Campaign Management 101: Where Do I Start?

Cross-channel campaign management in a digital world is complex. Our multichannel, mobile, social-media driven world makes integrating and coordinating digital-marketing strategies anything but easy. How do you develop a successful cross-channel management strategy?

One way to manage how campaigns are managed, launched, and measured is to create a roadmap and have a plan. Without either, cross-channel campaign management is challenging but not impossible. Beyond the basics of setting business objectives and marketing goals, identifying targets, and creating a content strategy is to assemble a plan that allows for better coordination, collaboration, and management from a centralized location. The result will be marketing efficiencies that will help increase marketing velocity and the overall effectiveness of campaigns.

Managing Finances, Digital Assets, and Workflow — Set a Baseline

Solutions abound that make it easy to manage workflow. Create an email campaign, for instance, and it’s possible to assign and view different tasks through to the end. Project-management software is helpful, too. But, success in a multichannel world also requires the ability to coordinate finances, digital assets, and workflow simultaneously.

Forget about trying to collaborate across multiple tools. Many marketing organizations rely on spreadsheets, email, calendars, and even sticky notes to manage campaign workflows and projects. Campaigns lose momentum when marketers struggle to manage several different solutions simultaneously. Better to start multichannel delivery by designating one place to define objectives and gather input before pursuing successful campaign management.

Create a central repository for all digital assets with commenting, markup, and financial-management capabilities. With creative workflows tied to approvals, accessible markup, and even financial management, you’ll expand visibility into specific campaigns while you can also roll up and down through the hierarchy. This creates an important baseline for how the different constituents in marketing work together while allowing you to openly measure what everyone is doing.

Key Considerations

Once you’ve created a unified approach to get everyone on the same page, key components to make it work include:

Building Flexibility Into Your Timeline
Is it better to put together a detailed monthly campaign plan or something long-term with details and tactics to employ on the fly? In most cases, it makes sense to build flexibility into your strategy. Create an annual marketing plan with different programs that can be shifted and reorganized as needed.

Maintaining Consistent Brand Experiences Across Multiple Channels
A central repository for digital assets lets you control content across different channels, ensuring brand experiences are consistent. There’s no need to go one place for email and another for direct mail or offline assets. Digital-asset management combined with content management optimizes the process, ensuring consistency from publishing and distribution to choosing the right channels.

And, with access to the same library of content, marketers have a record of digital assets as well as a central means for collaboration. This will greatly streamline creative workflow processes associated with approvals, edits, handoffs, and ultimately, rolling out content into campaigns.

Coordinating Messaging — Say the Right Thing to the Right Customer
A central decision environment controls not only message delivery, but also personalization. Content tailored to each customer’s data attributes is key, but personalization also involves timing interactions to fit customer needs and expectations. An email that’s received at the right time is more important than one that uses the right name. Although personalization relies on data attributes, it’s also about taking into account preferences, timing, and context. A key consideration is using technology that combines campaign management, content management, and email delivery on one platform. This will eliminate unnecessarily duplicated data, lower the total cost of ownership, and combine these key capabilities in one platform.

Bridging Online and Offline Efforts
Integrating online and offline marketing efforts is critical to providing a seamless experience across all channels. This will lead to a better customer experience, increased engagement, and greater customer loyalty. Managing different rules and interactions together makes it easy to use and learn from customer profiles and your database.

Measuring Effectiveness — Optimize for Spend and Customer Experience
A holistic view across all interactions provides you with a better understanding of how each communication drives marketing dollars and future efforts. By identifying the value of each interaction, it’s possible to measure the effectiveness of your campaign-management strategy. It is powerful to be able to determine what’s working and what isn’t within each campaign. Measure efficiently and you can attribute different activities to bigger, broader conversions — marketing attribution at its finest.

Single and Accessible View of the Customer
Creating a 360-degree look or a “high definition” view of the customer across channels can be intimidating. When the goal is to create more carefully targeted, personalized campaigns and customer journeys, start with a single but meaningful view of your customer. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the number of channels and wondering where to start, consider email. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t require an enterprise-marketing data warehouse. Remember, slow and steady wins the race. Manage digital assets and workflow through a central repository and stay organized. If it’s clear, cohesive, and unified, you’ll see your efforts grow in no time at all.