Campaign Planning and Budgeting

The first two stages of campaign management involve firms developing initial planning and taking decisions on overall and channel-specific budget that they would want to spend on digital campaigns. This is crucial to make sure marketers have strong insights into the kind of campaigns they want to run and the type of RoI they would expect from their spend.

Key activities for campaign planning include:

1. Campaign objectives: As we saw earlier in Chapter 7 section titled, ‘Basics of Lead Generation and Conversion Marketing,’ the key campaign objective for any firm is to help generate leads who could then be further converted to customers to execute a sales transaction. The company needs to develop different sets of strategies and objectives for each of its campaigns depending on their specific needs and the type of channels which would best help accomplish those needs. Once the channels are chosen, firms should develop specific goals for each campaign to achieve desired actions and ensure that each channel supports the other across the marketing life cycle.
2. Target market: For running any campaign it is crucial that its ‘Target Market’ has already been clearly identified and target personas created to help execution teams develop the right kind of message/creative without wasting spend or impressions on non-targeted audience. It is also important that the goals set above are representative of the nature of target market, and, are achievable.
3. Determining flight dates: The third key activity involves deciding on flight dates (campaign run dates) as this would finally determine the impact which needs to be generated through the campaign and targets that need to be achieved at regular intervals to ensure that the campaign is successful.
4. Target output: Equally important is to decide on the kind of output that is expected from the campaign and what needs to be measured to interpret its success. In case of a branding campaign, it might suffice that the population base of a specific segment is reached, while in the case of a conversion-led campaign, final sales figures are crucial. Also, specific set of metrics, data-capturing techniques and dashboards need to be created to analyze conversions and measure RoI.
5. Resource identification: Finally, after all the campaign details have been resolved, firms need to look at how they would want to get campaigns delivered—through an agency, in-house, outsourced, etc—and what kind of resources need to be deployed to ensure that campaigns run smoothly and maintain the expected quality and effectiveness. There also needs to be a process defined and approved for resources and targets set for their regular performance.