Driving a Campaign is identical to driving a car (not in autonomous mode!)

You drive to meet your friend waiting at destination X with some money, petrol, driving skills, a Google map on your smartphone. No matter how you drive (fast, slow, reckless (wouldn’t recommend though😉) you will invariably reach your destination. On reaching your destination, if your friend asks about the upside-down building on the way or the new hotel that was few miles before the intersection and if you just said, no, probably it won’t have a significant impact on you or your friend.

Now let’s talk about the campaign.

You have a goal, budget, skill, and the tools (Adobe Campaign, Marketo, etc.) to meet certain numbers at end of the Quarter / Year and you are following a structured approach/template to drive the campaign. At the end of the quarter, you meet your numbers sometimes and your manager asks what you could have done differently to improvise.

Now the stakes are high in this case unlike driving to meet your friend!  You need to justify what you did uniquely to arrive at the destination. You can start looking laterally, up, and down, not just in the direction of your goal, look beyond the Ps of marketing. Here’s a checklist that I followed which you can use when managing a campaign.

1. Competition Research/Reviews: Scan through reviews sites (G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, CNET, etc.) for vendors that compete with your own products/services, look for Analyst research papers available online in case your organization has not availed any subscription. This will help in positioning your product/service.
2. Market trends – Between planning and launch, sometime is lost. Follow current market trends in your product area so that you can alter your messaging to something more current. Stay relevant.
3. Get in your buyer’s shoes and identify broken journeys fast – Your campaign is just 1 interaction where the buyer is experiencing it for a few seconds, it should talk to the buyer in their language. It should resonate with what they want in the most effective way. Imagine the buyer’s journey by empathizing with what would you do in their place.
4. Verify if similar products are vying for the same shelf – If your organization has multiple products, ensure they are not competing in the same category. The messaging will be confusing for the buyer and will do more harm than good.
5. Simplify and don’t let your buyer go on treasure hunt – There could be 10 ways to reach your trial offer placed in hidden corners of your website, don’t discourage your buyer with complicated journeys. Chances are they will quit faster than you think.
6. Connect the dots – most important, take a 360-degree view of all the points above. You can only tweak your campaign strategy if you are able to connect all the dots and evaluate if the buyer can see value in your product. This back tracing activity will help you close gaps every time you do this exercise.

There’s more that you might be doing. Do share in comments if this resonates with you or have any more suggestions that might help budding campaign managers!

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