Strategies for Success: Effective Campaign Management in Marketing

While advertising efforts have existed in principle since the dawn of time, the role of a dedicated marketing campaign manager is relatively new. Campaign managers are responsible for staying on top of the latest trends and tactics that will appeal to their audience—all hoping to drive higher revenue or awareness. Discover how to be a more effective marketing campaign manager with these strategies and tips below.

• What is campaign management?
• Types of marketing campaigns
• Key elements in marketing campaign management planning
• The marketing campaign management process
• What to look for in marketing campaign management software
• Elevating marketing excellence with Fellow

What is campaign management?

Campaign management refers to the process of organizing activities to advertise a new product or concept to a target audience. The campaign manager is the person who coordinates all of the activities and ensures the efforts are aligned, executed on time, and reported on regularly. 

Here are three reasons campaign management is important:

1. Draws in fresh clientele: Using detailed data and figures, marketing campaign managers can hone their marketing messaging to target new potential customers likely to use the product more effectively. 
2. Enhances sales figures: Effective marketing campaigns can speed up the sales process and offer more detailed reporting on sales data. 
3. Introduces new products and features: Well-managed campaigns are the perfect opportunity to announce launches for products or updates that existing or new customers may be interested in purchasing.

Types of marketing campaigns

1. Product marketing campaigns are crucial for sharing updates about new features or products so your customers and prospects can start to purchase and use them. This type of campaign can also signal industry leadership to product competitors.
2. Email marketing campaigns are often an ongoing effort to keep audiences engaged in learning about the brand or product. It’s ideal to segment email sequences by industry, sales funnel stage, demographic, or product use case, for example.
3. Brand development marketing campaigns help to position the brand name in a specific light. For example, if your company is undergoing a PR crisis, a brand development campaign can mitigate any negative perceptions the public may have about the brand. 
4. Content marketing campaigns are focused on creating assets like blogs or whitepapers to inform the target audience about the product or industry niche. This content can be shared on your company’s profile or in industry news. 
5. Social media marketing campaigns use community channels like TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube to create online conversations about the product or brand. Video and images are important here. The aim is to create viral content widely shared or discussed in multiple channels. 

Key elements in marketing campaign management planning

• Audience
• Marketing goals and OKRs
• Budget
• Marketing activities
• Timeline
• Team

1Audience

The campaign’s target audience is the central focus of the campaign, so it’s important to hone in on who this group is and what they mean to the campaign. Try to figure out their relationship to the brand or product and why that relationship is important to them. As the campaign manager, you can seek out any challenges or pain points the group may have that your product solves for them, as this will be important when you craft your messaging. 

2Marketing goals and OKRs

The second most important factor in a marketing campaign is setting great goals. Objective and key results (OKR) planning is a popular strategy as it focuses on the results your activities need to earn. Tracking your campaign goals in a common space like Fellow’s OKR tool makes them easily accessible to all team members throughout the campaign.

3Budget

Work with your finance team or marketing manager to decide on a budget that will allow you to execute your plan while also driving a high return on investment (ROI). Again, it’s a best practice to track the overall budget goals and expenditures in a shared space to easily see if you’re working within your limits. 

4Marketing activities

Some marketing activities are more strategic, while others are more tactical. Brainstorm ideas for strategic and tactical efforts simultaneously to ensure they align. Opt for achievable plans considering your timeframe, budget, and knowledge about your target audience. Hosting your meeting in Fellow allows you to document the decision process and assign action items and deliverables to team members immediately.

5Timeline

Like any project, campaigns need to have a timeline. This should map out the time needed to create all assets, launch activities, optimize, and generate reports. It’s also helpful to mark where check-in meetings, reports, and deliverables are due so the rest of the team can prepare in advance.

6Team

Don’t forget to think about who will be responsible for executing all of your action items! Hosting a marketing team meeting during the planning and kick-off stages is a great way to communicate requirements for your colleagues and allows them to ask questions about their assigned tasks. Consider using this strategic marketing plan template below to meet with your campaign team and discuss all the pertinent stages of the plan.

The marketing campaign management process 

• Define goals and measurements
• Identify your audience
• Choose your marketing campaign tools
• Develop a budget aligned with campaign requirements and strategy
• Generate your marketing content
• Establish and oversee your workflow and timetable
• Conduct testing and assessment of your marketing campaign
• Chart the customer journey

1Define goals and measurements

First, determine what you’re hoping to achieve with your campaign efforts. On a high level, are you looking to increase revenue or drive brand awareness? On a deeper level, how can you quantitatively measure your progress? For example, you could count new sales demos booked, increased product usage, or more direct sales through the website. If you’re leading a campaign for a client, try our campaign review meeting template to get their answers. 

2Identify your audience

Once you know what the business needs to achieve, you can plan how to get there. Choose an audience that is likely to help you meet your goals. This will vary a lot from one company to another. For example, business-to-business companies may need to target multiple decision-makers within a target account. 

3Choose your marketing campaign tools

For a marketing campaign to be successful, it’s important to consider which mediums or tools to leverage. Your campaign team should deliberate and decide on which channels your target audience engages with the most, and prioritize them. Using this template from Fellow, your team can collaborate on the discussion, document the decision process, and create a centralized hub for all the information.

4Develop a budget aligned with your campaign requirements and strategy

Marketing campaign budgets can vary widely depending on your tools and channels of choice. Some activities, such as search engine optimization, which is part of a content marketing strategy, can be done on a low budget if all content is created in-house. Other activities, like paid advertising on social media or TV commercials, can be expensive. Choose channels that your budget affords, and that will deliver a high ROI for maximum impact.

5Generate your marketing content

Content generation is often the longest part of the campaign development process. Many teams will need to have content like images, video, and copy created by specialists and then reviewed by managers or campaign leads. If you’re getting another team or person to create the content, don’t forget to write a detailed creative brief to inform them of the deliverables that you’re expecting. 

6Establish and oversee your workflow and timetable

Using technology allows you to focus more on actual creative work and less on reminding teams about upcoming deadlines or guiding them on where to find information. To ensure you don’t lose track of any deliverable, due date, or requirement, you can easily track your campaign’s deliverables and action items with Fellow!

7Conduct testing and assessment of your marketing campaign

All campaigns should be tested and optimized multiple times throughout their life cycles to determine the most effective messaging or visuals. A best practice is to do A/B testing where possible, especially if you’re targeting a new industry or audience on which you don’t have a lot of intel. 

8Chart the customer journey

The customer journey maps out the ideal path that someone follows from first learning about your product to becoming a paying customer. It’s important to highlight the different times when and channels where the potential customer will be informed, what message they’ll receive, and how likely they are to move forward to the next stage in the journey.  

What to look for in marketing campaign management software

• Collaboration
• Multichannel marketing automation support
• Asset management tools
• Content marketing support

Collaboration

It should be easy to connect with your team, brainstorm new ideas, and document decisions all from one centralized spot. A pro tip is to search for a platform that connects to your company’s preferred browser. For example, Fellow’s browser extensions allow your campaign team to take meeting notes, assign action items, and toggle AI recordings without ever leaving your meeting.

Multichannel marketing automation support

Automating marketing efforts makes it easier to sit back and view your campaign’s results rather than manually calculating data all day. Make sure to look for software with native integrations with tools like Hubspot, making it easy to track multichannel engagement and new revenue without any information being lost.

Asset management tools

Streamline your meetings and workflows by accessing all of your assets in one place. Your software should seamlessly integrate with tools like Google Drive or DropBox, making finding and presenting content or reports in campaign planning meetings easy. 

Content marketing support

Whether you’re mapping a plan in Asana, brainstorming a design in Figma, or posting a video on YouTube, a top-tier campaign management platform will make it easy to coordinate all of these activities from just one integrated software tool.

Elevating marketing excellence with Fellow

Ready to take your marketing campaign planning to the next level through automation and improved team collaboration? With collaborative meeting agendas for kick-off calls, or AI meeting transcriptions and summaries to capture every campaign detail, Fellow is an all-in-one software designed to keep marketing teams organized and focused. Lay the foundation for a successful digital marketing campaign by ensuring that everyone on the team is informed and aligned on action items, plans, and goals—all from just one platform.