Our tips on the strategy, software, tools, and techniques you need to streamline marketing campaign management
Managing marketing campaigns is complex, especially when juggling online and offline activities that straddle multiple global regions while trying to optimize marketing performance and improve ROI.
But as campaign management becomes more complex, campaign management software is matching the pace of change. With the right tools (and a customer-focused strategy), brands and agencies can streamline marketing campaign management, improve productivity, and optimize delivery for greater returns.
Read on for our top tips on streamlining marketing campaign management. Plus, we’ll share the top myths surrounding cross-channel campaigns in 2023.
What is Marketing Campaign Management?
In a nutshell, marketing campaign management is the process of planning, executing, reviewing, and optimizing marketing activities.
There’s huge scope within that definition. For example, it refers to marketing teams coordinating integrated marketing campaigns across several European regions, running multiple campaigns for different product lines, leveraging social media, search engine marketing, and TV and billboard ads.
Marketing campaign management also refers to creative agencies managing multiple client campaigns, from simple always-on campaigns to complex online-and-offline adventures. Or it could be a mom-and-pop company launching its first search ad.
What is Marketing Campaign Management Software?
Complex campaigns involve a lot of moving parts. Marketing campaign management tools simplify the process by automating manual tasks and streamlining internal processes.
Again, that’s a broad definition. There are a lot of campaign management software solutions out there – almost 10,000 at last count – each with a different set of features.
The Essential Marketing Campaign Management Software
With so many potential platforms, knowing which suits your brand is challenging. There’s no right choice for everyone. But there is a “best marketing campaign management tool” for your requirements, and we’ll help you find it.
Your martech shopping list:
| Must have | Nice to have |
| Time-saving automations | Media planning templates |
| Holistic overview of marketing activity | Automated reporting |
| Third-party data integrations | AI or machine learning |
| Real-time target tracking | Timesheet or productivity tracking |
| Flexible, user-friendly dashboard | Taxonomy tools |
| Calendar tools | Predictive analytics |
| Exportable reports | External collaboration tools |
| Strong data security | |
| Customizable user permissions | |
| Scalability to support growth |
Before you rush out to procure a marketing campaign management tool, consider the bigger picture. Although we refer to MarTech as “solutions,” software is more of an “investment.”
The marketing campaign management software you choose should support long-term growth, not become a band-aid solution for poor internal processes. So, before you make another move, read these tips on streamlining campaign management.
Step 1: Name and Structure Your Data for Reliable Results
One of the critical parts of campaign organization is matching taxonomy and naming conventions between internal systems (software) and external activity (campaign creative).
Taxonomy is the Classification of Data into Standardized Categories
Establishing a taxonomy ensures marketing data is correctly sorted across channels, systems, and processes. Matching internal and external taxonomies means the systems communicate, and you receive complete reliable marketing data.
Creating clear naming conventions for all offline and online marketing activities enables every person and every system to track and analyze data correctly. Standardizing data taxonomies and naming conventions from the start will significantly help to attribute results and improve ROI.
The type of structure you use will differ for your organization. Naming conventions also become more complicated as more people contribute to the media planning process. For global brands and agencies, it’s essential to have a centralized repository for naming conventions supported by collaboration tools that bring everyone together.
In Mediatool, you can set up taxonomy and naming conventions customized to your needs and then connect them to actual results for a granular yet holistic view of campaign activity. You can build custom tags and create custom UTM codes to classify your data the exact way you need to.
Mediatool’s collaborative media planning tools put everyone on the same page. Brands and agencies can easily work together across borders without losing track of taxonomy.
Step 2: Execute Your Plan With a Marketing Campaign Management Tool that Gives a Birds-eye View
Running complex marketing campaigns requires an aerial view of all investments. This means you need access to reliable data hooked up to a single marketing campaign management tool to help you make better decisions about optimizing your campaigns and meeting your targets.
A customizable marketing dashboard will help you:
- Feed all your marketing data to a single source of truth
- Spend less time jumping between platforms
- Streamline media planning, tracking, and analysis
- Track campaign performance with confidence
- Generate reports automatically
- Identify optimization opportunities
There are many marketing tools and dashboards out there. Yet, many Marketing Managers still need to use spreadsheets or separate systems. If you think there’s no option to integrate PPC campaign management, social media results, web analytics, and offline media investments, you should check out Mediatool.
Mediatool is an all-in-one marketing campaign management tool that integrates digital marketing platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook, and TikTok with offline media planning for a comprehensive view of all activity.
Step 3: Use Real-time Data to Track Results and Compare Them Against Targets
As soon as your campaign launches, tracking starts. Accurately tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) requires reliable, real-time data from all marketing channels. If you have no choice but to wait a week or longer for results or manually compile marketing data, you’re guaranteed to miss opportunities to optimize activity.
Provided you follow steps 1 and 2, your marketing campaign management tool will deliver a constant stream of accurate data so you can compare actual results against KPIs. You should also be able to filter marketing data, export customized reports, and get to the bottom of tough KPI questions.
To streamline your processes, find a cross-channel campaign management tool that enables you to:
- Set targets for an individual channel or creative
- Automatically compare results data to targets
- Track campaign results against high-level goals
Using one platform to plan, launch, track, optimize and report on campaigns is the ‘golden goose’ for streamlining marketing campaign management.
Step 4: Use Insights to Improve Performance and Smash Your Targets
Once you know how your marketing activities compare with your targets, you can use your newly-gained insights to optimize your campaigns.
Maximizing ROI is an essential priority for all marketing campaign managers. Couple this with managing overall campaign performance, and that’s a lot to juggle without the right cross-channel campaign management software.
Simplicity and ease of use go a long way in helping brands and agencies deliver better customer experiences. The right campaign management software should enable you to make agile, informed decisions about things like:
- Where to increase investment
- Where to pull back
- Which channels are delivering results
- How audience segments are responding
- A/B testing new ideas
By reacting to your campaign’s performance in a timely way, you can exceed KPIs while optimizing the marketing budget. Plus, you can be confident in your decisions knowing the data is accurate and reliable.
Five Marketing Campaign Management Myths to Leave Behind in 2023
When HubSpot surveyed 1,200 marketers earlier this year, 80% said marketing had changed more since 2019 than in the last 50 years.
Now, it’s hard to take a stat like that too seriously, as most of today’s marketers wouldn’t have been working in 1972. But the sentiment remains the same: digital marketing evolves fast.
McKinsey’s research into US customer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic provides a better snapshot of how things are changing. As we farewell 2022, let’s leave these campaign management myths in the past, along with the short-lived resurgence of neon…everything.
Marketing Campaign Management Myth #1: Reports are Made at the End
Reporting is often seen as the last thing you do after a campaign. This makes more sense with traditional advertising such as OOH or TV. Once those channels are live, it’s hard to make adjustments.
However, with most digital marketing campaigns, changes can be made mid-campaign. Targeting tweaks, adjusting investment levels, A/B testing creative – but how do you know what to change?
Mid-campaign reporting provides the data you need to make agile adjustments and hit KPIs faster.
By presenting results internally – or updating clients on mid-campaign results – marketers have a stronger case to justify investments and request more budget.
Marketing campaign management software should ease the reporting burden. You can generate reports in seconds using campaign management software like Mediatool. That means you can spot opportunities to improve campaigns, demonstrate marketing’s value, start planning early and keep the client informed.
Marketing Campaign Management Myth #2: A Marketing Strategy is a One-and-done Task
Marketing strategies need time to generate results. Changing the strategy every couple of weeks would be a waste of energy. However, strategy is still being set and remembered.
We’re not saying you should change your messaging and shake up the campaign from its foundations every week. But if results fall short of KPIs, you should be proactive by making data-driven adjustments.
- A/B test new ideas
- Review marketing data regularly
- Turn insight into action with agile marketing techniques
Every insight should contribute to the current strategy and the next campaign. There’s no set time frame for making adjustments. Remember that audiences respond to consistency, continuity, cohesiveness, and clarity. Make minor multivariate adjustments and let them run for a few days to gather data.
Marketing Campaign Management Myth #3: The More Marketing Campaign Management Tools, the Better
Tracking performance data from numerous channels and platforms at once can get complicated. Many companies have an oversaturated Martech stack that does more harm than good when trying to automate the process and reduce the team’s workload.
You don’t need a PPC management tool, social media analytics platform, media planning platform, project management tool, or reporting software. You need Mediatool.
Mediatool integrates all your digital marketing channels to centralize data. By merging all your top-level targets and real-time results, it’s easier to get a comprehensive view of campaign performance and prove the value of marketing efforts.
Marketing Campaign Management Myth #4: Conversions Are All That Matter
While conversions and sales are important, you would be doing yourself a disservice to focus on that one metric. Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns isn’t always easy, especially if your conversion rate is lower than expected.
There are two things you need to think about here:
1. What Other Results are Important?
For example, you launch a small social media campaign for a new product. Despite having a loyal follower base, conversions are low.
Consider other metrics that lead to conversions in due course. What is the CTR of your ads? What is the engagement rate of influencer partnerships?
Linking measurement data to campaign KPIs (and eventually high-level business goals) is an effective way to filter out the noise of cross-channel campaigns and focus on the metrics that matter.
2. What’s Going on in the World? What Are the Latest Consumer Trends?
As well as drilling down on data, marketers need to step back and factor in outside influences, such as consumer trends and global events, that could grab the audience’s attention.
Sometimes, things happen that you can’t control. Access to cross-channel marketing results in real-time enables you to react faster, optimizing media investments, so you don’t throw good money after bad. That’s where Mediatool adds value.
Marketing Campaign Management Myth #5: If a Campaign Performed Poorly, it Was a Waste of Time
There will be times when campaigns don’t perform as well as you hope. You’ve done your darndest to plan a cross-channel marketing campaign, tracked results, iterated, optimized, tweaked, and tested, and still, it’s not hitting the mark. To think it was a waste of time would be your biggest mistake.
The campaigns that don’t go to plan are the ones that help you learn the most. The reason we collect data, measure results, and create reports is ultimately to improve.
Learning from what went wrong will help you make better decisions in the future. Set aside time to analyze campaign data and identify areas to improve next time. With Mediatool, you can revisit historical data whenever you’re ready. The intelligent filtering and reporting let you deep dive, into the campaign and find opportunities you might have missed the first time.
Get the Benefits of an End-to-end Marketing Campaign Management Software
Let your marketing tool do the heavy lifting so you can focus on the important work: coming up with killer creative ideas, optimizing your channel plan and content mix, allocating spending based on results, and strategizing the next campaign.
With Mediatool, you won’t have to second-guess your data or spend hours building and exporting reports for the C-suite.
Mediatool gives you a flexible overview of your marketing activities. You can zoom out to see how results are tracking against targets or zoom in to understand your audience. Book a chat with our team to see how the right marketing campaign management software can save time and optimize campaigns end-to-end.
