Marketing Campaigns

What Are Marketing Campaigns?

They are the foundation of lead generation and revenue growth for small businesses and large enterprises alike. They can be as simple as a series of four or five emails. Or, they can be quite complicated, such as multichannel campaigns that involve a combination of email marketing, social media, web site content, SMS marketing, telephone outreach, and more. The overall purpose is to raise awareness in the market and generate demand for your product or service so that prospects think of your brand first and foremost when they decide to look for a solution to common business needs. For the most effective and engaging campaigns, it’s important to have a system that supports various types of outreach, such as Agile CRM’s multichannel campaigns.

Finding and engaging new leads, then nurturing them through the various stages of the sales cycle is a slow process that takes a lot of thought, time and patience. Sometimes, a lead you market to is not ready to buy. But when that is the case, you don’t just forget about them and move on to the leads that are ready to make a buy decision. Rather, you route them into a drip campaign that keeps your brand front-of- mind so that when they do get to that point, your name is the first that comes to their mind. Learn more about drip campaigns.

What Are the Stages of a Marketing Campaign?

A good way to think about how your campaign plays out over time, is to think of it as a story you are telling, with a beginning and an end. You wouldn’t start a story with the climax, because: 1) the audience has no context to understand why that climax is important, and 2) they wont really care about the climax if they have not developed an attachment to the characters. The characters in this case are the individual reasons why your product will make their life easier, and the climax is the sum total of all those reasons, adding up to the realization that they need your product or service.

So, take aims to develop your campaign so that it tells a story over time and slowly moves to a climax. To put it simply, you can think of the stages of a marketing campaign as: 1) convince them they have a need, 2) illustrate to them how your product or service solves for that need, 3) prove to them that your solution will better serve them than those of competitors, and 4) convince them to take a closer look, through a live demo or a direct, one-on- one conversation with your sales team. Again, once they move to sales, your job is over and your work has been a success. Then it’s up to sales to do what they do best: close a deal. Read about forming digital marketing strategy.

How Do You Automate Your Campaign?

Again, a good marketing automation solution—such as Agile CRM, which provides tons of marketing automation features that help streamline the execution of your campaign—is needed to be successful. It completes all of the administration behind the scenes and allows you to be much more dynamic with your approach.

Let’s say your campaign consists of 10 emails that tell a story over time. Marketing automation lets you write them all beforehand, include your calls to action in each email, and set the system to send them to your target leads at set intervals of time. Then you leave it and the system does the rest. Now you set up your scoring triggers so that each time a desirable action takes place, the system automatically scores the lead behind the scenes. You also set alerts to go to sales once a lead is qualified, so that your reps can follow up with them while they are engaged and ready to speak to you. That is a simplified version of how to automate a campaign. In reality, you can make your campaign as complicated or simple as you like, and there are tons of ways that marketing automation can help you do this. Check out Agile CRM’s marketing automation capabilities to learn more about this aspect of a successful campaign.

What Are the Benefits of a Marketing Campaign?

For the most part, we’ve already touched on these above. To reiterate the major ones: it lets you make the most of your limited opportunity to connect with leads. If you start with the climax, you may lose your only chance to engage them… and once they are gone, you might never get their attention again. Read more about lead generation. It improves alignment between marketing and sales by allowing marketing to nurture leads until they are qualified and ready, so that your sales team doesn’t waste time on dead-end leads.

When you use an all-in- one CRM, sales and marketing automation solution such as Agile CRM, it also keeps everyone on the same page by letting them all work off of the same data—see for example how Agile CRM provides 360-degree contact views that let marketing and sales see every touch point that each lead had with you, all displayed on a chronological timeline. This is a huge boon to collaboration and saves everyone involved time by eliminating the overlap that comes from sales and marketing working in silos. But the most important benefit of a strong marketing campaign that’s automated and planned well from the start, is that it makes everyone more productive in carrying out their respective part of the process. And this, of course, drives lead acquisition, increases lead conversion, and allows you to close more deals, which drives revenue growth and business expansion.

How Do You Manage Marketing Campaigns?

One of the most important parts of managing one is how well you plan it. It’s important to start off with a clearly defined set of goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) so that everyone who will be working to bring it to fruition, and manage it as it goes, is on the same page. Nothing is more detrimental to the success of a marketing campaign than a lack of alignment across your teams.

You want to start by defining your target audience and developing your campaign structure and strategy according to that audience’s interests and needs. Simply put, your campaign needs to be targeted to a specific segment of your audience in order to be successful. Once you target your audience, you can develop a message that resonates well with their needs and interests, which makes it much more effective in converting leads. Once your message and audience are defined, it will be much easier to develop content that aligns with those two things.

Next you want to plan out every touch point that will be involved. These touch points can be emails, social media posts, or any other element of a multichannel campaign. The way you manage these depends on how you are executing your overall strategy. It’s definitely advisable to be using an end-to- end CRM, sales and marketing automation solution, like Agile CRM. This is so helpful because it tracks every interaction that each lead has with you, including opening emails, visiting your landing pages, completing forms or other calls-to- action, and so on. With a good software system in place to manage this, you will be able to score leads for each of these actions, with the goal of them scoring high enough to pass your lead qualification threshold, at which time they are passed off to your sales team. This is how you measure success in a marketing campaign—each lead that you qualify is a success. After they are passed over to sales, your job is done.