Marketing campaign management: your go-to guide

In a world of omnichannel marketing, it’s hard to know where to start. You probably have tons of ideas for programs and initiatives—new social media platforms to try, new email campaigns and audiences to experiment with, events, contests, virtual seminars, podcasts... 

Campaign management is a smart way to turn your never-ending idea list into focused, high-impact work. In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about managing marketing campaigns—from terminology and best practices, to campaign management systems and processes, and more.

What is campaign management?

First, the basics: a campaign is a focused set of marketing activities planned with a specific purpose in mind. Campaign management is the process of planning, executing, monitoring, and evaluating your efforts to ensure they perform well and are executed efficiently. This process encompasses the entire lifecycle and it’s critical to keep efforts on target and on (or under) budget.

Of course, as campaigns and channels have gotten more sophisticated, so have their management tools and techniques. We've evolved from relying on gut instinct or a see-what-happens mentality to consulting robust data and analytics to optimize, especially in enterprise marketing. (We’ll dive into these processes in more detail later.) This evolution has helped businesses get the best possible return on investment and remain competitive in tough markets.

What are the benefits of campaign management?

When you have multiple campaigns running simultaneously, all with their own unique goals, stakeholders, and dependencies, effective management is a necessity. Campaign management not only keeps marketing teams organized, but it also allows them to:

• Attract new customers: Effectively managed campaigns provide real-time data that helps teams hone their audience strategy, ultimately helping the business target and attract new customers. 

• Increase sales: Well-executed campaigns increase revenue by improving velocity, quality, and time to market.

• Roll out new products and features: Strategies and tactics are flawlessly connected in well-planned campaigns, creating a unified message for launching new products and features. 

• Build or repair a brand image: Top-notch campaigns improve brand consistency, helping you build trust with customers and prospects.

Why is campaign management important?

Given how complex campaigns are today, it’s hard to carry one out successfully without strong management processes. With the right approach, you and your team can:

• Aid collaboration: Effective campaign management prevents cross-functional teams from planning in silos, ensuring holistic inputs and clear audience strategy.

• Create efficient processes: Standardization and resource pooling allows teams to improve leverage, develop campaigns more efficiently, and prevent duplicative efforts and bottlenecks.

• Delegate tasks: Organized campaign management makes it easy to delegate with increased connection to priorities, vision, and impact.

• Align messaging: When done right, properly managed campaigns create a consistent brand message that cross-functional teams can operate from. 

With that in mind, it may be time to invest in campaign management processes and tools if you need to step up the quality of your marketing in general.

What does a campaign manager do?

A dedicated campaign manager is the key to running your process in an organized way that takes all teams into account. While this role may be defined differently from one organization to the next, campaign managers are generally responsible for the entire process. Here’s a granular look at what they do:

• Collaborate with marketing team members and key stakeholders to plan campaigns, identify target audiences, and set goals/KPIs.

• Schedule and oversee campaigns to keep them on track.

• Delegate tasks to the entire team.

• Provide updates to stakeholders.

• Track and report results.

How to create a marketing campaign

Now that we know what campaign management is, why it’s important, and who should handle its many moving parts, let’s dive into the actual steps of managing an effective one.

Identify goals and metrics

Launching a campaign without knowing its objectives is like playing darts in the dark. It’s imprecise (and sometimes painful). Plus, it drives up costs, wastes precious time, and probably won’t give you the results leadership is looking for. Clear objectives allow you to monitor performance and proactively course-correct. Some example goals could be to:

• Increase revenue 

• Increase brand awareness

• Increase web traffic

Once you have clear goals, decide which metrics you need to monitor the measure performance and keep the project on track. For example, you might use the following metrics to track progress toward the example goals above:

• Increase revenue → Customer acquisition cost

• Increase brand awareness → Rank for branded search terms

• Increase web traffic → Number of unique visitors

Segment audiences

The better you understand your audience, the more successful your efforts will be. By separating your audience into unique segments, like demographics or consumption behaviors, you can target your marketing even more effectively. One of the best ways to do this is to create personas representing members of your ideal audience.

Target personas, which can range from lightweight descriptions to epically detailed dossiers, are often used to create a more complete picture. To get a holistic view of the actual humans you’re trying to connect with, gather information like:

• Demographics: Specific characteristics that describe a population like age, race, gender, or marital status

• Psychographics: Classification of people based on traits like aspirations, lifestyle, or interests

• Consumption behaviors: Description of how people buy, use, and dispose of goods and services

• Purchasing power: Refers to a person’s financial ability to buy goods or services

Establish resources and budget

Another important step in the process is to get a realistic idea of how your existing resources—budget, team bandwidth, and the like—map back to your purpose and goals.

If you aren’t starting with a set budget, sit down with your leadership to create one. Look at historical channel and funnel performance to understand what kind of budget is needed to support your goals.

Similarly, you’ll need to understand your team’s capacity, which will depend on the importance of the campaign. If you have project managers, lean on them to provide a realistic timeline and don’t overextend your team’s bandwidth—both of which may result in a shoddy campaign that negatively impacts your brand.

Brainstorm content

Once you’ve aligned on goals, asked tough questions, and secured your resources, it’s time to unleash your team’s creativity. Many marketing teams kick off their planning with a team-wide brainstorm. This is a smart way to receive early buy-in and generate excitement from contributors, as well as come up with a long list of out-of-the-box ideas.

This isn’t the time to limit yourself—explore all channels and mediums before deciding which will best reach your target audience Here’s a non-exhaustive list of potential avenues to explore:

• Print: Typically best suited for events, conferences, or other physical settings; it gives you a tangible canvas to highlight your messaging

• Podcasts: An excellent media that can help establish your brand as a trusted industry leader; they’re an efficient way for people to digest information while multitasking

• Ebooks: Often gated, ebooks are an effective way to capture and nurture leads. Note: you'll need marketing automation software to gate content and handle leads at scale

• Webinars: Great for delivering content in video form, webinars can also include interactive aspects to facilitate real-time conversations with viewers. 

• Social media: Allows you to post a variety of content (video, audio, text) and reach precise target groups

• Blog posts: Versatile lead generation tools that can attract and nurture leads, letting people read information at their own pace

• Microsites: Smaller clusters of web pages that live outside of a company’s homepage, useful for publishing closely related content that speaks to similar high-interest topics or concepts

• Contests: A solid tool for branding and exposing new, possibly harder-to-reach audiences to your product

• Email marketing: Another versatile channel that can reach new clients and upsell and maintain connections with existing customers

Once you’ve generated your ideas, it’s time to check in with your principal stakeholders again—does your final list align with their vision?

Create content

Next comes content creation—which is no small task. Content creation doesn’t just mean crafting work that lines up with strategic goals and generates leads; it also means managing processes and workflows so you don’t fall behind schedule.

Work with your team to clearly define things like owners, due dates, and review windows. At this point, you’ll want to use a campaign tracker—check out our marketing campaign template, our product launch template, or our content calendar template for inspiration.

Distribute content

To make sure your content isn’t just floating in the void, you need a high-level distribution plan across owned, earned, and paid channels. This plan should outline how your content will be shared and promoted across various channels to reach its target audience. 

For instance, after publishing, you may want a blog post to be posted across social channels, included in email newsletters, and promoted in paid digital campaigns. By creating a well-planned distribution strategy, you can maximize the impact of your marketing efforts.

Track and analyze results

Once your campaign goes live, it’s time to start crunching the numbers and evaluating your ongoing progress. Use regular reports to keep tabs on your key metrics, and share them with stakeholders frequently. You’ll want to plan ahead for periodic progress updates, and a holistic postmortem once the launch is complete.

The more organized your metrics tracking is, the easier it will be to present results to stakeholders. Here are some analytics to consider tracking and why they’re beneficial:

• Lead profitability: This analytic measures how valuable a lead is to a company. It’s important to track because it reflects how profitable leads would be if they converted.

• Conversion rates: This metric identifies when a prospect has successfully completed an action or moved from one stage of the funnel to another. It’s beneficial to keep your eye on since it indicates which initiatives are the most directly profitable.

• Click-through rates (CTR): This is a percentage of people visiting your website through a linked advertisement. You should track it because it demonstrates which tactics are most engaging.

• Unique visitors: This is the number of visitors to your website, counting visitors only once. It gives you a clear picture of how big your audience is.

• Organic traffic: This is how many people are visiting your website as a result of unpaid or “organic” efforts. It’s important to track because it highlights which organic tactics are bringing visitors to your site.

• Backlinks: These are links from other websites pointing to your website. They identify what content others find valuable and benchmarks your status as an industry resource.

Types of marketing campaigns

Marketing campaigns can take on many forms, each with its own unique goals and strategies. For example, what works for an email likely won’t work as well for social media. Here are some examples of marketing campaigns, where they’re likely to succeed, and what tools to use to deploy them.

Email marketing campaign

Use to improve: Conversion rates, lead nurture, customer retention

This type of campaign may be an effective way to reach your audience and promote your products or services. 

Email marketing campaigns can also help you nurture existing customer relationships with consistent and personalized messaging. Your emails might include industry news, how-to guides, product updates, or exclusive discounts. 

When you consistently deliver your audience valuable content, you increase the likelihood of converting them into customers and retaining them. For a successful email marketing campaign, you’ll need:

• Email templates: You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you send an email. A few email templates will save you time and improve your brand consistency.

• Email addresses from your target audience: Simultaneously, your marketing org should spend time and resources on gated demand generation efforts—whether its demos, trials, webinars, or ebooks. By gating assets behind a sign-up, you can ensure you’re collecting the email addresses of interested prospective customers. 

• An email scheduling system: A system that automates your email sends will save you time and allow you to target people in their own timezones. 

• A tracking platform: To improve your future email campaigns, you should use a platform to track important mail metrics like open rate, CTR, and conversion rate.

Social media campaign

Use to improve: Brand awareness, engagement, reaching a new audience

A social media campaign is a great way to increase brand awareness and engage with readers. You can reach a large and diverse audience with social media platforms through paid or organic posts. With paid social media posts, you can also target your specific audience segments.

Create a dialogue and engage in conversations with your audience to build stronger relationships and increase customer loyalty. These campaigns are also a good way to gather feedback and find new ways to improve the customer experience. For a complete social media campaign, you’ll need:

• Social post templates

• A social media calendar

• A social media scheduling system

• A tracking platform

Content marketing campaign

Use to improve: Lead generation, brand trust, website traffic, search visibility

Content marketing campaigns are a great way to provide your target audience with valuable and informative content. This content should answer common questions, address pain points, or provide practical tips to help establish your brand as a trusted, credible source. 

This not only leads to increased brand trust, but it can also help improve lead generation and drive traffic to your website. For the best content marketing campaign, you’ll need: 

• A keyword research tool

• A content calendar

• A content management system (CMS)

• A tracking platform

• A group of writers (in-house or freelance)

Branding campaign

Use to improve: Brand awareness, brand loyalty, customer retention

This type of campaign helps establish or reinforce brand identity in the market. It can also help differentiate your product from competitors. Using strong storytelling, visuals, and messaging can establish a unique personality that leads to loyalty. 

For a standout branding campaign, you’ll need:

• A design hub

• A digital asset management system

• Branding templates

Product marketing campaign

Use to improve: Sales, product awareness

Product marketing is a great way to introduce a new product to the market and generate buzz and interest around it. It can help differentiate your product from the competition and communicate a unique value proposition to potential customers. 

Compelling messaging, visuals, and other marketing collateral can persuade potential customers to try your product, ultimately boosting sales and revenue. Additionally, building anticipation around the release of a product can create a sense of exclusivity or urgency around your product. For a well-planned product campaign, you’ll need: 

• Scheduling systems

• Product launch templates

• Event planning templates

• A tracking platform

Features of a great campaign management tool

A robust marketing campaign management tool will streamline work, keep partners on the same page, simplify reporting, and free up time. Here are some of the most important features to look for when choosing a campaign management tool:

• Ease of use: A campaign management tool should make your life simple, not complicate it further. If you’re dealing with many contributors and reviewers, you want a tool that is easy to set up, understand, and use. 

• Creates flexible, customizable views: A good campaign management tool lets you toggle between different types of views (like calendar, Kanban, grid views, and more) and hide or reveal different information to different stakeholders.

• Prevents data silos and redundancies: Your tool of choice should prevent data silos and redundancies by centralizing information. Rather than create duplicate (differing) data sets—your team should be able to work from the same source of truth. 

• Provides a reporting functionality: Your software should help you easily share your insights. You should be able to create and customize reports with relevant information—ideally injust a few clicks.

• Automates tasks and workflows: Robust campaign management tools should allow you to automate repetitive tasks, saving time and reducing human error in the process. Look for features like the ability to build custom trigger-and-action sequences with little to no coding.

• Fosters collaboration: The right campaign management tool should provide a centralized platform for team members to access and contribute to, as well as facilitate, real-time communication. For instance, comments and mentions make it easy to discuss projects with team members without having to hop between platforms or lose important context. 

• Simplifies scheduling: Find a tool that lets team members view all upcoming tasks and deadlines in one place, and can automate delegation and reminders to ensure projects stay on track.

Even when all goes according to plan, marketing campaign management is an intricate, time-intensive process. But leveraging the right tool can make integrated marketing campaigns easy, and, dare we say it, fun.

Airtable offers marketing campaign managers a powerful platform that accelerates the full campaign lifecycle. Stay on top of all of your marketing processes and workflows, from establishing strategic goals and planning out resources to tracking content assets and compiling valuable reports.