FIVE STEPS for your Integrated Campaign Planning System

Build a better marketing organisation
One of the most effective ways to ensure every campaign
delivers maximum impact is to adopt an Integrated
Campaign Planning System.
This comprises a cycle of five steps that enables
businesses to choose the most effective combination of
engagement tactics, media types, platforms and content.
This makes it possible to build a campaign plan that is
highly relevant to the customer segment, represented by
personas, and that makes optimum use of paid, owned
and earned media.
Integrated planning is an iterative process, with analytics
making it possible for organisations to identify and fine-tune
the tactics that work best. This process of continuous
refinement leads to improvements in KPIs and enhanced ROI.
The five elements of the Integrated Campaign Planning
System are as follows:

Step 1: Identify inputs
To succeed, a marketing plan must take account of all the
internal and external factors likely to influence the campaign.
Internal factors include business priorities and corporate
digital strategy. Among the external factors are the digital
landscape in the target territory – digital usage is subtly
different in every country – and the level of digital maturity.

Step 2: Define marketing objectives
CMOs are expected to drive performance in three areas. First,
they need to grow sales and revenue. Second, they need to
demonstrate marketing efficiency improvements in brand
awareness, improved customer acquisition and product
promotion. Third, they must boost overall brand value.
Unlike traditional above-the-line marketing – such as
print, radio and television – it is possible to quantify just
about every aspect of a digital marketing campaign using
KPIs. These include viral reach, likes, video views,
comments and shares. As well as providing an instant
barometer of success, KPIs assist in the progressive
refinement of campaigns. KPIs must be aligned to
objectives and should not be considered as objectives
in their own right.

Step 3: Customer experience
Who is your customer? What is their preferred combination of
social networks? What sort of digital journeys are they likely to
take and what will they do next? Personas – fictionalised
consumers built using data and insights – help marketers to
answer such questions. Personas represent key segments
within target markets and provide a higher level of granular
detail than traditional broad-brush segmentation techniques.
In order to build personas, organisations need a range of
analytic skills and techniques, including data analytics,
buying-behaviour analytics and analysis of customer interviews.
Hyper-personalisation of this sort makes it possible for
marketing organisations to optimise the customer experience
and plan tailored journeys that generate maximum value at
every touch point. This allows marketers to target social
spend where it is most likely to trigger a chain reaction:
an example would be using “paid” media.

Step 4: Execute and measure
A rigorous and timely plan is the key to a successful
campaign. Integrated planning needs to be a default
capability: good planning will ensure not only the successful
initiation of a campaign, but also that every opportunity for
refinement is acted on once the campaign is in motion. A
number of test methodologies can be used to determine
what works, and what doesn’t, throughout the campaign
lifecycle. The most valuable of these techniques are A/B
testing, multivariate testing, usability testing and customer
journey analysis.
Dashboards provide a real-time indication of the health
of the campaign, highlighting activity on each social media
channel and correlating outcomes with earlier actions.
The ability to visualise and measure everything – and then
to adjust the campaign accordingly – is a differentiator.

Step 5: Analytics everywhere
Analytics has the power to transform every facet of a
campaign, from initial set up through to in-flight monitoring
of customer journeys [see box on “Tools for Change”]. But
it also has the power to drive change in the way marketing
organisations function. The companies that get the most out
of analytics are the ones that develop new expertise and
tackle interdepartmental bottlenecks to ease the flow of data
between silos and across areas of responsibility. In short,
analytics can not only boost revenue, it can also serve as a
catalyst for a smarter and better-integrated business