A lot of work goes into launching a marketing campaign. But once all of your copy and creative go live, your work isn’t done — your marketing campaign management skills will help you get the most from your efforts.
Even with good planning, you’ll need to manage all the moving parts of your campaign — before it goes live, during the campaign, and after the campaign ends. Marketers need to be prepared to make adjustments at any time, which means tracking the right data and knowing when to shake things up.
Here’s how you can become a campaign management master to keep things fresh and exciting for your audience.
Contents:
What Is Campaign Management?
The Importance of Campaign Management
What Are the Key Components of Campaign Management?
What Are the Benefits of Campaign Management?
How Does Marketing Campaign Management Work?
Best Practices for Effective Campaign Management
How to Do Campaign Management With Meltwater
What Is Campaign Management?
Campaign management is the art of juggling all the parts of a marketing campaign. Your goal is to make sure that all of these parts harmonize with each other and resonate with your audience.
Or, to put it another way, it’s the intersection of data and creativity.
You’re combining visuals and messages with audience segments and channels, and you’re tracking engagements and conversions every step of the way. You’re gauging what works and what doesn’t. This lets you quickly adjust things like ad spend and creative elements to improve your results.
Ultimately, you want to plan every move before, during, and after a campaign to keep your marketing on track.
The Importance of Campaign Management
Campaign management is the glue that holds all of your campaign pieces together. Without good management, parts of your campaign can become lost or overlooked, which can mean wasted resources and missed opportunities.
A good management strategy gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s happening at all times so you can spot if something is amiss. With these insights, you can make real-time adjustments using feedback and analysis rather than guesswork.
Because trends evolve quickly and consumer preferences are constantly changing, marketers must remain agile to stay ahead of the competition.
What Are the Key Components of Campaign Management?
Campaign management touches all aspects of a marketing campaign. Here’s a quick rundown of the various components you’ll need to include in your management plan.
- Set campaign goals. Be specific about your campaign’s purpose and set measurable, realistic goals (e.g., increase brand awareness, grow social media following, increase sales).
- Research your target audience. Identify your target audience based on demographics, psychographics, and behaviors.
- Create a budget. Determine the budget for the campaign and allocate the necessary resources, including key personnel and technology.
- Plan the campaign. Create a detailed campaign plan that outlines the strategy, timeline, key milestones, and other action items.
- Develop creative elements. Part of your campaign planning will be developing social media posts, videos, email templates, and other media to support the campaign — each of which needs to be assigned to the right people with a deadline attached.
- Choose the right channels. Choose the appropriate marketing channels (e.g., PPC ads, social media, email) to reach the target audience.
- Execute the campaign. Implement the campaign according to your plan.
- Monitor campaign engagement. Use analytics and third-party tools like Meltwater to monitor engagement, customer sentiment, share of voice, and other metrics to see your campaign’s real-time influence.
- Report on your campaign’s performance. After the campaign ends, compile data highlights into a report and reflect back on your wins and opportunities for improvement.
This is a simplified version of what your campaign management process might look like.
What Are the Benefits of Campaign Management?
Great campaign management can be the defining difference between a campaign that flounders and a campaign that performs beyond your expectations. Here are some of the top benefits of campaign management.
Improve your targeting
Proper management in the planning stage ensures you’re speaking to the right people. This leads to higher engagement and conversion rates, which make your campaign more successful.
Maintain consistent messaging
Campaign management ensures all messaging across your various channels is consistent and aligns with your brand voice. This helps to strengthen your brand identity, plus it speaks directly to the audience segments you’re targeting.
Increase efficiency
Good planning helps you streamline your processes and allocate your resources. Saving time and money can speed up your campaign timeline, and if you can save money on back-office tasks, it might mean you’ll have a bigger promotional budget to work with.
Gain a better ROI
Managing a campaign from end to end helps you avoid missing opportunities that could be game-changing for your campaign. Optimizing budgets, saving time and money, and creating a strong campaign overall can achieve better returns on investment.
Mitigate brand risks
Campaign management requires heavy involvement before the campaign goes live. Extra diligence can help marketers reduce the risk of campaign failures and anticipate and address potential issues proactively.
Once a campaign goes live, ongoing monitoring can show marketers how people are responding to the campaign. If you’ve missed the mark entirely, you can pull the campaign early to reduce potential brand damage.
Hold your team accountable
Marketing campaigns involve team members of various disciplines — video creators, copywriters, graphic designers, and social media experts, to name a few. It’s hard for these individuals to come together as a single unit when there’s no clear direction.
Campaign management adds accountability to the process by outlining roles, tasks, due dates, and other expectations. It gives everyone the same blueprint to work from, which helps the entire campaign stay on track.
How Does Marketing Campaign Management Work?
Knowing what you know now about campaign management and its role in successful campaigns, let’s dig deeper into how you can create your campaign management blueprint.
Start with your campaign goals
First things first: You need to know what you’re aiming for. Setting clear, measurable goals gives your campaign direction and helps you decide whether it’s successful. Ask yourself: What do you want to achieve? Is it more sales, website traffic, social media followers, or brand awareness?
No matter your goals, everything else you do in your campaign should tie back to these goals.
Understand your audience segments
Know who you’re talking to. You might have more than one buyer persona in your marketing arsenal, or you might choose a single unique segment for your campaign. The better you know your audience, the more effectively you can communicate with them.
Choose the best channels to reach your audience
Once you know your audience segment(s), you can choose how to reach them. Different audiences might be more likely to use one platform than others.
For example, young adults love social media channels like Instagram and TikTok. Older adults might prefer Facebook, while B2B professionals flock to LinkedIn.
Choose the channels where you know your audience spends their time.
Create a campaign budget and timeline
Decide how much you’re willing to spend on each piece of the campaign. Your budget should set aside funds for creative assets, paid ads, and other channel-specific costs (e.g., the price per email sent). You might also need to budget for things like payroll or agency fees.
You also need a timeline for each phase of the campaign. For example, you can’t launch the campaign until you have your creative assets in place. Timelines will help keep your campaign on track.
Assign campaign tasks
Campaigns are a team effort, so you’ll need to be sure everyone knows their part. Determine who will be responsible for each component of the campaign, from creating content to scheduling social media posts to responding to follower comments and questions.
Clear assignments reduce confusion while giving you coverage of every phase of the campaign.
Implement the campaign
Put your plan into action. Launch your campaign across your selected channels, then double-check to make sure those elements are live and functional. Refer back to your campaign plan to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.
Monitor your campaign
Use analytics tools to track your key metrics and collect campaign data. Watch to see whether you’re hitting your goals or whether you’re hearing crickets. Be prepared to make adjustments to improve your campaign’s performance and achieve the best outcome possible.
Tip: Read our Ultimate Guide to Campaign Measurement for the do's and don'ts of tracking your campaign performance.
Best Practices for Effective Campaign Management
Managing a campaign isn’t a task to treat as an afterthought. You can unlock its greatest value when you begin every new campaign with good management techniques.
Here are some best practices that can help guide your efforts.
Test and optimize campaign elements
People are attracted to different things. It’s worthwhile to try variations of headlines, images, and calls to action to see what your audience responds to. Not only will this help you optimize your current campaign, but you can apply these findings to future campaigns, as well.
Engage with your audience
Make sure you actively engage with your audience through comments, feedback, and direct messages. This builds relationships with your audience, increases loyalty, and shows you’re listening to them. Engagement is also a great opportunity to get inside their heads and learn more about their sentiments and what they want from your brand.
Monitor and adjust campaigns in real time
The marketing landscape is constantly changing, which means your campaigns will likely change, too. Be prepared to pivot or adapt your campaign based on real-time data, feedback, and new opportunities you didn’t see before.
Report on campaign performance
After the campaign, look back and see what worked well and what didn’t. Document your findings in your marketing playbook and share them with your team. These findings are essential for creating more effective campaigns in the future.
Tip: Check out our Marketers Guide to Unified Reporting to see how you can break down silos, save time, and easily share successes with your organization!
How to Do Campaign Management With Meltwater
Meltwater puts the power of real-time data into your hands to help you run more effective marketing campaigns. You can manage the end-to-end campaign process from the platform, from learning about your audience and identifying key segments to finding influencers and managing social media content.
Meltwater processes billions of data points from social media, blogs, podcasts, and other media to give you direct insights into your customers. You can learn more about their preferences, the channels they use, the things they talk about, pain points, and more — all to help you build better marketing campaigns.
During the campaign, you can monitor your brand to see how your share of voice, consumer sentiment, and social media following improve. You’ll have all the data you need to prove your effectiveness or justify changing your strategy for better results.
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