Create a Campaign

Campaign

The Campaign is a vital component in marketing that captures key activities and investments to support Goals and Metrics. It serves as the driving force behind achieving measurable results. Just like planning a vacation, a Campaign involves selecting activities, allocating resources, and evaluating outcomes. In Planful for Marketing, campaigns are used to define marketing activities, collaborate with teams, plan budgets, evaluate performance, and inform future decisions. Assigning Campaigns to Goals ensures alignment and helps assess the effectiveness of investments.

Campaigns and Child Campaigns

Integrated campaigns are a specialized category of marketing campaigns that encompass multiple interconnected campaigns with distinct tactics, all working towards the common goal of reaching the same target audience. In the context of Planful for Marketing organization, it is possible to designate a campaign as an integrated campaign type. This integrated campaign can then have child campaigns attached to it, which represent the individual tactics or channels employed within the broader integrated campaign strategy. 

Creating a Campaign

You have multiple options for creating a new campaign. Here are some ways to create a campaign (in no specific order).

The Create option on the menu bar:

Click Create drop-down on the menu bar and select New Campaign.

The Create option on the Manage Page in Table View:

While viewing campaigns on the Manage page in Table View, click Create and select Campaign.

When viewing a Goal:

On a Goal detail page, you can easily add a campaign by clicking Add Campaign at the top of the campaigns section on the screen. This approach automatically connects the new campaign with the current goal and effectively establishes the goal as the parent of the campaign, creating a hierarchical relationship between them.

The Campaign details page

The Campaign detail page is divided into two primary functional areas. On the left side column, you will find campaign information and budgeting fields. On the right side, there are different sections dedicated to linked objects. These sections serve the purposes of measuring, organizing, managing, funding, and executing your campaign.

Essential Campaign information

To initiate the creation of a campaign, the following required information must be provided:

Campaign Name

Campaign names must be unique and should provide clear information about the campaign's type, target audience, and purpose. Avoid vague or duplicate names that do not convey meaningful details.

Campaign Type

Categorizing campaigns according to their purpose is crucial. Planful for Marketing provides a dropdown menu with default campaign type options. Additionally, you have the flexibility to add custom campaign types by utilizing the Enter Custom Type field, allowing for a more personalized experience.

Segment

A segment represents a distinct portion of your marketing plan owned by a single individual accountable for budget and results. Assigning the correct segment is crucial for budget management. Planful for Marketing allows visibility into campaign activities, planned budgets, and expenses per segment. If a campaign targets multiple segments, you can define shared cost rules to allocate expenses proportionally.

Owner

By default, the campaign creator is assigned as the owner. However, ownership can be changed if the assigned owner has the necessary permissions for the campaign's assigned segment.

Optional Campaign Information

To effectively utilize a campaign throughout its lifecycle, consider providing the following additional information:

• Start and End Date: Specify the campaign's start and end dates to mark them on the marketing calendar.
• Allocated Budget: Allocate a specific budget to the campaign for planning and forecasting purposes. Monitoring allocations against actual expenses is important to ensure budget compliance.
• Parent (Goal or Campaign): As your campaign planning progresses, you may find that campaigns can be grouped together in what is known as an integrated campaign in marketing or a Parent Campaign in Planful for Marketing. These campaigns may also align with an overarching marketing goal. The Parent designation allows you to establish these campaign relationships by linking campaigns and goals together:
  • Assigning a Goal as a Parent: When assigning a Goal as a Parent, you can connect a campaign to a specific marketing goal to consolidate metrics and contribute to the overall goal. This is particularly useful when tracking revenue generated by multiple campaigns with the aim of achieving a revenue growth target. For instance, let's say your marketing organization has identified "Increase Sales" as a primary goal for the year, measured by marketing contributed revenue growth. By assigning a campaign to this goal, the metrics collected will be aggregated to provide insights into the overall marketing goal. To illustrate, suppose you have a recurring marketing activity focused on persuading existing customers to upgrade to the latest product, with a campaign named "Upgrade email to current customers" expected to contribute $7,500,000 towards the revenue goal. In this case, it would be appropriate to attach that campaign to the "Increase Sales" goal. Similarly, other revenue-generating campaigns should also be linked to this revenue goal.
  • Assigning another Campaign as a Parent: When assigning another Campaign as a Parent, you can group related campaigns together to achieve coordinated targeting, share common messaging, and utilize shared assets. By designating a parent campaign, child campaigns inherit its attributes automatically. However, if you use alternative creation methods, you must manually select the parent campaign from the dropdown menu.
    
    During the campaign identification process, it may become apparent that multiple campaigns should be consolidated to target a specific audience or share a common theme. For example, when launching a new product, you may create several campaigns revolving around the product launch. These campaigns would employ shared messaging and assets to drive revenue growth. In this scenario, you can establish a "Parent" Campaign named "Shazamm Product Launch, WW, Q3." Under this parent campaign, you would include child campaigns related to upgrading current customers, acquiring new customers, cross-selling to existing customers with a different product, and more. Each of these campaigns would be categorized as a child campaign under the "Shazamm Product Launch, WW, Q3" campaign.
    
    When creating a new child campaign directly under "Shazamm Product Launch, WW, Q3," the parent campaign is automatically assigned. However, if you utilize a different method, such as the Create option in the menu bar, you must manually select the parent campaign from the "Parent" dropdown field to associate your new campaign as a child campaign.
    Note:

    The examples given throughout the information are intended to illustrate the concepts and guidelines discussed.
  • The Parent Hierarchy using Goals, Parent Campaigns, and Child Campaigns: Continuing with the example of a product launch, the hierarchy and relationship between your goal and campaigns would be as follows:
    • 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

The target audience field allows you to provide additional context about the specific audience you are targeting with your campaign. It is a free-form text field where you can describe the characteristics or demographics of your target audience. Examples of target audiences could include CTOs, millennial homeowners, parents with teenagers, or enterprise organizations with less than $100M in revenue.

Campaign Messaging

The campaign messaging field is another free-form text field where you can provide information about the messaging strategy of your campaign. It allows you to share the key messages or value propositions that will be communicated to your target audience. For example, if you have multiple banner ad campaigns targeting the same audience, you can describe the different messages being used, such as "top rated product on review websites," "winner of quality awards," or "offers the most value for the money." Tracking the performance of these messages against expenses can help determine the most effective campaign based on return on investment (ROI).

Tags

Tags are a way to classify and categorize campaigns in Planful for Marketing. They are used when other fields don't cover the specific classification needed. For example, if you have budget segments defined by marketing functions like product marketing, field marketing, and demand generation, you can create a tag called "Global Marketing" to group them together. You can also create geographic tags like the UK, France, Germany, Italy, etc., to filter and group campaigns based on specific regions or locations.

Attached Document(s)

This feature allows you to attach relevant documents to your campaigns, providing additional context and resources for your team. These documents can include messaging documents, campaign strategy documents, market research reports, sales strategy documents, customer testimonials, and more. Attaching documents helps ensure that all campaign stakeholders have access to important information and resources.

Notes

The notes field is a free-form text field where you can add any additional information or comments about your campaign. It can be used to provide instructions, highlight important updates or milestones, or share specific requirements or dependencies. For example, you can mention specific approval requirements or indicate when campaign messaging was last updated.

Related Campaign Objects

This refers to the concept of linking campaigns together in a hierarchical structure, where parent campaigns can have child campaigns associated with them. Child campaigns can represent different channels or tactics used to achieve the goals of the overarching campaign. By organizing campaigns in this way, you can better track and manage the various components of an integrated campaign.

Metrics

Metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure the success of your goals and campaigns. When creating a goal or campaign, it is recommended to define relevant metrics that can be used to track progress and determine ROI. Planful for Marketing provides preloaded common metrics, and you can also define custom metrics to align with your specific objectives.

Child Campaigns

Child campaigns are individual campaigns that are part of a larger integrated campaign or initiative. They represent different channels or tactics used to reach the target audience and achieve the goals of the parent campaign. For instance, let's say you want to create a campaign to raise awareness among software developers about your company and its products. Software developers rely on various trusted channels for information, which may differ from those used by consumers or other business audiences.

To effectively execute a campaign, it's important to target a specific audience. Child campaigns can serve as channels or tactics that contribute to achieving the goals of the overarching campaign.

Taking the software developer awareness example, here's how the hierarchy and relationship between your goal and campaigns might look:

• 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 track expenses related to a campaign, you can click + Add Child Campaign located to the right of the child campaign section on the Campaign detail page.

Expense Groups

An Expense Group helps to categorize and organize related expenses. While it is not mandatory, it provides a logical method for grouping expenses within a campaign. For instance, an SME Google Adwords could be an example use case for utilizing Expense Groups. In such cases, digital marketing expenses could be grouped together, allowing for easy tracking of expenses.

To add an Expense Group associated with a campaign, simply click + Add Exp. Group located at the right of the Expense Groups section on the campaign detail page. Within the Campaign detail page, Expense Groups are represented in the following manner:

If you click on the SEO expense group, it will redirect you to the Expense Group detail page, where you can find the following information. To add an expense related to this Expense Group, simply click the + Add Expense.

Expenses

Expenses are incurred when your campaign moves from the planning phase to execution. They represent the costs associated with your campaign activities. By adding expenses to your campaign, you can track and manage the financial aspects of your project. These expenses contribute to the overall budget allocation and are visible on the Dashboard page and listed as individual items under the Expenses page.

To add an expense related to your campaign, access the campaign detail page and click + Add Expense located in the Expenses section.

Tasks

Tasks play a crucial role in organizing and coordinating the execution of your campaign. They help ensure that the necessary actions are carried out effectively and allow for collaboration among team members. To add a task to your campaign, go to the campaign detail page and click + Add task link in the Tasks section.

Tasks can be assigned different statuses to reflect their progress, such as In Progress, Completed, Blocked, Late, Postponed, or Cancelled.

Notes

The Notes field within a campaign provides a convenient way to communicate important details or updates regarding the status of tasks.