What is Marketing Campaign Management?

Marketing campaign management is the planning, execution, monitoring and analysis of direct marketing campaigns. These tasks span the entire lifecycle of a marketing campaign, from inception to launch to evaluating results.

With software such as marketing automation software, analytics platforms, and new delivery methods and channels, campaign management has become a complex and expansive proposition that takes place in emails, on social media platforms, on company websites, communities and blogs, and on mobile devices. . As technology has become more sophisticated, it has allowed more tasks to be automated, more personalized messaging and marketing content.

To be successful, every marketing campaign must address audience segmentation, content development, email automation, omnichannel communication, and message personalization.

Audience segmentation. The first step in managing marketing campaigns is to define and categorize audience segments (also known as customer segmentation). Marketers often use demographic information such as age, gender, residence, or location as attributes to define categories, along with many other predefined attributes. Audience segmentation allows marketers to target campaign messages and content to the right recipients.

Audience segmentation also converges with customer journey mapping, which is the visual representation of customers’ buying (or non-buying) journeys. Customer journey mapping describes where customers first interact with a business, where they go online or in physical locations, and what they do.

Successful use of audience segmentation starts with creating customer profiles to understand customer behaviors and preferences. For example, a travel agency can send out a quiz to gauge customer interests and customize travel options. With a high level of participation, the quiz can provide a wealth of personal data that the company can use to target offers to customers.

Personal profiles are a great way to avoid presenting irrelevant marketing content to consumers. For example, travelers interested in thrills and adventurous activities are probably not interested in a quiet, relaxing beach vacation. Being more targeted will ensure that content marketers resonate with their customers.

Content development. Marketers focus on creating informative content that educates an audience not just about a specific product or service, but often about the larger market or context in which that service sits. Much of this content creation has come to be known as inbound marketing, which involves targeting audience members with informative content and bringing them back to company websites, social networks platforms or other online destinations that marketers use to engage customers.

Content development should be customer-focused with an emphasis on findability, focus, and value. Findability is a combination of SEO and real-world communication clarity. Both focus and value are defined by the customer. A business may have information about its audience, but it doesn’t matter if its content is irrelevant or valuable to its intended customers and cannot be easily found using a search engine.

Email Automation. Email automation allows marketers to automatically segment audience lists and schedule message sends in advance. Instead of having to create lists and schedule delivery manually, marketing automation allows segmentation and delivery to happen automatically. There are several types of automated email tactics to use, including the following:

• Autoresponders: Follow-up emails sent after someone fills out a form. The goal is to reinforce the brand and deliver the requested content to the right email address.
• Sales promotion emails: Marketers can help sales teams by creating development programs to increase follow-up efforts and tell sales when to contact current or potential customers.
• Snackable content emails: Most commonly used in nurturing programs, snack content is short and meant to be shared. Their purpose is to drive engagement with the brand.
• Invitation emails: Used to invite people to webinars, events and other special campaigns, with the aim of getting the person to register and confirm their interest.
• Identification emails: Used to determine a customer’s stage in the buyer’s journey. The goal is for the customer to self-select into a stage of the buyer’s journey by acting directly through a click on a link.

Personalization of messages. Message personalization and retargeting are marketing techniques designed to show prospects and customers that “you know them.” With message personalization, a business can send an email that features a certain category of products that a customer has previously viewed online. Retargeting ads will display a company’s banner ads in a search browser, even after the user has stopped searching on that site.

Companies have gone to great lengths to personalize marketing – some efforts have failed while others have been successful. BustedTees, an online t-shirt company, is an example of a successful personalized campaign. In 2013, they increased their email revenue by 8% by switching from sending fearsome emails to customizing send time based on time zones and past open behaviors of its customers. In stark contrast, in 2014 content-sharing site Pintrest emailed collections of content to single women congratulating them on their upcoming marriages, misinterpreting their interest in marriage-related content for genuine impending nuptials.

Omnichannel Communication. Today, audiences travel seamlessly between desktop computers, smartphones, physical stores, social media platforms and more to browse products and services. Companies use e-commerce platforms, marketing automation and other tools to provide a seamless experience between these mediums and to capture customer behavior in the process. Businesses can then use this data later to deliver new personalized marketing messages to continue to solidify the relationship with customers and remind them of their brand.

A strong social media presence has become increasingly important for communication between businesses and their customers. An omnichannel approach places the customer at the center of its strategy. Digital customers use multiple channels simultaneously and expect consistency.

Marketing analysis. Marketing analytics provides marketers with a variety of metrics that allow them to see how many people a campaign reaches, what content is most effective at converting leads into customers, and what products and services tend to sell more over time. following the marketing campaign. Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer deep insights into customer preferences and trends. All of this data can be made available in dashboards that allow marketers to view information in real time and immediately apply lessons learned.

Through marketing analytics, marketers can see the direct relationships between individual marketing channels (social media, blog, email marketing, SEO) and their performance. Analytics has increased value because marketers can easily link the performance effect of multiple channels to create a cohesive, tangible story about their audience. This information can then be used for all parts of the campaign: audience segmentation, content development, email automation, omnichannel communication, and message personalization.