What is Campaign Planning
Effective campaign planning is a core marketing fundamental and critical to success. Leading organizations invest in robust campaign processes and systems, ensuring their campaigns focus on core objectives and maintain a balanced mix of short-term and long-term marketing initiatives. The campaign planning process includes three critical steps:
- Campaign Planning: The systems and processes that bring together marketing teams to plan, classify, and prioritize all campaigns that will be conducted within a particular time period (called a “campaign season”). Campaign planning is strategic preparation, where marketers assess and analyze all campaigns collectively before building and executing specific campaigns.
- Campaign Brief & Mapping: The translation of campaigns into detailed, actionable execution plans. For each approved campaign, it details every customer touchpoint across channels and journey stages. It answers the key strategic questions required for the build.
- Campaign Workflow: These are the workflow templates in systems and project management tools that detail the steps to build and approve the campaign.
Services
Campaign Planning (Campaign Planning Nexus™)
Our anchor service – the Campaign Planning Nexus™ – is the strategic command center for orchestrating all organizational campaigns. It encompasses the systems and processes that unite marketing teams to plan, classify, and prioritize campaigns. This strategic preparation allows marketers to collectively assess and analyze all campaigns before building and executing individual initiatives.
Our approach combines deep organizational insight with industry-leading expertise, helping you shortcut the learning curve and avoid costly missteps:
- We begin with a comprehensive discovery process, conducting interviews across your entire organization to uncover the full spectrum of existing and planned campaigns. This includes initiatives from all departments that impact customer touchpoints, ensuring no opportunity is overlooked.
- Building on these insights, we facilitate collaborative workshops with your core marketing team. Together, we dive deep into your current processes, define the optimal scope for campaign planning, and align on strategic goals and prioritization criteria. This co-creation process allows us to tailor our approach to your unique needs and objectives.
- Leveraging our industry expertise, we then develop a customized campaign model that fits seamlessly into your existing systems. This model incorporates critical elements such as campaign classifications and reporting views, all designed to enhance your team’s ability to plan and execute effective campaigns.
- Throughout the entire process, we act as a strategic partner. We share best practices and use facilitation techniques and frameworks to take teams through co-creation processes. Our goal is to guide clients through key strategic questions around campaign mix, prioritization frameworks, time-bound campaigns vs. always-on activations, segmentation, performance measurement and more.
We invite you to learn more about Campaign Planning in our Perspective Blog article: Seasonal Campaign Planning: Fostering Collaboration and Finding Alignment Around Marketing Priorities
Campaign Mapping: From Strategy to Execution
Campaign Mapping translates high-level Campaign Planning into detailed, actionable execution plans. For each approved campaign, it details every customer touchpoint across channels and journey stages. Think of Campaign Planning as the architectural blueprint and mapping as the detailed construction plans. As MarTech capabilities advance, enabling multi-staged journeys, personalization, and large-scale testing, campaign mapping becomes increasingly complex and more important than ever to conceptualize and document.
For each approved campaign, the mapping process inherits and builds upon strategic classifications from the planning phase. For each touchpoint within a journey, it fleshes out core elements to ensure the campaign is designed well. These elements encompass such elements as messaging strategy, creative direction, share-of-voice considerations, behavioral and journey stage triggers, and testing/optimization strategies.
The result is a structured touchpoint map that serves as a comprehensive guide for campaign execution. These maps are essential for anyone building campaigns, but they play a crucial role as documentation, ensuring that campaign ideas conceived by one team are clearly understood by others responsible for implementation across various systems or channels. The mapping also provides a holistic view of all planned, live, and historic campaign and customer touchpoints and forms the foundation for campaign tracking parameter management.
Benefits of Campaign Planning and Mapping
Strategic Alignment and Customer-Centricity
- Align campaigns with organizational goals
- Develop integrated, multichannel and multi-staged campaigns that meet customers where they are
- Balance time-bound campaigns with “always-on” activations
- Develop a smart campaign mix that balances performance and brand marketing approaches
Data-Driven Decision Making and Visibility
- Use performance analytics to measure effectiveness, iterate strategy, and demonstrate impact
- Provide comprehensive visibility into historic, live, and future campaigns across functions
- Establish a core data foundation for campaign measurement and optimization
Resource Optimization and Prioritization
- Advance high-impact campaigns while eliminating or postponing low-impact initiatives
- Balance resource allocation across campaign types and channels
Cross-Functional Collaboration and Execution Efficiency
- Enable unified marketing efforts across organizational silos
- Provide clear campaign briefs with mapped customer touchpoints for seamless execution
Implementation Flexibility and End-to-End Support
C&E adapts to clients’ existing or planned project management and MarTech solutions. Depending on the client’s preference, C&E can either build the system directly or provide detailed requirements for implementation within the client’s preferred systems.
The below is a simple visual to demonstrate the interconnectivity of the end-to-end strategic campaign management phases.
