Campaign manager guide

9 min read

In the modern world of digital marketing, proactively managing your marketing campaigns is essential. This is because the process can help you maximise the efficiency of your campaigns and boost your ROI.  

Today, marketing teams face a number of challenges when trying to align their campaigns with the goals of their business. However, many of these internal and external pressures can be overcome by adopting a marketing campaign management process. By building an effective strategy, streamlining workflows, and harnessing the power of marketing automation, you will find it easier than ever to meet and surpass your objectives.

Wondering how you can take your campaigns to the next level? We’ve put together this comprehensive campaign manager guide to help you. As well as telling you all about how our campaign management software can help you achieve your goals, we’ll explain what campaign management involves, the benefits provided by popular campaign management features, and how software can optimise your efforts. However, we’ll start our campaign manager guide by outlining a number of key definitions you need to know.

What is a marketing campaign?

Any definitive campaign management guide must start by providing you with the key definitions. We’ll start by discussing exactly what we mean by a ‘marketing campaign’.

A marketing campaign is a strategic initiative (or series of initiatives) that help your business achieve a specific goal. Common goals of marketing campaigns include:

• Boosting brand awareness
• Attracting new customers
• Generating more leads and sales
• Promoting new products or services
• Improving brand loyalty  

Generally speaking, a marketing campaign aims to get potential and frequent customers to think about a specific problem or issue they’re facing. Once the campaign does this, it aims to convince the customer that only the products provided by that business can solve these problems. Marketing campaigns can achieve their goals using a variety of methods. They can also be distributed on a number of different channels.

The success of a marketing campaign will be determined by how well it is created, implemented, and analysed. Simply spending lots of money doesn’t guarantee the success of the campaign. Instead, factors like correctly identifying the target audience, selecting the right channels, and implementing your plan properly are far more important.

As a result, in order for you to achieve your goals, it’s vital that you successfully employ a campaign management strategy.

What is campaign management?

Campaign management is the process of planning, executing, tracking, optimising, and analysing a marketing campaign. This marketing campaign can be used for any purpose. It might help launch a new product or event, or it may aim to promote an existing product.

In the modern world of marketing, most campaigns are now sent out across multiple channels simultaneously. For example, many campaigns include pushes on social media, email, printed materials, giveaways, and surveys. As a result, the campaign management process can quickly become quite complicated. Due to this, the marketing campaign management process is usually overseen by a campaign manager.

What does a campaign manager do?

Ultimately, a marketing campaign manager is responsible for ensuring that each campaign meets its goals and objectives. Traditionally, a marketing campaign manager is also responsible for overseeing and scheduling everything that’s customer-facing, including all copy and design requirements.

Although a marketing campaign manager will likely head up a team of marketers who will create assets, provide ideas, and work on campaigns, they will have the final say on decisions relating to the campaign. 

On top of this, they’ll also work closely with the sales team, external agencies, and heads of other departments to ensure that marketing campaigns run smoothly. Following this, they’re responsible for measuring the effectiveness of the campaigns and reporting results to stakeholders.

Finally, a marketing campaign manager is responsible for using the data they’ve gathered from previous campaigns to inform future activities. Using this data, they will make informed decisions about the effectiveness of past campaigns and how future activities can be altered in order to provide maximum ROI.

Why do you need marketing campaign management?

Marketing campaign management is important because the process helps you plan, deliver, and optimise your marketing campaign. In particular, actively managing your campaign from start to finish can make sure you’re reaching the right people in the right place at the right time. In doing so, you’ll maximise your ROI and stand the best chance of achieving your goals.  

Of course, not every marketing campaign is the same, so there’s no cut-and-paste solution for campaign management. While some small businesses may run an email marketing campaign in a single city (such as when a new store opens), a larger business may operate a multi-channel campaign in several different markets.

Regardless of the size and intention of your campaign, you’ll find that several key marketing campaign management features will help you maximise the efficiency of the campaign. By proactively managing your marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to:

• Analyse your results and optimise the strategy while the campaign is live
• Gain a deeper understanding of the goals of your business and how you can help meet them
• Track the results of your marketing campaigns and inform key stakeholders of your successes
• Develop a more informed strategy that is in tune with your goals

Of course, investing in campaign management is costly. However, it can provide phenomenal ROI when it’s utilised correctly. When you actively manage your campaigns across their entire lifecycle, you can expect to:

• Attract new customers
• Increase sales and profits
• Improve the customer journey and brand experience
• Increase product awareness
• Establish a brand image
• Improve customer retention rates

In addition to this, actively managing a live campaign can provide you with one key advantage: you can optimise and tweak your campaign while it’s live. As a campaign manager, you should always be aware that the landscape you’re operating in may change while your campaign is underway. After all, your company’s goals might change, the behaviour of your customers might alter, and your target audience may start to like different things. If any of these things happen, you’ll need to change your campaign.

In order to pinpoint any of these changes and pivot your strategy, campaign management is vital. If you’re actively monitoring your campaigns, you’ll find it easy to spot any shifts in behaviour. You can then alter your strategy to accommodate these changes and maximise your returns. After all, if you fail to spot these changes, you’ll end up targeting the wrong people or pushing the wrong message. As a result, you’ll waste money.

How to conduct marketing campaign management

The process of managing your campaign should be closely tied to your marketing campaign plan, which should act as a roadmap for your campaign.

Each campaign is different, but every campaign management plan should include:

• The goals of the campaign
• A definition of how success will be measured
• A timeline
• The audience for the campaign
• The resources required
• The budget required
• Any content requirements
• How the campaign will be monitored
• How the campaign will be reviewed, analysed, and reported on

As well as devising the campaign, a marketing campaign manager is also responsible for following through with the plan, making adjustments where necessary, and ensuring that everyone in the team is completing their tasks within the allocated time frame.

By proactively managing the campaign and staying true to the plan, you can ensure that the campaign remains focused. You can also optimise the campaign at each step of the journey and ensure that you’re achieving maximum ROI. 

What's campaign automation software?

Large businesses usually run multiple marketing campaigns on various mediums all at once. As a result, creating content, executing your plans, monitoring performance, and analysing results can be incredibly challenging.

For this reason, in the modern world of marketing, campaign automation tools are an essential part of any marketing execution strategy. They help you work much faster and will make your day-to-day work far easier. Plus, they can help you keep all of your materials in check, increase your chance of success, and assist you in executing a flawless campaign.

Pieces of campaign automation software handle routine marketing tasks without the need for user input. By automating repetitive tasks and monotonous pieces of work, you can increase efficiency and create a more personalised experience for your customers. 

Examples of campaign automation software 

There are numerous ways that your marketing activities can embrace the power of automation. Let’s take a look at social media automation tools and email marketing software to learn more. 

Social media management software (sometimes abbreviated to SMMS) can help you monitor inbound and outbound conversations about your brand. Even at its most basic level, this software allows you to connect multiple social media accounts and manage, monitor, and analyse interactions from a single dashboard. On a more advanced level, these pieces of software can monitor online conversations for brand awareness and sentiment. 

On top of this, social media automation tools can also allow you to schedule posts, manage your calendar, and monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns. With drag-and-drop functionality, you can share posts and reschedule them. In some instances, premium social media automation tools will even provide you with helpful suggestions for content ideas and will create reports at the touch of a button. 

Similarly, email marketing software allows you to automate segments of your email marketing campaigns. For example, you can save time by automatically sending triggered or timed promotional emails to your subscribers. Plus, this software also allows you to send personalised messages to your prospects and subscribers when certain conditions are met. By automating the process, you won’t need to send new emails each time. 

With these examples in mind, let’s have a look at the benefits of using campaign automation software in more detail. 

How campaign automation software can help

No matter what level of experience you have, campaign automation software will help improve your productivity and boost the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Even if you have clear goals, fantastic content, and a streamlined workflow with an accountable team, managing every element of numerous marketing campaigns can be incredibly exhausting. Thankfully, campaign automation software can help you. This is because this specific type of software can help improve every aspect of your campaign. 

Depending on the campaign management features it supports, the software can help you identify your target audience, decide on distribution methods, optimise workflows, and analyse metrics. On top of this, campaign automation software also helps you automate large aspects of your campaign, including the tracking, delivery, reporting, and analysis. This will ultimately save you time and stress.

By using campaign automation software, you can make sure that all of your campaigns are optimised. By giving you the ability to track your campaigns across various channels, these tools allow you to focus on what’s working for your business. They’ll also show you which aspects aren’t working, so you can discontinue those activities. This is particularly the case if you opt for one of the best campaign automation tools on the market. Although these are more expensive than budget versions, they offer a greater number of features and provide you with a granular look at your marketing campaigns. Thanks to this, you turn your data into actionable insights that will improve performance.

How Apteco’s solutions can help you achieve your goals

At Apteco, our campaign management and automation solutions can take your campaigns to the next level. Thanks to the great number of features they support, our tools can help reduce the complexity of managing campaigns and can provide you with informed and impressive insights.

Our tools provide you with end-to-end actionable data insights. In one place, you can create audience lists, visualise your data, and activate and optimise high-performance marketing campaigns. With our best-in-class software, you can ensure that every piece of marketing is relevant, targeted, and personal.

Our aim is to help you to create and manage marketing campaigns that produce outstanding results. That’s why, with the help of our software, you can create, manage, and automate multi-channel, multi-stage, event-driven marketing communications and personalised campaigns. In doing so, you can start building and distributing powerful and automated campaigns that deliver real results.

On top of this, we understand that your data tells a story. As a result, our software makes it easy for you to share insights and reports with all relevant stakeholders in a simple, visual online format. From ideation through to delivery and reporting, our campaign management solutions will be by your side at every stage of the journey.

Whether you want to target your customers more effectively, automate your campaigns, segment your customers, or transform your data into actionable insights, our software makes it simple.

Enjoyed our campaign manager guide and want to learn more about how our software could help your business? Book a personalised demo with the team today.