How to plan and execute a successful marketing campaign

Every ship needs a captain, and every captain needs a map to guide the journey. The map for your brand’s digital marketing journey depends on the marketing efforts you choose, including the multi-channel marketing campaigns you and your team put together and execute.

Ah, execution — the most difficult part of it all. Did you know that the chances of executing a great marketing campaign increase with proper project management? In fact, top marketers who run successful campaigns document their marketing strategies and use project management tools.

Below, we’ll guide you through what successful marketing campaign management looks like and how project management tools can help get you there.

What does great marketing campaign management look like? 

Marketing campaign management is a set of deliberate actions that govern campaign goal setting: creating a plan based on established goals, executing the plan through collaborative team efforts, tracking goal progress, and evaluating the plan based on results. Successful marketing teams use marketing campaign management to establish clear systems and streamline processes they can follow for effective campaigns. When done well, marketing campaign management helps these teams spot issues quickly so they can deal with them proactively and optimize their campaigns for the best results.

Establishing a solid marketing project plan doesn’t have to be complicated. Get the kickstart you need and streamline the process with Teamwork.com’s free marketing plan template.

6 steps to execute a successful marketing campaign

Your marketing campaign should fit well into your overall marketing project plan. But it all boils down to how well you execute your marketing campaigns. Otherwise, the marketing project plan will fall apart. Here are six steps that can help you carry out a successful marketing campaign.

1) Thoroughly research your target audience

The Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report reveals that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. But the sad truth is that some companies don’t take the time to truly understand their customers.

Ryan Gibson, founder of Content Lift, shared an interesting story in a podcast interview. One of his clients hypothesized what attracted their buyers, but Ryan’s extensive customer research found that the hypothesis was flawed: People had completely different reasons for buying. The company was spending 33% of their marketing resources on the wrong things because of their flawed hypothesis! It was only through speaking directly with customers that Ryan made this discovery.

While not every business needs this depth of research, there are several simple ways to learn more about your target audience:

• Website visitor surveys

• Customer surveys

• Customer interviews

• Chat transcripts

• Review mining

• Competitor research

• Talking to your sales team

Ideally, it’s best to incorporate all of these tactics for a thorough research strategy. But if you can’t, at least do a combination of website visitor surveys, customer surveys, customer interviews, and talks with your sales team. This is how you’ll better understand your target audience — and identify where teams across the company aren’t understanding customer’s needs and expectations.

2) Build an audience segmentation strategy

An audience segmentation strategy helps you group potential and existing customers based on common interests and defining characteristics. It goes beyond grouping customers based on where they live and involves using your customer research to group customers based on their pain points, the solutions they seek, and their stage in the buyer journey.

It’s the foundation of any good marketing strategy because it helps your:

• Content marketing team better understand how to create content based on each segment’s needs

• Paid ads team know which ad campaigns would be best for each audience segment

• Conversion copywriter create landing pages that appeal to the pains that motivate each audience segment

• Social media marketing team understand how to build brand awareness in a targeted way for each audience segment

• Email marketing team create email automations that resonate with each group of customers and lead them closer to a sale

But how do you know that the audience segments you’ve chosen are the best for your brand? Make sure your segments meet the following criteria:

• Measurable based on their size and potential ROI

• Accessible based on how easy it is to reach your target customers within each segment and whether those target customers can afford your product

• Substantial in terms of being able to actually purchase your product (not just being interested it)

• Actionable based on meeting the target audience’s expectations

3) Create campaign goals & milestones that align with your budget

Knowing your target audience and how it should be segmented paves a clear path for outlining your goals, campaign budget, and campaign milestones. Let’s start with campaign goals. Marketers who set goals for their campaigns are nearly four times more likely to be successful than those who don’t set goals. Campaign success and goal setting work in tandem.

Your campaign goals depend on what you’re trying to achieve over a period of time and how that aligns with the business's overall goals. Let’s say you’re working at a startup that needs to increase brand visibility to reach potential customers. You and your team have decided to host a webinar at the end of the first quarter. The goal is to have at least 500 attendees.

One milestone that could help you achieve the goal is getting a 10% webinar signup rate from paid ads for the period. The next step would be to figure out the budget. You’ll need to know how much the paid ads will cost for the period, the subscription fee for the webinar hosting platform, and the guest speaker’s fee (if there is one). You can only move forward with your plans if the budget lines up.

Organizing your campaign goals and milestones is much easier with the right tools — ones that allow your team to collaborate easily and clearly see how close they are to goal completion. 

Teamwork.com provides this essential part of your marketing tech stack to help your team stay on target, and on budget. Sign up with Teamwork.com to get started today.

4) Decide on your marketing channels

Marketing channels are the media you’ll use to get your message to your target customer. There are nine popular marketing channels:

• SEO and content marketing

• Email marketing

• Pay-per-click advertising

• Social media marketing

• Email marketing

• Video marketing

• Public relations

• Affiliate marketing

• Influencer marketing

Only big brands with huge marketing budgets can use all nine channels. You don’t need to spread yourself thin trying to cover all of them, but a multi-channel campaign can still be beneficial to your brand. Choose the best combination of channels that will help you reach your audience at each stage of the customer journey based on your customer research and campaign goals.

5) Execute your campaign

The four steps outlined above help you create a plan for your marketing campaign. But it’s the execution of the plan that determines its success. There are many moving parts to consider such as:

• Who will be in charge of each task?

• What will the campaign workflow look like?

• How will you know when each task is completed so that you know you’re getting closer to the goal?

• Who is the point person who oversees the entire campaign?

• What will the project schedule be so that each task can be completed in the correct order?

These questions boil down to one thing — organization. Research shows that organized marketers are 674% more likely to report success. But organization doesn’t come through numerous spreadsheets and Google Docs files. Marketing campaign management software acts as a central hub for organizing your campaign’s project schedule and workflow so that you and your team can successfully complete tasks.

6) Monitor your KPIs to understand campaign progress and success

Your campaign KPIs relate to the goals and milestones you outlined in step three. KPIs help break down your goals into various subtasks that are easy to track. They also help keep your team motivated as they see how their work contributes to overall goal achievement.

Let’s say your goal is to get a 56% conversion rate by the end of the first quarter. You break that goal down into these measurable KPIs:

• Conversion copywriter completes eight customer interviews

• Conversion copywriter uses the customer interview data to write the copy for three different landing pages (one for each customer segment)

• Web designer creates each landing page

• Marketing manager walks through the website with the conversion copywriter and web designer to design at least two variations of each landing page, ensure the CTA is clear, and ensure that there are no technical glitches

• Paid ads expert creates a series of PPC and social media ads for each landing page

• Marketing manager monitors the success of the campaign by the number of conversions from each paid ad

• Data informs the variation of each landing page that should be used going forward

The key here is to ensure that your KPIs are realistic and attainable. If they aren’t, your team will feel overwhelmed and will quickly lose their motivation.

Popular marketing campaign management tools

Once you’ve created a plan for your marketing campaign, you’re ready to use campaign management tools to take it to the next level. Below, we’ve compiled a list of six popular tools to consider when deciding which is best for your team.

Teamwork.com

Teamwork.com is a project management tool that allows you to manage multiple marketing campaigns with ease. It acts as the single source of truth for day-to-day project management and has helped teams increase productivity by over 40%.

Key Features

• Workload planner that allows you to see each team member’s work capacity at a glance

• Forecasting and planning resources for future time periods through a resource scheduler

• Milestones that make it easier to monitor progress towards goal completion

• Time logging so you know how long team members take to complete tasks and improve your billing processes

• CRM that helps you close deals faster and make client handoff more efficient

• Various team collaboration features that help with communication and keeping everyone on track

Create your own Teamwork.com account to experience these great features — and many more!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the go-to tool for monitoring website performance, website traffic, Google ads, and website goal completions. This isn’t surprising since Google dominates 92.49% of the search engine market. It’s definitely a tool you should have in your arsenal if you want to run effective marketing campaigns.

Key Features

• Easy-to-understand reports on your website’s performance

• Information on traffic sources so you can see which of your marketing channels perform the best

• Smart goals that help you bring link website activities to specific outcomes

• Customizable dashboards so you only see the marketing activities that matter most to your initiatives

HubSpot Marketing

HubSpot is a CRM tool designed to help sales and marketing teams sell more effectively. There are five hubs: marketing, sales, service, CMS, and operations. You can use HubSpot‘s marketing hub to host your website and blog, schedule social media posts, carry out email marketing activities, and much more. It’s a marketing tool used by over 143,000 teams in more than 120 countries, so there’s definitely a lot of trust behind it.

Key Features

• Imports customers into marketing workflows based on where they are in the customer lifecycle

• Advanced email list segmentation

• Drafts, schedules, and publishes social media posts while also tracking post engagement

• Analyzes your Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ad performance

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a marketing automation and email marketing solution. It’s mainly known for its email marketing features but it can also be used for website and landing page creation.

Key Features

• Marketing calendar that helps you keep all your campaigns organized

• Audience tools that help with personalization and segmentation

• Creative studio that helps you create branded content directly from your website

• Advanced email marketing automation, management, and analytics

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool that helps you maximize all your SEO initiatives. You can use it for keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, site audits, and assessing the backlink profile of any website.

Key Features

• Keyword research across 10 search engines (Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Daum and Naver, and Seznam)

• Shows estimated number of clicks for each keyword in search results

• Tracks backlink growth

• Gives insights into which of your competitor’s subpages get the most traffic

• Shows ranking history of any website for any keyword

SplitMetrics

SplitMetrics is an A/B testing solution that includes test scheduling, heatmaps, surveys, multivariate testing, and funnel analysis. The most important thing to consider when using SplitMetrics is whether you know how to do A/B testing effectively — bear this in mind as you explore what SplitMetrics has to offer.

Key Features

• Seamless real-time reporting

• Multiple statistical methods to choose from to use to test hypotheses (Bayesian method, multi-armed bandit, or sequential)

• Qualitative and quantitative metrics on user behavior

Clearout

Clearout is an email finder & email verification tool that helps you locate accurate b2b prospects on any domain, build quality email lists, maintain data hygiene, reduce bounce rates & maximize email campaign ROI.

Key Features

• Assured results backed with a confidence score to build a strong customer database

• Real-time email validation support at the point of capture on forms, landing pages, newsletters, chatbots etc via JavaScript widget, WordPress plugin & API

• Google sheets Add-on to validate data on the google sheets directly

• Team account option to sublet the credits

• Email/domain Allowlist & blocklist feature

Seamlessly manage your marketing campaigns with Teamwork.com

Your team depends on you to guide them towards successful omnichannel marketing campaigns. As the captain of the marketing ship, steering them on the right course means not only having a great plan, but also executing it efficiently using a project management tool. 

Teamwork.com is here to help you successfully complete your campaigns through team collaboration, task creation, milestone tracking, and many other features. Sign up for a Teamwork.com account today.