The Marketer’s Guide to Marketing Campaign Management

In today’s digital marketing landscape, organized marketing campaign management is essential to keep track of business goals and marketing activities.

Marketing teams face a number of challenges when it comes to aligning marketing initiatives to grow brand awareness and boost sales.

But with an effective strategy, streamlined workflows, and marketing automation in place, a dedicated marketing campaign management system can help marketers and companies at large meet and surpass their content and revenue objectives.

Optimizely’s campaign management software is a great place to start for campaign managers and all kinds of marketers who are ready to take their ad campaigns and marketing activities to the next level.

Read on to learn about our features and benefits, and why a solid marketing campaign is so essential to successful brands and businesses worldwide.

What is a marketing campaign?

A marketing campaign is a strategic initiative that’s designed to drive results on a specific business goal, like boosting brand awareness, promoting new and existing products, or driving click-through-rates on certain CTAs.

With this in mind, and through a diverse range of channels, content, and media, marketing campaigns transmit targeted messaging to specific audiences in an attempt to increase new and potential customer conversions.

The sky’s the limit for what your marketing campaign can touch, with possible experiences ranging from outdoor advertising, print, and email strategies to digital ads, videos, webinars, social media, and far beyond.

A solid marketing strategy covers all the right bases, which vary depending on your business and brand. And while you don’t have to do everything, you do have to be intentional with the channels and social media platforms you choose to pursue to ensure that your messaging remains relevant and engaging to existing audiences as well as new customers.

How can Optimizely help?

With Optimizely, campaigns are designed to assist marketing teams in planning and executing integrated marketing initiatives within a single workspace.

The platform helps maximize alignment by providing visibility into all associated tasks, progress, and status data.

And marketers can collaboratively develop campaign strategy briefs to align all team members on key details like campaign objectives, target audience, key messaging, content plan, and every piece of work that goes into the marketing mix.

What is marketing campaign management?

Marketing campaign management consists of the planning, execution, and analysis of every touchpoint and piece of content or messaging involved in a dedicated marketing campaign. And with such a saturated space, effective management often presents an overwhelming challenge to marketing teams and organizations — especially at scale, and regardless of your industry.
These days, marketing automation and innovative campaign management software is a necessary investment for marketing teams who want to succeed and stand out for the work that they do and the audiences they engage.
Whether working with an agency or managing marketing campaigns internally, these efficiency-boosting technologies make simultaneous marketing campaign management easier from start to finish, streamlining every step in between and seamlessly preparing teams for the next iteration and new campaigns.

How can Optimizely help?

Because modern marketing has such immense reach, Optimizely provides a dedicated space for marketing teams to view and collaborate on all tasks associated with that specific work within each campaign.

What’s more, they’re able to simultaneously see any relevant events and outside happenings, so marketers can stay in sync and on top of every element concerning a specific campaign, from ideation to briefing, creation, and distribution.

Setting up a successful marketing campaign

A successful marketing campaign can be complex to set up and challenging to maintain, but once you’ve put all the pieces together, moving forward becomes much easier. To level up, you’ll need thoughtful planning, a commitment to quality, and regular analysis — of your own work and your competition’s — backing up every implementation.

To get started off on the right foot, you’ll need to do some homework:

• Identify your audience To create content that resonates, you need to know who will be reading it and what they care about. Dive into trend and user research to find out.
• Define your KPIs Before dedicating valuable resources to rolling out a new campaign, be clear on your goals and how you plan to quantify them.
• Decide on distribution Outline the owned, paid and potentially earned media channels on which your content will run and make sure they align with your presence on social media platforms as well as your target audience’s digital habits.
• Plan out the content A successful marketing campaign goes far beyond a blog post. Determine the various content formats and media types your campaign should cover and include to make the most of the story you’re trying to tell.
• Build your team Last but not least, ensure you have a talented roster of people working towards the same goal on tasks that fall across writing, editing, design, video production and anything else relevant to the campaign at hand.

How can Optimizely help?

With Optimizely, marketing teams can easily manage, discover and reuse existing content assets to support and streamline future campaigns and content creation — critical for delivering consistent brand experiences. That’s why we’ve created a Content Tab directly in our campaign management platform, designed to store and and all materials associated with that particular campaign. So marketing teams can seamlessly repurpose them in future planning and content creation efforts.

Now, that’s even easier with our “Copying Campaigns” feature, which lets users copy all of a campaign’s elements (like briefs, labels, tasks, attachments, and events) into a new instance for an all the more streamlined process.

Optimizing marketing campaign management with streamlined workflows

When working at scale, a digitally documented and managed marketing strategy is a must to avoid errors, redundancies, and wasted resources.

And in such a fast-paced industry, an all-in-one platform to manage, organize, and orchestrate all marketing activities is key to keeping up with the competition, as well as audience interest and demand.

An innovative marketing orchestration platform streamlines and enhances every step of a marketing team’s workflow, allows for every task and campaign element available in real-time and makes it easier to make better business decisions across the board. With Optimizely, marketing teams can also make the most of our technology to:

• Simplify budgeting Access at-a-glance visibility into the actual spend on individual marketing initiatives and track budget health with marketing planning software
• See the big picture Visualize and easily manage all work, content, and other marketing campaign elements in one, flexible marketing calendar.
• Manage shifting priorities Identify bottlenecks, control tasks, and jump on real-time marketing opportunities on time with additional marketing project management software.
• Collaborate efficiently Connect every step of the marketing workflow process — from intake and marketing requests to reviews and approvals — across every team member and marketing campaign and any brand asset, content format, and distribution channel.

How can Optimizely help?

On Optimizely’s easy-to-use marketing orchestration platform, we’ve designed a centralized space for marketing teams to collaboratively define and execute their campaign strategy. By increasing awareness and visibility across each campaign’s specific objective, teams can easily monitor shifts in direction and changing priorities, speed up the process from planning to publishing, and better align on all strategic goals.

Comprehensive sharing, permission, and commenting capabilities make it simple to share any kind of assets and get quick feedback from anyone across an organization, from marketers and editors to higher-up decision makers and other key stakeholders. So everyone can be on the same page, every step of the way.

Distributing marketing campaigns on social media and beyond

Once a marketing campaign has been conceptualized, strategized, and executed, it’s time for distribution.

Via a documented strategy across owned, paid, and earned channels, content can begin to circulate and drive traffic back to a brand’s website or other target.

And while there are many different methods for distributing content based on channel, audience, and business goal, no matter where along the customer journey a campaign or piece of content sits, marketers can be sure to be reaching the right demographics.

Paid advertising can jumpstart engagement at the launch of a campaign when your content hasn’t yet received much traction.

It’s also effective at revitalizing and giving additional reach to existing content that has previously performed well with your audience.

But when it comes to low-cost distribution tactics, marketing teams can consider lead nurturing, social media, free content platforms, crowdsourcing, and SEO. Remember, however: while these methods may require little to no financial investment, they can take up significant time and energy.

When it comes to social media marketing, we’ve found LinkedIn to be a valuable distribution tool thanks to its growing popularity and evolving marketing products. 83% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing, and compared with Twitter and Facebook, it generates the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate — nearly three times higher.

How can Optimizely help?

Optimizely lets marketing teams distribute marketing campaign components and ensure a consistent, cross-channel brand experience in a couple of clicks, seamlessly pushing content to all downstream systems like CMS, CRM, social media platforms, and more. In addition to providing free promotional platforms, many social networking platforms also feature paid ad channels that businesses can leverage. Ads on LinkedIn, promoted Twitter posts, sponsored Facebook updates and the like are just a few that allow for highly targeted content distribution.

Analyzing marketing campaign metrics

Prove performance and the value of your marketing campaign management efforts by studying key metrics. Optimizely’s advanced Analytics Module allows users to measure the performance of any piece of content as well as marketing campaigns as a whole, to demonstrate results to key stakeholders and surface actionable takeaways to keep getting better with every new iteration.

As you evaluate your campaigns, analytics can unlock essential insights into your audience, including existing and potential customers. And when combined with data from sales, customer service, and other vital departments, valuable trends and patterns can begin to emerge. As teams test, experiment, and discover what works best for their target markets and business goals, they can pivot accordingly and direct resources toward campaigns they know will resonate and yield success.

How can we help?

A key measure of a team’s productivity is their output: what was actually produced?

Optimizely’s Campaign Analytics capabilities provide users with visibility into the productivity and effectiveness of any and all work being done within each campaign. By examining Operations and Performance, teams can understand the output of their campaigns through the lens of the content itself, with strategic and format breakdowns highlighted for clarity and ease of use.

Another helpful extra we’ve created is the Campaign Health Status Bar, which provides an at-a-glance view of the status and overall health of each campaign as well as a summary of its progress and associated tasks. As tasks progress and reach completion, the Health Status Bar is automatically updated to reflect changes along every touchpoint.

An efficient marketing team avoids wasting time, effort, money, and materials. That’s why Optimizely’s marketing orchestration platform is designed to streamline your entire marketing campaign and content lifecycle.

Retain existing audiences, attract new customers, and surpass business goals by bolstering your marketing efforts across all your active marketing channels, media, messaging, and beyond. Coordinate every element of campaign content and management, from blog posts, landing pages, and webinars to email marketing, social media marketing, and all kinds of other formats.

Sign up for a complementary account to explore all our digital marketing tools and functionalities for marketing automation, collaboration, and all-in-one orchestration.