Download the PDF
These days there are thousands of marketing campaigns launched every second, all over the world. In fact, there are 2311 active campaigns being run by marketers in Mediatool as we write this! Chances are whatever industry you’re in, there are hundreds of campaigns being launched by your competitors, trying to reach the same target audience as you. This makes creating campaigns that catch your target customer’s attention extremely difficult!
So, how do the companies that get it right, get it right? What makes them stand out from the crowd? Well, it’s not the sexiest answer, but the secret is how they manage their campaigns. And we’re not talking about managing the day to day marketing channels (which is of course mega important) but instead how the whole thing is orchestrated together to work as one machine.
Without good campaign management, everything tends to fall out of place. You stand less of a chance at generating the results you need to reach your goals and actually help your target customer. Maybe you’ve been there before, where launching and running campaigns feels like constantly putting out fires. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. We’re talking about how you plan, measure, evaluate and improve on your campaigns. Whether you’re launching a new product, promoting an event or running a seasonal campaign, you should follow the same structure to run and manage them.
In this guide, we’ll explain how thousands of marketers launch better campaigns, make better decisions and produce better results using Mediatool. Starting with planning.
Step 1 to Managing Successful Marketing Campaigns: Plan
A marketing campaign is only as good as its strategy and plan. The plan is where all the magic happens. Where you envisage what channels, tactics, and content you’ll use. Alongside allocating budgets and setting targets, so you can see how you’ll reach your goals.
Marketing teams across the globe are realizing the importance of planning, now more than ever. At a time when everything is measurable and marketers are under increasing pressure to prove the value of their marketing investments, planning is vital to showing how activities will directly impact the wider business goals. Pair that with the fact that markets and technology are evolving so quickly, great planning allows teams to pivot based on new insights, making it critical for business digital transformation.
Better planning is proven to produce better results, increase revenue and give marketers the kudos they deserve internally. We constantly hear from marketers that creating comprehensive media plans is one of the areas they struggle with. They either use spreadsheets which don’t provide flexibility, leave room for human error and take ages to update. Or they’re using too many tools to keep on top of. In Mediatool, it’s as easy as pie.
Marketing planning shouldn’t be hard! It should be holistic, encompassing every detail that the whole team needs to execute campaigns to a higher level. It needs to be scalable, repeatable and include budgets and business targets.
Here’s how you plan better in Mediatool:
Organization and Structure
When you become a Mediatool user, our CS team will help you determine the best structure for your account. This includes your data hierarchy, taxonomy, naming conventions and how your plan is set up. You can set rules and calculations, so your data is automatically quantified and ordered based on your pre-selected parameters.
Your media plan and account is fully editable to your needs, and setting it correctly up from the get-go will make sure your local and global marketing teams plan campaigns using not only best practices, but also the same structure. Ensuring they’re working together towards the same goal.
Strategic Planning and Target Setting
When you create your marketing strategy and set KPIs, you need somewhere to visualize it, somewhere you can keep coming back to. In Mediatool you can set strategic targets so you can track how your results are measured, in comparison with your KPIs or goals. Within targets you can allocate budgets and view it in line with spend. So you can see how much budget you have left compared to results, and can tweak it based on insights you gain.
Creating and Managing Media Plans
Now this is the best part. In Mediatool, you can create your own marketing or media plans. The structure of them is set by you at the onboarding phase, or you can edit it to suit your campaign needs.
When you create a plan, you have full control over what it looks like, and what fields go into them. You can include as many fields as you need, such as: marketing channels, markets, products, date range, metrics, creative materials. And you can set up any calculations or rules that you need to automate. Making media planning smooth and saving you time doing it.
You can make as many plans as you need, neatly stored and secure in the cloud. And you can grant access to your teammates that need it.
Collaboration and Briefs
One of the biggest challenges that we hear from marketing teams is collaborating effectively. And this has increased tenfold with the uptake in remote working. Teams just don’t feel like they can get answers they need, brainstorm ideas and work together productively as they once could. And this has become a barrier to success for marketers.
Well, have no fear; that’s what Mediatool’s collaboration features are for. Like we said, you can pick who needs access to plans. Teams work together to edit and manage plans, measure results and generate reports. You can see how close you are to hitting your targets and can bounce ideas off each other based on insights you’ve gained, in the conversation hub. Users can unsubscribe and subscribe to conversations to be notified of updates.
You can also request and grant approval of campaign plans or edits, instead of having to chase colleagues for weeks on end! And it doesn’t stop there. Create briefs, tag assignees and anyone else who should be cc’d in, in one place. For example, if you need to brief the content team on creatives needed for that specific plan, you can communicate back and forth and share final versions.
This doesn’t just go for internal teams. Mediatool is built for marketers and agencies to collaborate too! Making completing projects exciting rather than tedious.
Step 2 to Managing Successful Marketing Campaigns: Measure
Repeat after me. Tracking your data shouldn’t be hard. But a lot of marketing teams have over-complicated it, creating new problems. They either track every metric they’ve ever laid eyes on, or use so many tools to track that they can’t actually see what their data is telling them.
Measuring the impact of your campaign should be a priority. But we didn’t need to tell you that. To measure campaigns properly you need to understand what metrics are most important to your specific campaign. To figure this out, start with your KPIs and what metrics will tell you if you reached the KPI. Work backwards from there and select the key metrics that will determine if your campaign was a success.
The next most important step to tracking is how you collect your data. Can you see all of your data in one place, or are you constantly shifting between tabs? Does it take a while to understand your results? Are you just overwhelmed every time you look at your data? If this sounds like you, Mediatool can make your life much less stressful.
This is how Mediatool improves how marketing teams measure campaign performance:
Real-time Data Consolidation
Mediatool gives you a birds-eye view of your data. You choose how you review it; at a local or global level, at campaign (plan) or account level. We understand what metrics will suit your team and can help you improve the quality of your data to make sure it’s reliable. With this level of visibility, you can make better and quicker decisions with confidence.
No More Data Silos!
Siloed data is probably one of the biggest issues that every marketer has faced. And it’s one of the easiest issues for us to fix! With all your tracking data in one place, everyone in the team is kept on the same page. Which is what you need if everyone is to work towards shared goals.
Integrations
By integrating all of your platforms, you save time spent sourcing data from individual marketing channels. Everything tracks into Mediatool and you can view your data as one, so spotting insights takes minutes. We have a long list of integrations that connect to Mediatool and the list is constantly growing! From all your social media channels to the best advertising platforms out there.
UTM Parameters & UTI Codes
Get detailed tracking data by generating UTI and UTM codes directly in Mediatool. Whether it’s for an organic social post or a Search campaign, create codes that you can use at scale. Allowing you to link results back to campaign plans or to specific entries within that plan.
View Performance Data in Line With Targets / Predictive Modelling
As you’ll have already set targets in your plans, you can see how your campaigns are pacing against your predictions. Spot insights in your data with this holistic overview, so you can tweak campaigns to generate better results in real-time.
You can then create predictive models based on what you find, enabling you to pivot and adjust better to further improve future campaigns.
Step 3 in Managing Successful Marketing Campaigns: Evaluate
Proving ROI and the value of marketing activities are up there with two most important things on any marketer’s mind. It’s also one of the major obstacles, with 60% of Fortune 1000 CMOs claiming they find it hard to quantify the impact of their marketing efforts.
So, how do you demonstrate marketing ROI? You create reports. And therein lies another hurdle. Marketers feel up to their eyeballs in reports. Wasting so much time crunching the numbers that they should be spending working on campaigns. Then when that report is done, they still feel under scrutiny. If you work in marketing this is no doubt familiar, and every year studies are published with similar statistics: most marketers cannot quantify their impact. It’s a universal marketing problem. And it’s not going to fix itself.
The issue is that a lot of teams are doing step two: measurement. But they’re missing the link between measurement and the rest of the business: evaluation. Thorough evaluation needs reports that can help you spot opportunities, not get in the way of it.
Here’s how Mediatool provides a solution:
User Friendly Reporting Dashboards
When you build the structure of your data in Mediatool, you then use this structure throughout the platform. So when it comes to creating reports they’re almost done for you. And if there’s a metric you didn’t previously set up or a new kind of report you need, it takes minutes to generate new reporting dashboards. You can create as many dashboards as you need, at campaign or account level. Are you a numbers person? Or maybe you’re more visual? There’s reporting styles for everyone. Simply customize it to best suit you.
With all of your data in one platform it’s easier to spot insights that you can act on, to improve campaign performance as it happens in real time.
When you need to show your results to senior leaders, download it without having to do any extra work. By managing the whole process from planning to reporting in the tool, you can sit back and relax knowing your data is correct and the tedious work is done for you. If you feel like you can’t currently trust your data, Mediatool helps you change that.
Demonstrate ROI
With this new found confidence in your data and reports, presenting your hard work to the rest of the business is a breeze. And as your budget, spend and targets are included in the reports, showcasing ROI is exciting, rather than daunting.
When your reports work for you, you have more time to look at how you can leverage insights to prove how marketing is contributing value to the organization, and get buy-in for future marketing plans. By achieving your objectives, adding business value, and generating more revenue, the reward is for the whole business, not just the marketing team.
Step 4 in Managing Successful Marketing Campaigns: Improve
The best marketing teams in the world are constantly thinking about how they can improve on their results, create even better campaigns, push boundaries with what they do and truly tap into what their customers want. They allocate budget and time to testing, iterating and investing in technology to help them accomplish their targets.
In Mediatool you get a new perspective on your strategy, so you can rethink it and smash your goals, rather than feeling like you’re constantly a step behind trying to keep up.
This holistic overview of each stage in the campaign management helps you find room for improvement and make better marketing decisions. When you find something that can be tweaked, your team has more chance to test ideas, iterate concepts and get better at making adjustments mid-campaign, to optimize it rather than waiting until after it’s over.
By becoming more innovative, the whole team will thrive and your results will grow exponentially. By learning from your results, the team will come on leaps and bounds professionally, ensuring they’re happier in their roles. For marketing leaders, not only will you manage your team better, but everyone will feel more pride in their work.
Wrapping Up
To manage successful marketing campaigns, you need to use technology to your advantage. But you also need to put the work in and use that technology to its fullest potential. While we’re explaining how Mediatool can improve the quality of your marketing, you need to approach the platform with the mindset that you are capable of producing excellent results. And that you can improve the way you’re currently operating!
With a combination of the right mindset and the right tool by your side, creating successful campaigns is a given, not a pipe dream.
To learn more about Mediatool and how it can help you, click here. Or if you’re ready to make the steps towards change, book a demo to see it in action.
