What Campaign Management entails

Nike’s “Just Do It” is probably the most famous campaign of all times. It took the business from $877 million to $9.2 billion in worldwide sales, just like that.

That is the power of a well-executed campaign.

Managing a campaign is where the success of the whole thing lies – campaign management is all about the planning, execution, tracking, and analysis of a marketing initiative. It involves many attempts to connect with customers – through email, social media, surveys, print materials, giveaways, etc. all focusing on a similar topic or idea.

Since there are multiple channels and different ways to get a customer’s attention, it is important to plan and manage a campaign well. You need to know what your audience is interested in, what issues they face and what problems they are trying to solve.

Managing a cross-channel campaign in a multifarious digital world is complex.

So how do you develop a successful cross-channel management strategy?

• You first make a plan and create a detailed roadmap
• You set business objectives
• You list down your marketing goals
• Put down the concept of your campaign
• You find your target audience
• List down how you will reach them

And then you formulate a strategy.

There are a few elements that you need to take into account –

Keep it flexible to an extent – make sure that you can incorporate any shifts or changes as required. Because that will happen in the normal course of implementation. You might need to switch around a particular creative or you may have to change the time of launch. So it is always a good idea to make sure there is some space for changes that could happen.

Ensure there is consistency across multiple channels – the same message must be communicated regardless of the channel.  Watching a series of ads from a business about all their various products does not a campaign make! It needs to be about one product – with one message – that comes to you through various channels.

Get a 360-degree view of your customer from data across all channels of communication –a customer might use different channels to engage with your business at various times. But each time he does, he expects to pick up where he left off and not have to start from scratch every time. So it is important for all channels to be linked – that data from each touch point is all collated together to produce a complete picture of who the customer is, what he wants and when he wants it. This helps in making the implementation of the campaign you send him, timely and relevant.

It is very important to say the right things to the right customer – at the right time. It is very important to send the right customer your message. It is important that the message is the right one that needs to be sent to him. And the message needs to be delivered at the right time for the impact of your campaign to be effective.

Track the impact of your campaign to see how effective your efforts were – a very efficient tracking and measuring system needs to be in place to see how each campaign is performing. Only then can you optimize what is working to make it perform even better, remove the ones that are not doing anything much – and work towards making sure you are implementing a very effective campaign.

The businesses that are successful at giving their customers a great experience while engaging with them are all “investing in methods to centralize analytics and decision making approaches and scale them exponentially, across all connected channels. CX leaders are investing in customer data platforms (53%) and real-time decision engines (45%)”. *Pega

Engaging with customers - armed with insights about them - will be the key to keeping customers happy and making sure that the campaigns have run successfully. In other words, technology is the key force that can drive this whole endeavour for you.

Some of the best benefits include –

• It improves the decision making process both in terms of relevance and quality
• Speeds processes up
• Speeds up decision making
• Reduces cost
• Increases revenues
• Gives businesses a huge competitive advantage
• Aligns processes with business strategy better
• It gives you dashboards with composite information across the enterprise in one spot

There are many tools that are available in the market today. It is important to find the right tool and the right people to run the campaigns for you.

Also, read:

• 10 Indicators of Campaign management transformation. Part 1 of 2
• 10 Indicators of campaign management transformation. Part 2 of 2