Create a Campaign

Campaigns capture the key sets of activities, and related investments, that you will carry out in support of your Goals and Metrics

Campaigns are critical objects for your marketing organization and in Plannuh. Campaigns turn plans, actions, deliverables and expenses into measurable results. This is where marketers spend most of their time.  It's what we do.  A Campaign is the car that drives you to your marketing destination. 

When you plan a vacation, it's a lot like planning a marketing campaign.  You pick your location (the beach, a large city, a mountain retreat), your mode of travel (automobile), spend money on necessities, pack the car with supplies, fill the car with gas and use your GPS to get you to your final destination. And just like in marketing the review of your vacation comes down to some key questions: Did you spend too much or less than you thought? Was your trip worth the time and money you spent getting and being there? Where can you cut or what might you add next time to enjoy it more? Should you have taken the trip at all? If you had to choose between several destinations next time, knowing what you know now, where would you go and why? 

Examples of marketing campaigns that drive results include hosting a customer seminar, attending a key trade show, running a digital awareness campaign, executing a TV advertising campaign, and so on. Anything that requires the coordination of multiple marketing activities AND has a measurable outcome should be treated as a Campaign.

You will use campaigns in Plannuh to define your marketing activities, collaborate with your team, plan your budget, forecast your expenditures, evaluate success or shortcomings, and learn how to make well informed choices about what to do next. 

Campaigns should generally be assigned to Goals: if you're spending a lot of money on a Campaign and it's not in support of a Goal, it may make sense to consider whether it's a good investment, or to assess whether you have defined all the right Goals and Metrics.

Campaigns and Child Campaigns

Integrated campaigns are a type of marketing campaign that have several related campaigns all trying to reach the same audience through different tactics.  In Plannuh's organization a Campaign can be defined as an integrated campaign type to which we would attach Child Campaigns (tactics or channels). 

Creating a campaign

There are several ways to create a new campaign.  Here are the ways you can create a campaign (in no particular order):

Create menu on the navigation bar

On the navigation bar click on the Create drop down and select "New Campaign"

Create button on the Manage Page in Table View

When you are viewing campaigns on the Manage page in Table View, click on the create button and select "Campaign"

Plus symbol on the Manage Page in Classic View

When you are viewing campaigns on the Manage page in Classic View, click on the small circular button with the plus symbol in it to the far right of the Campaigns label.

When viewing a Goal

When you are on a Goal detail page, you can add a campaign by clicking on the "Add Campaign" link at the top of the campaigns section of the screen. This method automatically associates (links) that new campaign with the current goal. In other words, the Goal becomes the campaign parent.

The Campaign details page

The Campaign detail page is broken up into two main functional areas.  The left side column features campaign information and budgeting fields and the right side features various sections of linked objects for purposes of measuring, organizing, managing, funding, and executing your campaign.

Essential Campaign information

To create a campaign there are several required pieces of information you'll need to begin.  You can't create a campaign without this information.

Campaign Name

Campaign names must be unique and should include as much information as possible to clearly describe the type, audience and purpose of the campaign. 

For example, the following "bad names" are not well formed because they could be duplicates (which are not allowed) and they don't really tell you anything.

Bad campaign names:

• Webinar
• North American Webinar
• Launch Webinar

The following are well formed names that allow your team and your management to gain some insight into they type and intent of the activity.

Good campaign names:

• Top 5 reasons to use spam blockers for enterprises, Webinar, North America, Q2
• Shazamm product launch webinar for customer to upgrade, WW, English, May
• Financial services webinar, for millennial homeowners, special offer, Q3

Campaign Type

The most useful (and required) way to categorize or group campaigns of a similar purpose is the campaign type.  Plannuh comes with a number of default campaign type selections in a drop down list. 

You may also add your own campaign types when creating campaigns to further customize your experience.  To add a custom campaign type scroll all the way to the bottom of the campaign type list and select <Enter Custom Type> and then type your campaign type name.

Segment

A segment is a portion of your marketing plan that has a single owner (with accountability for spend and results). Knowing and assigning the correct segment is critical because you, or your manager, may be responsible for not overspending or underspending your segment budget.  Plannuh needs to provide visibility into campaign activities, planned budget and expenses by segment.

If your campaign is designed to be used across multiple segments, you can define a shared cost rule that will split and attribute expenses by percentage across multiple segments. These shared cost rules will appear at the bottom of the segment list.

Owner

By default, the owner of the campaign will be the person who creates it in their account.  If you are creating campaigns for another team member you can change ownership here (as long as that owner is either an Admin or has Read-Write or Read-Only permissions to the assigned segment).

Optional Campaign information

To most effectively utilize a campaign there are several pieces of information you'll want to provide as your campaign progresses from concept to launch.  

Start and End Date

Entering a start and end date will put your campaign on the marketing calendar. Learn More

Allocated Budget

An allocation is the allowance, budget or target spend you are assigning to an activity or set of activities to be used for a specific purpose (such as a campaign) during a specific time period.  

It is important to monitor allocations against expenses to make sure you don’t overspend your budget.  In other words, allocations are what you intend to spend (planning) and expenses are what you are actually spending (execution). Therefore allocating budget for your campaign is a significant step in forecasting what you plan to spend on a campaign. Campaign allocations can be spread over several months and you may have multiple expenses against a single allocation.

For example, you may be creating a campaign for a trade show event in May.  Based on your best estimate, you think your total cost for that trade show is $10,000, so you would put that amount under Allocated Budget.  This amount doesn't actually reduce your budget by $10,000.  Only expenses are applied against your budget. Learn More

Parent (Goal or Campaign)

As your campaign planning matures you may find that campaigns may belong to a group of other campaigns, called an integrated campaign in marketing or a Parent Campaign in Plannuh, and/or also belongs to an overarching marketing goal.  The Parent designation allows you to form these campaign relationships by linking campaigns and goals together.

Assigning a Goal as a Parent -

Your marketing organization has determined that one of the main marketing goals for this year will be to "Increase Sales" measured in marketing contributed revenue growth.  The purpose of assigning a campaign to a goal is so that the metrics you are collecting roll up to the overall marketing goal.  You want to track revenue as a metric so you can measure all your revenue generating campaigns with an overall goal of increasing marketing contributed revenue from $120,000,000 to $135,000,000. $135,000,000 is the total goal and each campaign will contribute some portion of that revenue.  Let's suppose that a yearly recurring type of marketing activity is to convince your current customers to upgrade to the latest product. If you have a campaign like "Upgrade email to current customers" and you expect that campaign to contribute $7,500,000 to your overall goal, you will want to attach that campaign the your "Increase Sales" goal. You will also want to attach all the other revenue generating campaigns to this revenue goal.

Assigning another Campaign as a Parent -

As you are identifying campaigns it becomes clear that several campaigns should be grouped together to target a particular audience or have a common theme.  For example, you are launching a new product and you want to develop several campaigns around the new product launch.  These campaigns will utilize common messaging and assets to drive revenue growth. Therefore you might have a "Parent" Campaign called "Shazamm Product Launch, WW, Q3".  Under that campaign you may have campaigns related to upgrading current customers, acquiring new customers, cross-selling current customers that have a different product, etc. Each of these campaigns are child campaigns to the ""Shazamm Product Launch, WW, Q3" campaign. When you create a new child campaign under "Shazamm Product Launch, WW, Q3" the parent will automatically be assigned to that child campaign.  If you create the campaign using a different method, such as using the "Create" menu in the navigation bar, you will need to choose the parent campaign in the "Parent" drop down field to associate your new campaign as a child campaign.

The Parent hierachy using Goals, Parent Campaigns and Child Campaigns - 

Continuing with our product launch example the hierarchy and relationship of your goal and campaigns might look like this:

• Goal: Increase Sales
  • Campaign: Product Launch (Parent: Increase Sales Goal)
    • Child Campaign: Upgrade customers (Parent: Product Launch Campaign)
    • Child Campaign: Acquire new customers (Parent: Product Launch Campaign)
    • Child Campaign: Cross-sell existing customers (Parent: Product Launch Campaign)

Target Audience

This field is a free form text field that allows you to provide additional context to your campaign so that other members of your team can be informed about the target audience of your campaign.  This may help them with their planning and create a collaborative discussion about which campaigns are most effective for different audiences.

Examples of target audiences might be CTOs, millennial homeowners, parents with teenagers, enterprise organizations with less than $100M in revenue, etc.

Campaign Messaging

This field is a free form text field that allows you to provide additional context to your campaign so that other members of your team can be informed about the campaign messaging of your campaign.  This may also help you when testing messaging in various campaigns to the same target audience through the same channels.

For example you may have three different banner ad campaigns on targeted websites with different messaging to the same audience.  One campaign message might be "We are the top rated product on review websites", another might be "We have won several quality awards", and a final one might be "We offer the most value for the money". You can then track performance against expenses to determine the most effective campaign based on RROI.

Tags

Tags are a way to classify objects in Plannuh that are not served by other fields.  For example, let's say that some of your budget segments are defined by marketing functions such as product marketing, field marketing, demand generation.  These may all be grouped together in a segment group called Global Marketing. Since Plannuh has only two levels of segmentation in budget definition, you may need a way to find all campaigns related to field marketing in France.  You can create a series of geographic tags (UK, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) that can be applied to, filtered on, and grouped (by field marketing in France, as an example).

Attached Document(s)

Attaching documents is a powerful way to provide rich context to your campaigns.  Examples of such documents include messaging documents, campaign strategy documents, relevant market research, sales strategy documents, customer testimonials, etc.

Notes

This field is a free form text field that allows you to provide additional context to your campaign such as "Approval required by Jenny Smith in sales to proceed with campaign" or "Campaign messaging was updated on June 12.  See the attached documents for the latest messaging guide", etc.

Related Campaign objects

To create a campaign there are several required pieces of information you'll need to begin.  

Metrics

Metrics are critical to measuring the achievement of goals, campaigns, and determining ROI. When you create a Goal or Campaign, we strongly recommend that you add Metrics to it. The Metric should be something relevant and measurable that defines success. Plannuh is preloaded with some of the most commonly-used Metrics and you can also define your own using the "Custom" Metric. Learn More

Child Campaigns

There are so many ways that you can reach the same audience that, more often than not, a campaign is really an integrated campaign of many campaigns using different channels.  For example, you might want to create a campaign to target software developers to become aware of your company and its product offerings..  This target audience has several different channels that they trust for reliable information that may not be the same as consumer or other business audiences.  

As a best practice, a campaign should be targeted to an audience and child campaigns could be channels or tactics to achieve the goals of the overarching campaign.

Continuing with our software developer awareness example the hierarchy and relationship of your goal and campaigns might look like this:

• Goal: Increase Awareness
  • Campaign: Software developer awareness (Parent: Increase Awareness Goal)
    • Child Campaign: Github (Parent: Software developer awareness Campaign)
    • Child Campaign: LinkedIn (Parent: Software developer awareness Campaign)
    • Child Campaign: Stackoverflow (Parent: Software developer awareness Campaign)

To add an expense related to a campaign, click the "+ Add Child Campaign" link to the right of the Child Campaign section in the Campaign detail page.

Expense Groups

An Expense Group provides a logical way to group related expenses together.  Relative to a campaign, this is a handy organization tool but is not required.  An example use case might be grouping expenses for a trade show.  A trade show usually encompasses travel expenses and maybe you want to track these expenses by salesperson.

To add an expense group related to a campaign, click the "+ Add Expense Group" link to the right of the Expense Groups section in the Campaign detail page.

This is an example of the way Expense Groups are represented inside a Campaign detail page:

If you click on the "Travel" expense group you might see this on the Expense Group detail page.

To add an expense related to an Expense Group, click the "+ Add Expense" link to the right of the Expenses section in the Expense Group detail page.

Expenses

Something becomes an expense when your campaign begins to migrate from planning to execution. Let's return to the trade show event example we used to discuss allocated budget. As your planning progresses, you begin to get more expense details related to your trade show.  The trade show organizer has a published rate of $5,000 for the booth size and location you want at a tradeshow.  You have contacted your logistics carrier and committed to $3,512 for delivery and booth installation. At this point you would create these expenses under your campaign and you would quickly see that you have $8,512 or expenses against an allocated budget of $10,000. The expense amount reduces your overall segment budget by $8,512 and becomes visible on the Dashboard page and as line items under the Expenses page.

To add an expense related to a campaign, click the "+ Add Expense" link to the right of the Expenses section in the Campaign detail page.

Tasks

Tasks are a great way to keep the execution of your campaign in good order and to enlist the help of other team members when necessary.

To add a task to a campaign, click the "+ Add task" link to the right of the Tasks section in the Campaign detail page.

As tasks are being worked on the status can be changed to one of the following: In Progress, Completed, Blocked, Late, Postponed and Cancelled.

The Notes field in a campaign is a useful method of communicating details about the status of tasks.