Campaign Management Mastery

Master the basics before chasing complexity.  

Marketing campaign excellence is a delicate interplay of strategy, execution, and technology. There are multiple factors that set a great campaign apart from an average one, not just on the execution side but also from a strategic perspective. First of all, a campaign needs to be relevant to the customer – which begs the question, do you know who your customers are, and how they differ from each other, and subsets you can identify? Having a refined customer segmentation in place then allows you to design the right level of personalisation; think Dynamic Content tailored to each customer segment. Key to this is understanding your customer data and their attributes.  

AI and Automation: Tap into AI Features for Optimisation  

As a next step, keep in mind to make your customers' lives easier – not just by displaying the right content ("what was my loyalty number again???") but also selecting the right channel and send-time. AI can make your job very simple here, with a lot of modern customer engagement platforms offering channel-and send-time optimisations that run automatically.  

Building Your Campaign Management Framework  

As far as execution goes, assess your internal operations – do you have a solid campaign management framework that allows your teams to build and deliver campaigns effectively and with ease? This includes operating model considerations as well, having all your ducks in a row from design and layout build to content creation, setup of the campaign build in your marketing automation software, and taking the right steps to test your campaigns before launch.  

 You'll find with average campaigns that one or more parts in the chain are broken or non-existent – late approvals, last-minute changes that frequently lead to mistakes, irrelevant content, lack of contact strategy, improper Litmus tests; leading to disengaged customers at best, and disgruntled customers at worst.  

The New Age and Complexity of Data-Driven Marketing  

The last decade was an interesting one from a marketing automation perspective – we've seen widespread adoption of the mammoth platforms à la Adobe Campaign and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, over to the emergence of rivals like Braze, Insider, MoEngage, Iterable and others. New platforms bring new capabilities, yet teams are lacking expertise and require lead-up time to familiarise themselves with the breadth of features and master the skills needed to make the most of the systems. The more sophisticated your tech landscape is, with the inclusion of Customer Data Platforms, Marketing Data Layers and other customised pieces of tech, the more marketing opportunities open up for you, and it often comes with the need to upskill teams and creating new roles to complement your team's existing expertise. "More tools" does not always equal "better", in fact, it often adds layers of complexity for execution and governance that have to be harnessed.  

 Data-driven marketing has become more layered than ever, calling for upskilling of teams to derive value from their tech investments. This includes both being able to build advanced campaigns in your customer engagement platform, and understanding the customer data you're working with. It's complex systems landscape that calls for in-depth skills in data utilisation and campaign customisation. This includes familiarising oneself with optimisation features provided by AI – whether it's to generate data insights, predictive models around customer churn or RFM segmentation, or creating test & learn scenarios supported by AI-powered A/B tests in regards to content, subject lines, preferred channels and send-times.  

Building Blocks for Success  

From my experience over the past 10 years, businesses often shoot for the stars and aim to do complex, sophisticated customer marketing activities, while neglecting the basics. It's the age-old-saying 'crawl before you run' – get the basics right first, sort your data and campaign processes out, then focus on your marketing strategy.  

 If you don't have the right building blocks to operate efficiently, you will struggle to create and deliver refined, optimised customer communications. This includes having a marketing calendar that clearly outlines your activities over a defined time period, a standardised campaign management process that runs efficiently, and a well-positioned operating model in a multi-disciplinary team with clear roles and responsibilities. Giving your teams structure while working to everyone's strengths sets the field to be running campaign management efficiently even in larger enterprises. Identify upskilling needs within your teams and train them in the tech available to them in order to get maximum value and efficiency out of your Martech stack.  

Strategy: The Customer-Centric Approach  

Got all of the afore-mentioned aspects in order? Perfect, next look at your strategy. To be as relevant as possible to our customers, we need to understand who they are – a detailed customer segmentation model built on data insights, which underpins our marketing data layer (MDL). Align your MDL with a thought-out, customer-centric lifecycle strategy. Knowing your customers and tailoring your communications to customer segments is key to being relevant and building and expanding your relationship. When are you talking to your customers and what is the purpose of the communication? What is the overarching customer journey and which touchpoints do you deliver on?  

 Last but not least, when it comes to marketing measurement, move from guesswork to a truly data-driven approach to understand your marketing's impact. There are plenty of basics that you can learn to master that will set you up for more sophisticated marketing activities in the future, eventually leading to a full best-practice campaign management environment.  

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 Laura Boettcher is DBZ’s Senior Business Analyst & Marketing Automation SME. A seasoned consultant with a decade of expertise, Laura has led complex MarTech remediation, implementation and optimisation projects for enterprise organisations to turn their marketing tech headaches into success stories.