Complete, planned course of action formulated to achieve defined objectives in marketing, public relations, quality enhancement, revenue generation, safety standards, etc.

Marketing campaign

The efforts of a company or a third-party marketing company to increase awareness for a particular product or service, or to increase consumer awareness of a business or organization.

How to create a successful marketing campaign.

Creating an entire campaign might be complex, but it’s a pretty straightforward process if you do it correctly. Planning your campaign is just as important as designing the fun stuff, such as creative advertisements and conversion assets. Before you create what your audience will see, you must consider what you want them to do when they see it … or read it or hear it.

I’ve organized this section as a marketing campaign template of sorts. All you need to do is answer the questions — as accurately and in-depth as possible — to ensure a thorough, successful approach to your next marketing campaign. Also, don’t skip ahead! Your responses to previous questions will guide your ideas and answers as you move along.

Planning Your Marketing Campaign.                                                       

This step is crucial to the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. The planning stage will determine how you measure success and will guide your team and campaign when things (inevitably) go awry.

Featured Resource

Free Marketing Plan Generator

1. What’s the Purpose and Goal of Your Campaign?

Let’s start simple. Why are you running this campaign? What would you like your campaign to accomplish for your business?

If you’re having trouble defining your campaign purpose, start broad. Take a look at the goals below. Which one is most aligned with your own?

Promote a new product or service.

Increase brand awareness.

Gather customer feedback or content.

Generate revenue.

Boost user engagement.

Advertise an upcoming event.

This is hardly a definitive list, but it gives you an idea of some general business goals that a campaign could help reach.

For the sake of demonstration, I’m going to move forward with the third goal: Gather customer feedback or content. We’ll use this example throughout this guide.

Now, let’s take our broad campaign purpose and turn it into a SMART goal. To classify as “SMART”, a goal must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. SMART goals keep you accountable and provide you with a concrete goal for which to aim.

Continuing with our example from above, turning our broad purpose into a SMART goal would look like:

“The goal of my marketing campaign is to gather customer feedback or content.” vs.

“The goal of my marketing campaign is to gather user-generated content from 100 customers via a branded hashtag on Instagram featuring our new product line by December 31, 2018.”

The goal is Specific (user-generated content), Measurable (100 customers), Attainable (via a branded Instagram hashtag), Relevant (featuring the new product line), and Timely (by December 31, 2018).

See how my broad campaign purpose instantly transforms into an actionable, attainable goal? Determining such distinct measures for your campaign is tough — I get it. But making the hard decisions now will make your life — and campaign — much easier in the future.

Featured Resource

Free SMART Goal-Setting Template

2. How Will You Measure Your Campaign?

The answer(s) to this question will look different for everyone. You might answer this with “email open rates,” “new Facebook Page likes,” “product pre-orders,” or all of the above.

These answers will depend on your overarching campaign goal. Here are a few examples of metrics based on the campaign objectives I mentioned above.

For promoting a new product or service: Pre-orders, sales, upsells.

For increasing brand awareness: Sentiment, social mentions, press mentions.

For gathering customer feedback or content: Social mentions, engagement.

For generating revenue: Leads, sales, upsells.

For boosting user engagement: Blog shares, social shares, email interactions.

For advertising an upcoming event: Ticket sales, vendor or entertainment bookings, social mentions.

If your campaign involves multiple marketing efforts (such as social media, direct mail, and radio ads), it’s wise to define how you’ll measure your campaign on each medium. (Read more about these channel-specific metrics below)

For example, let’s say I was running my user-generated content (UGC) campaign on social media, email, and on our blog.

First, I’d define my key performance indicators (KPIs) for each medium, which may look like:

Instagram engagements (likes and comments) and profile tags.

Email open rates and click-through rates.

Blog views, click-through, and social shares.

Then, I’d define my primary campaign KPI: Instagram branded hashtag mentions.

While the above KPIs indicate how well my campaign is reaching and engaging my audience, my primary KPI tells me how close I am to reaching my SMART goal.

Lastly, let’s think about another question: What does “success” look like for your company? Sure, it’s exciting to reach a predetermined goal, but that’s not always possible. What (outside of your goal) would constitute success for you (or serve as a milestone)? What would make you feel like your campaign is worthwhile if it doesn’t involve meeting your goal?

When determining how you’ll measure your campaign, consider setting up some checkpoints along the way. If your campaign involves boosting brand awareness and your goal is to reach 50 PR mentions by the end of the year, set up some benchmark notifications at 10, 25, and 40 mentions.

Not only will it remind you to keep pushing toward your ultimate goal, but it’ll boost morale within your team and remind you that your time and money investments are paying off.

 

3. Who Are You Targeting?

Ah, the beloved “target audience” section. This is one of my very favorite things to talk about because your alignment with your audience can make or break the success of anything marketing or sales-related … especially a campaign.

 

Imagine constructing a bulletproof marketing campaign only to be met with crickets. *chirp* *chirp* In that case, you might think you chose the wrong marketing medium or that your creative wasn’t witty enough. Regardless of what it might be, all of those decisions come back to one thing: Your audience.

The first step to answering this question is figuring out what stage of the buyer’s journey your campaign is targeting. Are you trying to bring in new customers, or are you attempting to gather feedback from existing clients? Are you marketing your brand to those who recognize it, or are you introducing a new brand identity altogether?

Your marketing message will vary depending on whether your campaign audience is in the Awareness, Consideration, or Decision stage. It’s important to note that a marketing campaign can include collateral for people in various stages of their journey. For example, while your campaign might target current customers, it might also bring brand awareness to new consumers.

Next, identify your audience interests and pain points. Here are some questions to ask yourself and your team to better understand your audience.

What are my audience’s general interests? What magazines do they read? What TV shows do they watch? How do they spend their free time?

Where does my audience hang out online? For what purpose do they use Instagram, Facebook, and other networks? Do they engage or merely browse?

What kind of content gets my audience’s attention? Do they respond to straightforward sales messages, or would they rather consume witty, humorous content? What cultural references would they understand?

What kind of problems do they have that my product, service, or brand could solve?

Becoming well-acquainted with your campaign audience will help you confidently answer these questions and any others that may arise during the campaign.

Featured Resource

Buyer Persona Generator.

4. What’s the Concept of Your Campaign? Who / How Will You Create Your Marketing?

It’s time to talk about the campaign itself. At this point, you know why you’re running a campaign, how you’ll measure it, and who it’s targeting. Now, let’s talk about what the campaign will look like … literally.

Marketing campaigns are like their own brand. They require a mission, a vision, and a visual identity. Great campaigns are an offshoot of their parent brand, both visually and creatively — they stay consistent with the business brand but maintain their own identity.

When creating their campaign assets, some businesses use an in-house team while others opt for an agency. Another alternative is hiring a freelancer or contractor to complete a specific portion of the project, such as the copy or design.

Depending on your specific campaign goals, I’d recommend starting with your in-house team and moving forward from there. They are likely the experts on that portion of your business and can speak to what your campaign needs to succeed.

Following the example of my Instagram UGC campaign, I’d start by consulting with my social media team. They’d be the most familiar with what Instagram content performs well and what our Instagram audience likes to see. From there, I could assign the campaign to them, or outsource the creative part to an agency or freelancer.

This step will likely take the longest since you’ll be creating your campaign concept from scratch. Next, we’ll dive into how you’ll distribute your campaign assets and connect with your audience.

Featured Resource

Market Research Kit

Distributing Your Marketing Campaign

This stage is all about the public-facing part of your campaign, including what your audience will see and when. If you’ve combed through the previous section, you should have all the answers you need to guide you through this step.

5. How Will You Reach Your Audience?

Let’s think about what type of marketing your campaign will use. This choice depends on your audience preference, budget, and brand engagement levels, among other factors.

Take a look at the current media channels you use to promote your company. Which perform the best? Which allow you to pay for advertisements? Which have the best engagement? Most importantly, where are your customers hanging out?

Also, while using multiple media is highly recommended, it probably wouldn’t be wise to publish your campaign on a brand new medium on which your business has no presence.

Campaigns section

In the Campaigns section list of campaigns are displayed along with their categories and id .campaigns can be sorted according to publish date and the filter tab helps to filter the selection campaign.

The following information gets displayed in the campaigns page

1. Name of the campaigns
2. Category
3. Id

How to create campaigns

Steps for new campaign

Fill the following information

New campaign can be created from the new tab on the right top corner of the page.

New campaign has the following fields.

1. Name- Give the name of the campaigns.
2. Description – give brief details about the campaign.
3. Category- Select the category in which the campaigns is part of.
4. Allow contacts to restart the campaign – This will make the campaign available to the contacts.
5. Published- can switch the campaign from on and off state.
6. Publish at (date/ time) - choose the date when the campaign will be published.
7. Unpublish at (date/time)-select the date when the campaign will end.

Campaign builder

The CampAct campaign builder gives you a blank canvas upon which to build your campaign workflow. The overall interface is clean and simple with easy to use events. These actions, decisions, or conditions can be added through clicking the "anchors" of events.

Sources

Actions

Campaign actions are those items which are initiated by you. These are items which you will control and which affect your contacts involved in the campaign. Examples of these actions are adjusting a contact's point totals, moving a contact to a different campaign, modifying the segments a particular contact is a part of, and lastly but perhaps most importantly sending of an email.

These two options are demonstrated by the green and red decision points on the decision. Each path can then be handled by your campaign. This process is typically referred to as a decision tree.

It is important to note that a contact must already be part of the campaign in order for it to recognize the decision executed. Therefore, campaigns should never start with a decision unless you are manually managing the contacts assigned to it and the decision is expected to be executed at a later time.

Contact-initiated Decision Path (Green Points)

Actions attached to the green point of a decision are considered contact-initiated points.

The contact-initiated decision path is taken as a result of a contacts direct action such as opening an email or submitting a form. Connected actions will be executed (or scheduled if a delay is set) at the time the contact took the action.

Non-action Initiated Decision Path (Red Points)

Actions attached to the red point of a decision are considered non-action points. This path is taken as a result of a contact not taking some direct action.

Use an action's delay settings to define at what point the campaign should send the contact down this path.

To trigger these events, see Executing Campaign Actions.

Example

To provide a simple example of a decision tree consider an email where the decision is to open an email. There are two outcomes; if the contact chooses to open the email then the green decision point connects to the next action to be taken in the campaign workflow. If, however, the contact does not open the email then you may desire a different action to be taken (e.g. a delay of 30 days then a second email sent).

Conditions

Conditions can be used to execute different actions based on a contact's data. For example, a condition can be configured to execute an action if a contact has an email or do something else if they do not.

The delay you set is ran before checking the condition no matter the delay you add on the connected actions. It will not wait the delay on the connected action to check the status of the condition to qualify the contact into the positive or negative path of the condition.

Currently, there are 2 types of conditions

1. Conditions based on Contact Field Value.
2. Conditions based on Form Field Value.

Positive status Condition Path (Green Points)

Actions attached to the green point of a condition are considered as positive status points. The status condition path is taken as a result of the condition at the end of the delay set (trigger, delay or specific date).

Negative status Condition Path (Red Points)

Actions attached to the red point of a condition are considered as negative status points. This path is taken as a result of negative status for the condition at the end of the delay set (trigger, delay or specific date).

Edit campaigns

Campaigns can be edited by the following steps.

1. Click on campaigns.
2. Select the campaigns that need to be edited and then click on the checkbox associated with the campaigns and then from the dropdown select the edit options.
3. This will open the edit campaign section.

Delete campaigns

Clone campaigns

1. Click on campaigns.
2. Select the campaigns that need to be cloned and then click on the checkbox associated with the campaigns and from the drop down select the clone options.

Published and unpublished campaigns