Have you found yourself responsible for managing a marketing campaign but have no clue where to start?
Whether you’re new to marketing campaign management or want to expand your knowledge, you’re in the right place.
Today, we’ll break down the key principles of successful campaign management and provide practical tips to help you launch your next marketing campaign with confidence.
So, let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
What is campaign management?
Campaign management is the process of organizing marketing activities to achieve a specific goal, usually to engage with existing customers or acquire new ones.
All the marketing activities within a single campaign often share the same idea or theme, as the campaign goal is to create a consistent marketing message.
You may view the marketing campaign as telling a unique story intended to resonate with a specific target audience. Meanwhile, campaign management is the people and processes behind that story.
How to manage marketing campaigns successfully
It doesn’t matter what kind of a campaign you’re managing — if you want to run successful marketing campaigns, the following 9 steps are key.
1. Set a clear goal
A good marketing campaign must have a clear purpose. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve will pave the way for a successful campaign.
So, begin by outlining your objectives and try to be as specific as possible.
You can use the S.M.A.R.T. goals criteria to outline your goals more easily. In other words, make your ultimate goal:
- Specific,
- Measurable,
- Actionable,
- Realistic, and
- Time-related.
2. Decide how you will measure campaign success
It’s impossible to know what success is if you don’t know how to measure it. So, in the beginning phases of your marketing campaign, you should also define the key metrics.
For instance, if you aim to increase sales of a certain product, outline the specific numbers you expect to see after the campaign is released. E.g., you might aim for a 20% boost in sales within 3 months.
Alternatively, if you want to increase brand awareness, you can measure success by tracking the amount of impressions or engagement on social media.
3. Define the target audience for your campaign
Each effective marketing campaign turned out that way because it resonated well with its target audience. And, as a marketer, it’s your responsibility to analyze the target audience for your campaign.
For starters, you should gather your audience’s basic information such as:
- Age,
- Gender,
- Location,
- Income level,
- Education, and
- Occupation.
You should also explore what platforms they use the most and the type of content they consume. All this information will help you understand their interests and the kind of lifestyle they lead.
Finally, consider how your audience makes purchasing decisions. Are they more concerned about price or quality?
Tip: You’ll gather this information more easily if you actually speak to the people you’re trying to reach, e.g., through surveys or interviews. After you define your target audience’s biggest problems and desires in relation to your product, you’ll know what messages you should communicate to them.
4. Pick the appropriate marketing campaign channel
If your target audience doesn’t use emails or doesn’t watch TV, then running an email marketing campaign or making a TV commercial would be quite pointless, right?
Knowing your audience will help you decide what channels to use, so conduct audience segmentation to understand their habits and preferences.
Some of the most popular digital platforms among younger generations include:
- Instagram,
- TikTok,
- YouTube, and
- X.
These platforms have fueled the rise of a new, especially popular marketing trend — influencer marketing — where companies collaborate with influencers who have access to a wide network of specific audiences.
Other options include:
- LinkedIn — a channel widely used for business communication across all generations,
- Email — an ever-growing channel of communication that’s still among the most effective channels to reach customers, and
- SEO-optimized content — blogs and articles have proven successful in capturing organic traffic, so it’s no wonder 90% of marketers include content in their marketing strategies.
For more traditional marketing, there are TV and radio ads as well as cold call campaigns, which tend to appeal more to older audiences.
5. Identify resources needed for the campaign
When identifying campaign resources, there are several things to consider — people, things, and money.
- Who will you need for this campaign?
- Are you hiring any influencers to help you spread the word about your new product?
- Do you need any props for that TikTok video you’re working on?
- How much will it all cost?
Try to list all the resources you’ll need for the campaign and calculate how much it all costs. Then, analyze how everything fits into your budget.
6. Plan the marketing campaign budget
But simply identifying your resources won’t be enough. You’ll also need a proper budget plan for the campaign.
You could try using some of the common project budgeting methods or track down all budget-related information within a project management tool.
Relying on software is the most convenient choice, as you can use common budgeting features to list costs transparently and assign them preferred statuses.
The ability to categorize specific budget expenses will help you and your team stay on track at all times.
Most importantly, this will prevent you from exceeding the budget and potentially jeopardizing other items on the budget list — or even the entire campaign.
7. Create marketing campaign content
Whichever marketing strategy you choose, you’ll need to create appropriate content to accompany the campaign.
Now, a good rule of thumb is to make the content personalized, engaging, and relevant to your audience. This means — speak the language of your audience.
As for the organization part, publish the content regularly, and take it one step at a time.
To achieve consistency, you can create a content plan using an all-purpose project management tool. This way, you’ll make sure you know where you’re at with each specific platform, what’s been published, and when. Plus, you’ll know who’s responsible for each task and ensure no deadline is missed.
Another option is to set up a separate board where you will organize the entire content for your marketing campaign. This allows for a more transparent organization of individual matters, which, in turn, gives you a clearer picture of the overall workflow.
That said, to save time on starting the content board from scratch, try a content calendar template.
Get our content calendar templateThe benefit of using a premade template is that it gives you the foundation for your content calendar, and helps you get started with overall content organization. This saves immense time and effort.
Of course, you can customize each part of the template along the way according to your needs.
Another option is to organize content by platform and create a separate group for website content, another for Instagram, and another for Facebook content.
This approach makes content organization straightforward and easier to manage. You’ll quickly locate platform-specific tasks, saving valuable time and streamlining communication within the content team.
8. Monitor the campaign workflow
After you let your campaign see the light of day, you may sit back and monitor everything from the comfort of your chair.
Unfortunately, your job is still not done. Before you can relax, ask yourself:
- Who is responsible for replying to social media comments?
- Who will write the next post, and who will do the design?
This is all part of the marketing campaign management process flow — something campaign managers deal with daily.
If you’re one of them, you can save yourself a lot of time and headaches by using the proper campaign marketing project management software for organized task management and efficient project performance tracking.
Take advantage of key progress-tracking functions, such as statuses and timelines, to keep an eye on your entire workflow — and any potential bottlenecks.
9. Analyze the results and the audience’s behavior
Finally, remember that as soon as your marketing campaign starts showing results, it’s up to you to analyze these results in more detail. So, ask yourself the following:
- Are the results something you’ve expected?
- Do they align with what you’ve intended to achieve in the initiation phase?
- What can you do now to make the results better?
- What conclusions can you draw for next time?
Make sure to dive deeper into the specific data, e.g., how many website visits you got compared to the period before the campaign, or how many products you sold in the campaign month.
You could keep track of the summary of the important data all throughout the campaign. Using specific software for this purpose will simplify gathering data in real time. This is important as you’ll be able to quickly specify what you might need to adjust along the way.
A feature, such as Plaky’s summary row, that summarizes all this data within the table itself could also prove handy, letting you instantly see just how close you are to your original goals.
Why is marketing campaign management important?
With well-planned campaign management practices, you’ll increase the chances of running a marketing campaign successfully.
However, this means you’ll have to think about the strategies and how you plan to execute them in advance.
Being mindful of your approach will help you unlock the benefits of good campaign management, such as:
- Increased sales of the marketed product or service,
- Rising profit for your company,
- Lead generation,
- Growth in new markets,
- Increased product awareness, and
- Stronger brand image.
Common types of marketing campaigns
To run a marketing campaign, you could opt for traditional channels such as print, TV, or radio — or use digital channels.
The channel you opt for mainly depends on your target audience’s preferences.
Here are some of the typical marketing campaign types based on the channels or tools used in digital environments:
- Email marketing,
- Social media campaign marketing,
- Content marketing,
- Search engine marketing,
- Influencer marketing, and
- Video marketing.
Depending on what they aim to achieve, marketing campaigns can be:
- Brand awareness campaigns,
- Rebranding campaigns,
- Brand launch campaigns,
- Product launch campaigns,
- Increased sales and profit campaigns, and
- Customer retention campaigns.
What is the role of a marketing campaign manager?
As a marketing manager, it’s your job to make sure that the campaign runs smoothly throughout all campaign stages.
There are 5 main marketing campaign stages you need to go through:
- Initiating the campaign — brainstorm ideas for the campaign and prepare the necessary documentation,
- Planning the campaign — define objectives, target audience, timeline, and resources,
- Executing the campaign — prepare ads and schedule social media posts,
- Monitoring performance — track key metrics, collect data, and adjust tactics as needed, and
- Analyzing results —conduct a post-implementation review, analyze how your campaign performed and whether it achieved what was planned initially, and draw insights for future campaigns.
Most marketing managers will opt for specific software to aid them in managing all marketing activities, such as a project management tool. A reliable PM tool will help you plan the budget, measure campaign success, and in general, keep track of all relevant campaign activities.
Elevate your marketing campaign process with Plaky
The biggest challenge marketers face when running campaigns is how to organize every little detail of the campaign process. That said, it’s not uncommon for them to struggle with project time management and budget organization too.
Luckily, these are all matters that can be resolved easily with effective campaign management software like Plaky.
Try Plaky for free
To begin with, you can use Plaky to create your whole marketing strategy plan.
Rely on Plaky’s marketing strategy template to kick things off and save time — or simply use it as the foundation and inspiration when creating your marketing strategy.
Get our marketing strategy templateAs Plaky is a cloud-based solution, your boards will always be accessible to all marketing team members and other company departments in real time — allowing for streamlined communication.
You can create tasks easily, and specify them by adding statuses and dates so that no information falls through the cracks. Besides that, you can tag the team members or departments responsible for each task to increase accountability.
Add any other necessary details, such as links, files, or numbers to keep all data in one place and better centralize the tasks. After you’ve got yourself a campaign strategy plan, move on to the specifics that you can manage separately in other Plaky boards.
For example, use another Plaky board to organize the entire campaign budget. There, you can keep all the numbers displayed transparently and prevent possible cost overruns. Here’s a pro tip: further organize all the expenses by using tags and statuses for an even clearer overview.
A great perk here is that you don’t even have to calculate costs manually, as Plaky gives you the option to do it automatically — the summary row feature located in the bottom row shows you the sum of all expenses.
Start organizing marketing campaigns with ease. Sign up for Plaky now!
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