Marketing implementation made simpler with production services
The initial stages of a marketing campaign are always an exciting time. You’ve already got yourself a great product, a generous budget in place, and a juicy sales target looming on the horizon. They’re the first steps to marketing success, and the world is your oyster.
Getting a product out into the world, however, is where the tough part really starts. We call this phase of your campaign marketing implementation – the process of enabling all the moving parts of your marketing delivery.
The implementation process takes us all the way from concept and design through to delivery and debrief of your results. Without it, you can’t get your marketing off the ground and the product will never see the light of day. Your client could leave for other pastures and you’ll be stuck with a bad reputation.
A great implementation process is structured around a clearly defined process, including careful planning, timelines, a rigorous leadership structure, and accountability. With these in place, you can ensure that the campaign is launched appropriately at the right time, in the right locations. This guide will show you how to get there.
Your 4-Step Guide to Implementing a Campaign:
Bring the right people to the table
Choosing the right people to work with is not so different from choosing any other relationship. They need to click with your personality, communicate and respond to changing needs, and invest in the shared vision of your relationship.
When picking new partners to work with, we like to focus on three fundamental areas that help us sort the best suppliers. These are industry expertise, transparency, and a proven understanding of your business goals.
When structuring your initial meetings with new delivery partners, try to focus on these key aspects and make sure they have done their research on you and your market.
We asked Groupbrand Account Director Sara MacGregor for her insights on working with partners:
“From my perspective, an agency should offer excellent client service. As an Account Manager, this is my best practice advice:
- Understand your clients’ personal goals as well as their business goals. What does success look like to them?
- Live the client’s brand and know the culture – understand their business and their clients.
- Always manage client expectations from the outset – communication is key.
- Never underestimate the power of a quality brief.
- Bring clients into the process early to ensure they champion your deliverables.
- Listen more, talk less.
- Don’t run the account from your desk – get out there and speak to your client face to face.
- Ask “how did we do?” You can never improve if you are not open to feedback.
- Be clear on why you are arranging a meeting.”
Assign tasks and timelines
You can view any extensive campaign as little more than a series of small tasks. However, never lose sight of the fact that each step will eventually contribute to the overall success of your campaign. You need to make sure that every task is carefully managed, with goals, timelines, attribution, transparency, and that prioritisation structures are properly identified.
The first step in task management is always getting your management platform in place. Whatever platform you use, it must have a few specific features:
- Global accessibility
- Task assignment functions
- Status change tracking
- Deadline setting
- Asset allocation and linking capability
In our experience, success usually comes down to one critical factor – timing. Try to make sure your time restraints do the following:
- Have realistic expectations
- Harmonise with other tasks
- Allow a margin of error
- Work with available resources
- Have contingency plans in place
Track and report on goals set
Once your campaign plan is underway it’s natural for most marketing managers to get bogged down in the day-to-day churn of task completion.
However, never lose sight of the fact that your primary function is to oversee the smooth running of the campaign from end to end, not to finish specific tasks in your timeline.
You never know when resource misalignment or a missed deadline could bring the campaign to a halt.
In order to keep track of the metanarrative of your campaign you need a stringent analytics and reporting system in place. This gives all stakeholders transparency over the project, and allows you to micromanage aspects that may be at risk from surprise costs or ill timing. Not only will you be able to see what the status and costs are, but also the decisions taken, variants selected and rejected, costs approved and tasks under review.
At Loveurope, we use a multi-channel marketing platform called Loop to manage all our product information, marketing content, client interactions, campaign planning and data. This 360-degree system allows global access to assets and project management tools, with the capability to rapidly adapt to new content types and requirements. It allows managers to control workflows, action content approvals, enable consistency across creative, and work through an in-built audit footprint for debrief and reporting.
With a platform like Loop at your fingertips, you’ll be able to stay focussed on what’s important – the health and wellbeing of your campaign as a whole.
Celebrate and learn
Once your campaign is live, it’s time to take a few moments to celebrate your victory as a team. Crack open the champagne and take a breather – the stressful part is over! Don’t forget to thank both your team and your client for all their hard work.
When it comes to work, however, we’re not yet done. It’s essential to debrief on the campaign and reflect on what went well, what challenges you encountered, and how you can do better next time.
What did you assume would work but didn’t? What took much longer than expected? What issues caused friction in your team? What were the small innovations that led to surpassed expectations?
Perhaps more important than even these questions are the final results of your campaign. The ultimate benchmark is whether or not the total sales made during the campaign period meet the expectations set by your costs of acquisition. Whether you did or did not meet your targets, figuring out why is crucial to your ability to perform on the next campaign.
Smaller key performance indicators, such as click-through rates, total audience reach, channel conversion rates, and individual platform ROIs can paint a picture of what went well or badly during the campaign. Use this data to pinpoint the crisis points within your creative output, delivery strategy, targeting or value propositions. You need to know where issues arose and how you can adapt your team output to avoid them.