Marketing campaign management software

7 min read

Managing a successful marketing campaign is an incredibly time consuming process. Regardless of whether you’re running a basic email marketing campaign or a vast omni-channel campaign, the process will drain your time and resources.

Thankfully, software can alleviate a lot of the pressure. This is because the software will save you time, simplify your processes, and maximise your ROI.

With this in mind, let’s take a detailed look at the benefits of marketing campaign management and what the process involves. We’ll then analyse the main features of campaign management software and assess how the software can help you run successful campaigns. 

What is marketing campaign management?

Marketing campaign management is a strategy employed by marketers who are keen to maximise the results they are generating from their marketing activities. The primary aim of actively managing a marketing campaign is to track the progress and success of the campaign at every stage of the process, optimising and improving it where necessary.

What are the key benefits of marketing campaign management?

If you’re looking to run successful marketing campaigns, then marketing campaign management is incredibly important. This is because actively managing your campaigns allows you to tinker with the strategy as you go. This means that you can make necessary changes to ensure your campaign meets its goals.

On top of this, following marketing campaign management guidelines will also help you streamline the whole marketing process, and it will make execution easier than ever before.

In addition to this, the process allows you to stay closely connected to your marketing campaign. In a fast-moving world, this is incredibly important. After all, as your campaign progresses, the goals of your company, the behaviour of your customers, and the profile of your target customer might change.

In order to notice these changes and react to them appropriately, you need to be actively managing your marketing campaigns. By overseeing every aspect of the campaign, you’ll be able to continually optimise it, ensuring that it’s returning maximum ROI and working as effectively as possible.

How do I manage a marketing campaign?

In order to successfully manage a marketing campaign, you need to establish a clear structure. As you’ll see, the process of managing a campaign can be laborious, which is exactly why tools can help.

But, before analysing the features of marketing management campaign software, we first need to understand exactly what the process of managing a marketing campaign involves. Here are the steps that you need to follow:

1. Define campaign goals and how they’ll be measured

In order for your marketing campaign to be successful, everyone involved in the process needs to know exactly what you’re trying to achieve.

As a result, before you start planning your campaign, you need to set a goal for the campaign. Popular goals for marketers include increasing brand awareness, boosting revenue, attracting new customers, and promoting new products. But, yours should reflect the needs of your business.

Once you’ve set a general goal for the campaign, you need to make it specific and measurable. So, if you’re setting the goal of increasing sales, you also need to say exactly how many additional sales you’d like, how many extra leads you’d like to generate, and a timeframe for achieving this.

2. Define your audience

When you’re creating and managing a marketing campaign, you need to be aware of exactly who you’re targeting.

By defining your audience as precisely as possible, you can create a campaign that addresses these people directly and resonates with them. The more you tailor your campaign to your audience, the more likely you are to achieve your goals.

3. Decide how to reach them

In order to effectively reach your audience, you need to work out when and where you can reach them. This means understanding the channels they use and the assets they usually interact with. 

In a world where customers seamlessly switch from desktop to mobile and from social media sites to websites, this can be a time consuming task. However, knowing exactly how and where you can reach your audience is a fundamental part of any successful campaign. 

4. Define your budget

Marketing on multiple channels can be expensive. As a result, before you start creating assets for your campaign, you need to create a detailed plan that shows exactly how and where you’ll be using your budget. This should include a breakdown of how much you’ll spend on asset creation, advertising, paid media, and staff.

A larger marketing budget doesn’t guarantee success. So, make sure you’re spending money on channels where ROI looks set to be highest.

5. Create your assets

From email to social and everything in between, marketing channels are crowded with brands vying for attention. Due to this, you need to spend time considering what content will capture the attention of your target audience. You need to create assets that will set you apart from the competition and will appeal to the needs and desires of your target audience.

Once you’re happy with your idea and your initial asset, you’ll need to make sure that it’s tailored and optimised for each channel you’re running your campaign on.

6. Establish a workflow

At this stage of the process, you have all the elements of your campaign together. However, before you put anything live, you need to establish who will do what pieces of work when, and who will take responsibility for various aspects of the campaign.

When you’re creating your workflow, you should be as specific as possible about deadlines. The best way of doing this is to work back from the campaign’s launch date. Once this is set in stone, you can calculate when each stage of the campaign will need to be finished.  

7. Test and evaluate

Once your assets have been created, you should test them on a smaller sub-section of your audience. By going through this process, you can learn a lot about which assets generate the best feedback.

As well as showing you which of your assets is performing as intended, testing can help you spot potential trouble spots and trends. By identifying these before your campaign is fully rolled out, you can save time and money.

So, with each asset, ensure you’re monitoring response rates and ROI. You can then compare your results in order to understand what’s working and what needs to be improved.

8. Track and report your findings

You should continue to test and report throughout the entire duration of your campaign. This will help you make improvements as the campaign progresses, ensuring you’re maximising ROI and improving efficiency.

It’s best practice to track your customers throughout their journey. This includes everything from where they first interact with your business/campaign to where they complete their purchase. This will ensure that your understanding of how the campaign has performed in its entirety will be accurate.

What are the main features of marketing campaign management software?

As you can see above, the process of managing a marketing campaign can be laborious and time consuming. Thankfully, marketing campaign management software can save you time, simplify your processes, and amplify your results.

By using a campaign management solution instead of working manually, you can create and implement replicable and reliable processes in a fraction of the time and thus, also increase the frequency and consistency of your campaigns. 

In brief, a piece of software can help you create, manage, and automate multi-channel, multi-stage, event-driven marketing campaigns. A piece of software like this can help:

• Schedule, launch, co-ordinate, and monitor all your marketing activities across various channels
• Execute every aspect of your campaign at pace
• Complete some of your more manual tasks on your behalf
• Create templates that allow you to repurpose and distribute previous campaigns
• Automate parts of your campaign and implement rules that dictate who gets what messages and when
• Track the efficiency of your campaigns
• Provide actionable analytics
• Improve your testing capabilities
• Customise and personalise your campaigns
• Provide you with a complete view of every customer

Overall, marketing campaign management software will help make your job far simpler. It makes the process of setting up and managing a campaign quicker, and makes the campaign itself more effective. This is because the above features mean the software can help you:

• Define your goals
• Select your target audience
• Reach the right people, at the right time, and in the right place
• Personalise your campaign
• Improve your response rates and conversion rates
• Continually improve your campaigns
• Report on campaign successes

What is the best campaign management system?

In the modern world of marketing, campaign management software can help your business in a number of different ways. However, different systems will provide different forms of help, and the best campaign management software for your needs will depend on a number of factors. These include your goals, your budget, the channels you would like to use and the number of campaigns you’re running.

As a result, before you purchase any campaign management software, you need to ensure that it helps you achieve your goals. The best way of doing this is to make a list of everything you’d like a campaign management system to do, and then trial the software available.

Generally speaking, the best pieces of campaign management software help:

• Simplify the way you plan campaigns
• Manage multi-channel or omni-channel campaigns effectively
• Automate stages of your campaigns
• Create personalised offers that will attract customers or prospects back
• Allow you to employ event-based triggers
• Provide you with unrivalled access to customer data
• Allow you to complete real-time analysis of how your campaigns are performing

Of course, the more you’d like your campaign management system to do, the more it’s likely to cost you. However, if you’re running multiple campaigns a day or you’re taking charge of complex omni-channel campaigns, then pieces of marketing campaign management software that don’t offer all of these features are likely to be insufficient for your needs. Ultimately, these pieces of software will be ineffective in helping you plan, execute, and manage your marketing efforts. Plus, you may miss key insights and you’ll find that the process of running these campaigns will remain incredibly time consuming.

Here at Apteco, we believe that our software is best-in-class. Our solutions can help you find the right audience for your forthcoming campaign. Plus, they can also help automate stages of your campaign, personalise your campaign, and allow you to run vast omni-channel marketing campaigns with ease.  

If you’re interested in seeing how our software can help you, then book a one-to-one demo for your team today or download our free eGuide on “Seven top tips for best practice marketing campaign management” to learn more about successful campaign management.