and vice versa.

The key to effective right-channeling as it pertains to marketing campaign management is to adopt a cross-channel approach. Every channel should be seamlessly integrated to ensure each customer always receives the most relevant offer or message, independent of the touch point. Doing so allows marketers to drive a single marketing campaign with a consistent message across channels.

4. Set Appropriate Expectations:
“As marketing automation tools become more sophisticated, enterprises acquire the confidence to use them for increasingly larger and more frequent campaigns,” according to Tony Byrne, president of Real Story Group. But digital marketing evaluation research indicates most marketing automation programs are designed for departmental use, rather than the needs of larger, diversified enterprises.

Byrne notes that there are several challenges to campaign management at scale, including dealing with segments, the ability to support dynamic content, and managing multiple (potentially overlapping) campaigns. However, good information and configuration management (i.e., version control, access control, date-based publishing, etc.) can help large digital marketing teams prevent long-term problems.

5. Find the Right Fit:
When executed properly, campaign management can result in top-line revenue, customer loyalty, and ROMI. But with these opportunities come an equal number of challenges. In other words, if marketers choose the wrong system for their needs, they risk lacking functionality and having high development and operating costs.

To help mitigate some of the common pitfalls of campaign management, marketers should remind themselves that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution that will prove ideal for everyone. By evaluating the strategy in place over a period of time—and thoroughly researching a solution before implementing one—marketers can position themselves for a better chance at success in the long run.

Final Thoughts
Digital marketing is a constantly evolving industry and one that increasingly demands a cross-channel approach in order to connect with and engage customers. While there are a number of challenges to successful campaign management execution, savvy marketers can overcome these obstacles by employing CRM integration, real-time marketing, right-channeling, and more.

How have you handled the campaign management challenges you’ve encountered? Feel free to share best practices or insights below.