BASIC ELEMENTS OF DIGITAL CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT

Campaign management at its most basic level involves a set of planned activities towards achieving desired marketing objectives. As discussed in Chapter 6, in the section titled, ‘Digital Media Planning Stages,’ for executing any digital marketing campaign a firm needs to assess its 6S digital implementation state, specific business objectives, offerings mix, and present lifestyle stage along with an understanding of the kind of channels, target audience, and communication it wants to share.

Campaign management activities follow these first three stages of assessment, strategy, communication, and channel phase mix, to get into an execution mode and decide how marketing would be run across each of the chosen channels with a specific end-purpose. The ASCOR digital marketing framework supports creation of a high-level strategy for digital marketing execution but it is the channel-wise campaigns which are actually responsible for its tactical execution. In that regard, each campaign has to be thought through and developed in detail right from developing its objectives to running, monitoring, and revising it, based on regular campaign performance inputs and the specificities of that channel.

Sharing below are the seven stages for setting up a marketing campaign for any mix of channels:

1. Campaign plan: The first stage of campaign development involves planning separately for each chosen digital marketing channel. It starts with developing campaign objectives which include a high-level brief of the product, target segment types, campaign message, overall flight dates (run-time), and the desired tangible output in terms of response rates, website visits/leads, or conversions.
2. Campaign budget: The second stage includes all activities leading to development of the budget for each kind of campaign and channel, based upon specific product needs and overall digital marketing budget. Discussions should also happen well in advance on the bid/quote strategy which firms would want to adopt to make sure they win against competitors and to place their ads on top inventory at prime locations where chances of viewership and conversions are the highest.
3. Campaign set-up: This is the stage where actual operations work begins, first developing a campaign calendar and getting it approved internally before sharing it with the execution teams for implementation. The next step involves building and integrating target lists which are a combination of present leads, existing customers, and third-party lists. Marketers then need to plan and strategize the type of communication and messaging/creative tactics they would deploy for each specific channel campaign.Before campaign launch, marketers also need to make sure that all business rules for campaign placements have been put in place and communicated to the publisher, and inventory has been booked and confirmed. Finally, marketers need to make sure that all conversion elements like landing pages and templates have been created and tested, and necessary authorizations and approvals from various business teams obtained before the launch.
4. Campaign launch: refers to all activities towards launching the campaign across multiple channels and the campaign go-live parameters that need to be determined like bidding, geography, targeting, networks, devices, languages, ad extensions, advanced settings, etc., for effective campaign results. This stage also includes all manual activities related to campaign management (for example, keyword management and analysis for search marketing; trafficking and QA (Quality Assurance) for display marketing, etc.)
5. Campaign monitor: Even before the campaign has been launched and marketers start receiving daily and weekly data points, extensive metrics need to be developed and put in place so that all captured data can be effectively analyzed and monitored. In-house or external third-party tools can be used to build reports and run dashboards which once populated with campaign data are able to monitor progress and measure RoI at regular intervals (for example, How many leads have been generated? Is it in line with the weekly targets set? How many conversions have happened? Are we lagging behind?) Essentially, this stage answers questions on the ‘whats’ and the ‘wheres’ of campaign deviance during campaign run.
6. Campaign fine-tune: Involves investigating the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ to make each campaign successful. Campaign responses are studied, campaign variances analyzed, and accordingly, campaigns are optimized based on multiple techniques.
7. Campaign reconciliation: Finally, when each campaign is executed, marketers conduct post-campaign activities to measure success and check if various channel managers have been able to deliver impressions, clicks, and leads, as promised and negotiated earlier. For discrepancies (where output does not match intended RoI), make-goods (extending campaign beyond flight-dates or giving free inventory/placements) need to be delivered or discounts need to be given against the final payment amount. All these activities form a part of ‘billing and invoicing’ for the campaign.

We will cover these seven stages of campaign management in detail in the next three sections of this part of the chapter, but prior to that, let us understand the five key ways in which marketing campaigns can be executed by any firm:

1. Agency team: For large firms like Coke, Procter and Gamble, Samsung, etc., it is not feasible to run global and multi-channel marketing campaigns on their own. Firms have traditionally been dependent on advertising agencies (WPP, Omnicom, Ogilvy, McCaNN, Dentsu to provide a few examples) to help manage campaigns, develop creative ideas, deploy media planning, and ensure RoI, typically for a cut of the total investment spend. With digital platforms now forming an ever-increasing part of the spend, traditional advertising agencies have set up in-house teams (at the client premises, with supervision of the agency) and capabilities to manage digital campaigns in terms of final output and outcome.
2. Digital marketing firms: The next set of firms which support digital marketing campaigns are specialized or niche digital marketing outfits which work specifically on the digital side and are specialists in executing digital campaigns.
3. In-house campaign team: For small and medium-size companies (and those which are in new-age service businesses), it is common these days to have their own in-house design and campaign execution teams. These teams make extensive use of digital marketing products to manage and execute buys at their own level.
4. Product support teams: In a few cases, firms ask product companies to provide a platform and also support campaigns on their platform through product support teams.
5. Outsourced teams: Finally, a large number of firms are taking support from software and IT teams to help them manage campaigns. Key advantage is that unlike support on a single product, vendors can deploy multiple tools to run campaigns.