Campaign management software helps you automate the manual tasks of planning, launching and measuring the impact of your marketing campaigns.
Modern marketing campaigns often have many moving parts. Campaigns can include several:
Internal departments (eg creative, media, brand, legal). External partners (eg agencies, media, joint marketing).
Campaign management software helps keep stakeholders organized. Once the campaign is live, these tools help to:
Automate performance data collection Generate insights.
Understand the role of campaign management software
The biggest benefit of campaign management tools?
organization
All team members working on a marketing campaign must be organized before, during and after the launch to be efficient and informed.
The right campaign management tools will improve collaboration and help teams move faster through every stage of the campaign, from pre-launch resource preparation to post-campaign debriefing.
However, no plug-and-play, end-to-end campaign management tool really exists.
But you can look for the best solutions that integrate well with existing tools and skill sets to create an ecosystem that meets your campaign management needs.
Key features and capabilities of marketing campaign management software
Marketing teams will benefit from campaign management solutions that help them through the campaign lifecycle of planning, tracking and analyzing.
The more tightly integrated the tools are, either out of the box or through the efforts of developers or marketing operations professionals, the better the experience for marketers who use them.
Adopting multiple point solutions that can’t share information won’t create the efficiency you want with campaign management tools.
Campaign planning and programming
Aligning all people and assets is a significant challenge for teams, especially in a distributed workforce.
Project management tools from multiple vendors can be used to track progress, assign work, and send notifications. These tools offer automation, integrations, and customization capabilities that allow your team members to use them in a way that fits their work style.
Vendors with tools to help your team with campaign planning and scheduling include:
Asana Monday.com SmartSheet ClickUp Trello Wrike
Audience targeting and segmentation tools
Using data and targeting helps you avoid the inefficiency inherent in spray and pray marketing tactics. But you need to have detailed audience data and tools to help segment that data into lists.
Many popular cloud-based marketing tools can create lists based on certain criteria. Many also include functionality to engage with list members via email or create campaigns that run on other channels (such as paid ads) and connect to data sources to import data from those channels.
Vendors that make tools to help with audience segmentation and targeting include:
HubSpot Salesforce Adobe ActiveCampaign Keep Klaviyo
Creation and personalization of contents
Many segmentation and targeting vendors also offer a personalized marketing service. Customer data platform (CDP) providers also help marketers create personalized messages.
The combination of data and personalization functionality allows you to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, which is a powerful combination for influencing potential customers.
Running multi-channel campaigns
“Marketing cloud” vendors also offer visibility into your campaigns across channels, though it will likely require some work from the tool’s administrator or a marketing operations professional to make this work .
Leadership teams love high-level, holistic views, so the fewer data sources your team can track, the better. You don’t want your team to spend valuable time gathering data from disparate sources to put on a slide table for campaign updates and reviews.
Monitoring and analysis
You may find that your existing campaign management software cannot handle all the data generated by your campaigns.
If that’s the case, you can pull together reporting tools from vendors like SAS, Tableau, SmartSheet, and others to help you manage your data and monitor campaign results.
Benefits of campaign management software
It’s hard to coordinate, optimize and report on your campaigns without campaign management software.
While the exact tools and functionality you need will depend on many factors (i.e. your existing martech stack, your budget, and your team), the right mix of tools will increase your efficiency and contribute to better results
Benefits of using campaign management software include:
Improved efficiency and productivity
Some tools will help your team automate the often mundane tasks that are only part of marketing campaigns (eg, deadlines, reporting). Other tools will help improve collaboration between different roles that come together to create a marketing campaign.
Improved collaboration
Planning a marketing campaign often involves an assembly line that takes ideas from concept to reality and then brings them to market through multiple channels. This requires a few job functions and, depending on your organization, possibly multiple departments.
Campaign management tools that set deadlines and responsibilities keep the assembly line moving.
Data-driven decision making
Campaign management tools that collect and analyze data are important to quickly identify the performance of a campaign or part of a campaign. Having this data readily available allows for optimization, such as shifting budget from an underperforming channel to an overperforming channel or making adjustments to creative units.
Software that helps analyze data also plays a key role in explaining campaign results to leadership teams who just want to know what they got for their campaign investment.
Considerations for choosing the right campaign management software
If you’re like most marketers, you’re trying to navigate lofty business goals, scarce resources, and a variety of tools in a martech stack you inherited from someone else.
Licensing costs will play a critical role when investing in any technology. Here are four more criteria you can use to make smart decisions about campaign management tools.
Scalability and flexibility
Tools that are too rigid and cannot grow with the organization lead to poor investments.
Marketing is constantly changing, from channels to regulations governing data collection and use to new leadership with new ideas. The focus needs to be on tools designed to support these changes.
Constant cycling and tearing and replacing tools will hinder progress towards your goals.
Ease of use and training
Many marketing teams are filled with people who can do a little bit of everything.
Deploying campaign management software with a steep learning curve slows progress, but also creates bottlenecks when only a few people are able to use it properly.
Everyone needs training when implementing a new tool, so make sure the vendor supports it. But easier tools are better to use.
Attention and customer service
Even with training, your team is likely to encounter some hiccups along the way. Good customer support from your campaign management software provider can help your team keep moving forward, share best practices, and introduce new features and functionality.
Look for the areas where your team has the most needs. It starts here.
If your campaign is stuck at the same point in the assembly line, this is your first area to address.
While software is certainly one way to solve a problem, don’t overlook other opportunities to increase efficiency.
If it’s a people or process problem, software alone is unlikely to fix it.
[ad_2]
Source link
