Marketing campaigns have gotten increasingly complex to manage, given the multi-channel approach marketers must take to succeed in today’s environment. Enterprise marketing operations teams need to optimize their marketing campaign management strategy to stay ahead of the game.
The good news? Once you get the fundamentals down, you can simplify the process with tools and techniques that save you time and money. Let’s explore what you and your teams can do to manage marketing campaigns like a boss.
Marketing Campaigns 101
Marketing campaigns usually focus on a specific message designed to achieve a single goal. Brands broadcast that message across a broad range of channels, giving more of their target customers a better chance to catch the campaign’s message.
For global brands, marketing campaigns get even more complicated when they need to be translated for multiple markets. Lost-in-translation moments can derail even the best of intentions.
Additionally, large corporations often run multiple campaigns simultaneously, all with varied focuses and goals. But when you break down all that complexity into four stages, you can manage all your campaigns with ease.
The Four Stages of Marketing Campaign Management
Breaking marketing campaign management down into steps can help you and your teams avoid the chaos that often characterizes content marketing. Having a dynamic content calendar where you can sketch out all the steps allows everyone to see where you are in the process for each campaign.
Visibility, of course, is the key to success — as is the ability to plan, create, distribute, and analyze the results of your campaign on a single platform. Use this outline to organize each stage of your campaign.
1. Planning
Campaign planning should start with your target audience, aligning your focus to meet their needs and solve their problems, as well as with your company’s goals. Once you nail that down, determine what objective you want to achieve with the campaign and which resources you can funnel into it.
Creating buyer personas and customer journey maps helps your teams get to know your typical customers – their characteristics, preferences, and needs. Doing so gives your content planning a more focused direction, empowering your staff to create content that will appeal to each segment of your audience.
2. Execution
Once you have your plan in hand, your teams can think up personalized experiences tailored to each segment’s unique needs. Then, they can create content for each segment that brings those experiences to life.
Then, segment your email recipients and social media followers to personalize their experiences with content that appeals to each segment’s unique needs. Then, take advantage of email and content automation to funnel to each segment only that content that will interest them.
Delivering fewer, yet more relevant emails will likely keep your recipients happy with your brand. Statistics show that 51% of people who unsubscribe from a company’s email list do so because they receive emails more often than they can deal with.
3. Tracking and Analyzing
With a robust content analytics solution, you can easily track and analyze the performance of your campaigns across multiple channels. Unless you’re a non-profit, chief among your metrics should be analyzing your campaign’s performance by the revenue it generates.
Linking your analytics with your sales teams’ numbers helps you link each marketing campaign directly to the revenue your sales teams report. To achieve this goal, though, you need to measure your campaign’s performance at every step along the customer journey. These metrics include:
- Responses to your calls to action on each piece of content
- Tracking traffic sources to every webpage and blog post
- Social media and blog post shares
- Email opens and subscriptions
- Recording the number of sales from sales enablement materials, such as case studies, white papers, and ebooks
- Recording the number of sales from product descriptions of catalog items
Using Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes can simplify the tracking process. These codes are text snippets that you add to the webpage on which the URL is linked.
Tiny but mighty, these tracking tags allow you to track which pieces of content contribute to your campaign’s success. Using these snippets is well worth the small amount of extra effort it takes to create them.
Once you have a system in place to track your prospects’ journeys toward becoming a customer, you can have a more accurate way of assessing your content’s performance. Then, you can move on to the next step in the process – optimization.
4. Optimization
When those analytics numbers start flowing in, you can tweak areas where your campaign has underperformed. Whether it’s content that’s not connecting with your target audience or SEO issues, you can revise your low-performing content and amplify the reach of your best-performing pieces. Here are some ways to optimize your campaign to perform up to its potential.
Use Integrated Marketing to Pull Your Campaigns Together
Now that you have the steps of marketing campaign management outlined and plugged into your system, integrate your approach for more cohesive messaging. Go beyond stamping your brand colors and logo on everything to providing prospects and customers with consistency in your approach, from awareness to sales to service.
Marketers get branding. They get that design and content are fundamental for good campaign results, and that finding a great logo maker or a useful AI tool can help them. But what they often miss is integrating their salesforce and customer support teams into the process.
Content collaboration with these teams can help you extend your messaging to just before and after the sale, providing prospects and new customers with valuable content that addresses their needs at those stages of their customer journey. Prospects will appreciate well-researched white papers and ebooks, as well as case studies that can make their decision-making process easier.
Customers, on the other hand, will gobble up how-to and demo videos and blog posts that teach them how to get the most value out of their purchase. Troubleshooting content, too, can ease the frustration that often comes with learning to use a new product or service.
When your actions echo your messaging, you’ll build up a cadre of satisfied customers and fans that will help drive your message into the hearts of their friends and colleagues.
Use Templates to Streamline Campaign Processes
Templates give you and your teams documented, repeatable processes to follow as you plan, execute, analyze, and optimize your marketing campaigns. When you park these templates on your content marketing platform, you’ll have everything you need to streamline each stage of your marketing campaigns.
DivvyHQ’s content platform gives you and your teams a central hub where you can store your campaign templates, think up your next big campaign idea, and amplify its reach on all your target audience’s favorite channels.
And, with its custom analytics feature, you can sync all your company’s key metrics and view them together so you can make the kinds of decisions that can help your campaigns perform up to their optimum potential.
Even better, you can try it free for 14 days so you can discover all the other features that will make your work life a lot easier. Begin your free trial today!