Any successful marketing campaign has so many moving parts that some things can quickly go out of hand.
Yet sometimes, that can be the difference between the success and failure of your campaign, so it’s truly best to have all the components organized.
To that end, we recommend using campaign management software.
In this short article, we’ll discuss what campaign management is, why software can benefit your small business so much in this area, and how to select the right software for your marketing needs.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
What Is Campaign Management?
Managing your marketing campaigns, also known as campaign management, is a multi-step approach to ensuring the success of your marketing campaigns.
You’d first plan the components of the campaign, then execute the campaign, track its results, and analyze them.
Here are the components of campaign management in more detail.
Audience segmentation
Selling to a broad and general audience is not going to bode well. You need a target audience with pain points that your products or services can solve. Then you’d market to those people.
That involves first segmenting your existing audience as well as any incoming leads.
Objective setting
What kinds of goals are you trying to achieve with this marketing campaign? Are those goals within reach based on factors such as your budget and historical data?
As you decide, you’ll create objectives you’ll use your marketing campaign to help fulfill.
Marketing channel determination
Marketing is an umbrella term that refers to so many unique types of marketing, from content marketing to social media marketing, email marketing, video marketing, and more.
Based on your audience, goals, and budget, you must next determine which marketing channels are the most appropriate choice for this upcoming campaign.
Campaign deployment
As you create and compile the materials that will comprise your marketing campaign, the time will soon come to launch the campaign.
Analytics tracking
Finally, you must use data and metrics to gauge how well your campaign performed.
No marketing campaign is perfect, and there’s always much to learn if you underperformed.
Read also: The Surprisingly Easy Guide For Email Drip Campaigns
The Advantages of Using Campaign Management Software
As we said in the intro, marketing has a lot of moving parts.
With campaign management software, you can take a more hands-off but still active approach to your campaigns.
That will help you streamline your campaign planning and deployment processes moving forward.
Here are some benefits of using campaign management software.
Automation saves time and effort
We all wish the day had 25 or 30 hours in the day, but we just don’t. We have to work with what we have, as difficult as that may sometimes be.
Rather than manually go through all the stages of campaign management as detailed in the section prior, you can rely on software to automate more of these processes.
You set the rules for automation so that using this feature doesn’t deviate from your marketing campaign too sharply.
Then sit back and allow automation to take care of the tasks you simply don’t have time for as you need to do things like sleep and eat.
Establishes repeatable processes
Although every marketing campaign is different, after deploying enough of them, you’ll begin to notice recurring patterns.
With campaign management software, if your processes are similar or even identical in some areas, you can create repeatable processes that you can rely on repeatedly to streamline operations and save time as you launch future campaigns.
Ensures message delivery
Using software like EngageBay for your campaign management allows you to adjust the email delivery rate, so your marketing messages are a lot less likely to end up caught in a reader’s spam filter.
The software will also deal with unsubscribes and bounces for you, saving you more time.
You’re also free to configure the emailing preference options so that you can follow all data protection rules.
Tracks the most important metrics in real-time
Why wait until a marketing campaign is over to see KPIs when you can do so as they happen?
Marketing software like ActiveCampaign or EngageBay will produce results about more of the metrics you care about in your campaigns.
These real-time updates allow you to swerve or even change direction entirely while your campaign is still underway.
Read also: 10 Lead Nurturing Campaigns From Top Brands Like Kate Spade
How To Choose the Best Campaign Management Software
Marketing campaign management software is a viable addition to your current campaign planning, but there are more options on the market than you would have thought. How do you choose?
Here are some factors to pay attention to in your decision-making.
Ease of use
If you and your team struggle to figure out the features of marketing software during your free trial, then it won’t be any better once you pay for the software.
You’re getting essentially the same version of the software just with more features, but the interface will be unaltered.
The easier the program is to use, the happier your team will be, and the more productive!
Automation
Campaign management software without automation just feels incomplete.
You’ll rely on automation heavily to guide your future campaigns, so triple-check the features list for each piece of software you’re considering, so you’re certain that automation is offered.
Team collaboration
You don’t work alone, even if you do lead a small business or startup. Thus, your marketing software should have a team collaboration feature.
In that feature, you should be able to assign or revoke access based on role and share workflows seamlessly.
Optimization
Campaign management software is about more than boosting the efficiency of your campaigns but making them truly better.
To that end, the software should include optimization features such as A/B testing, send time optimization, and subject line predictions.
Analytics
Without a doubt, a must-have feature of any marketing software worth its salt is rich, detailed analytics.
As we just discussed, these metrics will guide many of your campaign choices now, and in the future, so the data must be easily digestible and clearly presented.
Read also: 10 Best Trigger Email Marketing Campaigns (+ 5 Top Software)
Conclusion
Campaign management is an integral process that all marketing campaigns should follow so you check the boxes of what a good campaign should be.
Software exists to make managing your ongoing and future campaigns even more efficient, so be sure to take advantage!
EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software designed for small businesses and startups. You get a suite of campaign management and automation features — including contact management, audience segmentation, personalization, workflow automation, email templates, schedulers, drip campaigns, and so much more.
Sign up or book a demo and our experts will show how your business can benefit from using EngageBay.
