Campaign management software: What can it do for you?

Campaign management software helps marketers automate the manual tasks of planning, launching and measuring the impact of their campaigns.

That’s important because there are a number of moving pieces to many modern marketing campaigns. Depending on the size of your marketing organization and the breadth of the campaign, people across internal departments (e.g., creative, media, brand, legal, etc.) and other companies (agencies, media partners or co-marketing partners) can all play a role in your campaigns.

Campaign management software will keep these stakeholders organized in preparation for the campaign. Once the campaign is launched, campaign management tools will help automate the data collection and insight generation.

Understanding the role of campaign management software

If you wanted to summarize the benefits of campaign management tools in one word it’s “organization.” The team members working on a marketing campaign need to be organized before, during and after the launch to be efficient and informed.

The right campaign management tools will improve collaboration and help teams move faster at each stage of the campaign, from preparing assets before launch to summarizing results after the campaign.

The challenge for marketers who want to better manage their campaigns and automate their manual tasks is that no true end-to-end, plug-and-play campaign management tool really exists. On the bright side, marketers can look for best-of-breed solutions that integrate well with existing tools and skill sets to build an ecosystem that meets their campaign management needs.

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Key features and capabilities of marketing campaign management software

Marketing teams will benefit from campaign management solutions that help them across the campaign lifecycle of planning, tracking and analyzing.

The more tightly the tools are integrated, either out of the box or through the efforts of developers or marketing operations professionals, the better the experience will be for the marketers who use them. Adopting a number of point solutions that cannot share information won’t create the type of efficiency teams are looking to gain from their campaign management tools.

Campaign planning and scheduling

Modern, multichannel marketing campaigns have many moving parts. Aligning all of the people and assets poses a significant challenge for teams, especially in the world of distributed workforces.

Project management tools from several vendors can be used to track progress, assign work and send notifications. These tools offer automations and integrations, as well as personalization capabilities so your team members can choose to use them in a way that fits their work style.

The vendors with tools that will help your team with its campaign planning and scheduling include:

• Asana
• Monday.com
• SmartSheet
• ClickUp
• Trello
• Wrike

Audience segmentation and targeting tools

Today’s marketing campaigns use data and segmentation to avoid the inefficiency inherent in spray-and-pray marketing tactics. This requires marketers to have detailed data on their audience and tools to help segment that data into lists.

Many of the well-known cloud-based marketing tools can build lists based on certain criteria. Many also include the functionality to engage with the list members via email or to create campaigns that are running on other channels (like paid ads) and connect to data sources to import data from those channels.

The vendors that make tools to help with audience segmentation and targeting include:

• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• Adobe
• ActiveCampaign
• Keap
• Klaviyo

Content creation and personalization

Many of the vendors in the segmentation and targeting space also offer the ability to personalize marketing outreach. Vendors in the customer data platform (CDP) space also help marketers craft personalized messages.

The combination of data and personalization functionality allows marketers to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, which is a powerful combination for influencing prospects.

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Multi-channel campaign execution

Vendors in the “marketing cloud” space also offer marketers visibility into their campaigns across channels, though it’s likely going to require some work from the tool’s administrator or a marketing operations pro to get this working.

Leadership teams love high-level, holistic views, so the fewer sources of data for your team to track down the better. You don’t want your team to spend valuable time collecting data from disparate sources to put in a slide deck for campaign updates and reviews.

Tracking and analytics

Speaking of campaign performance, some marketing teams will find their existing campaign management software cannot work with all of the data generated by their campaigns. If that’s the case, you can pull together reporting tools from vendors like SAS, Tableau, SmartSheet and others to help manage your data and monitor campaign results.

Benefits of campaign management software

Modern marketers will have a difficult time coordinating, optimizing and reporting on their campaigns without campaign management software. While the exact tools and functionality you need will depend on a number of factors, including your existing martech stack, your budget and your team, the right combination of tools will increase your efficiency and contribute to better outcomes.

Among the benefits of using campaign management software:

Improved efficiency and productivity

Some of the tools we’ve discussed here will help your team automate the often-mundane tasks that are simply part of marketing campaigns, such as deadlines and reporting. Others will help improve collaboration between the various roles that come together to create a marketing campaign.

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Enhanced collaboration

Planning a marketing campaign often involves an assembly line that takes ideas from concept to reality and then introduces them to the market across various channels. That requires some job functions, and depending on your organization, possibly several departments. Campaign management tools that establish deadlines and responsibilities ensure the assembly line keeps moving.

Data-driven decision making

Campaign management tools that collect and analyze data are important for quickly identifying how a campaign or portion of a campaign is performing. Having this data readily available allows for optimizations, such as diverting budget from an under-performing channel to an over-performing channel or making adjustments to creative units.

Software that helps analyze data also plays a key role in explaining the outcomes of a campaign to leadership teams who just want to know what they got for their investment in a campaign.

Considerations for choosing the right campaign management software

If you’re like most marketers, you’re trying to navigate lofty business goals, resource shortages and a variety of tools in a martech stack you inherited from someone else. Licensing costs will, of course, play a critical role in the decision to invest in any technology. Here are four other criteria you can use to help make sound decisions around campaign management tools.

Scalability and flexibility

Tools that are too rigid and can’t grow with the organization make for poor investments. Marketing is constantly changing, from the channels to the regulations that govern data collection and use, to new leadership with new ideas. You need to focus on tools designed to withstand these changes. A constant cycle and ripping and replacing tools will hinder progress toward your goals.

User-friendliness and training

Many marketing teams are filled with people who can do a little bit of everything. Deploying campaign management software with a steep learning curve delays progress but also creates bottlenecks when only certain people are capable of using it correctly. Everyone needs training when a new tool is deployed, so make sure the vendor supports it. But the easier tools are to use the better.

Customer support and service

Even with training, your team is likely to hit some snags along the way. Good customer service from your campaign management software vendor can help your team keep moving, share best practices and introduce new features and functionality.

One final piece of advice for marketers exploring an investment in campaign management tools: Look for the areas where your team has the most need and start there. If your campaign is getting stuck at the same point in the assembly line, then that’s your first area to address. And while software is certainly one way to solve a problem, don’t neglect other opportunities to increase efficiency. If it’s a problem with people or processes, software alone is unlikely to fix it.