3 Best Practices for Effective Marketing Campaign Management

Campaign managers play a vital role in the marketing process. It’s the campaign mangers responsibility to ensure that the results of any given campaign align with the objectives of the marketing plan — not to mention quietly making account mangers look good to clients and higher-ups.

In essence, campaign managers are the quarterbacks of the marketing department. They must understand the expertise and interdependencies of all the members of the marketing team and coordinate their individual contributions into a winning effort.

The primary responsibilities of a campaign manager focus on the development and monitoring of the campaign planning, implementation, and evaluation processes. Due to the complexities and surprises inherent in any marketing campaign, campaign managers must monitor a wide variety of tasks assigned to the client, marketing team and vendors.

Throughout the process, campaign managers are required to play a variety of roles ranging from marketer to project manager and negotiator. And to be completely honest, sometimes the roles of coach, bully and psychologist are also needed. With so many responsibilities and tasks to monitor, here are three best practices campaign managers can use to help keep their marketing campaigns on track.

1. Campaign Launch Meeting
This preplanning meeting serves to gain consensus among all them members of the marketing team and document all the factors involved with the progress of the campaign.

Campaign Launch Meeting Best Practices:

•  Ensure everyone involved with the campaign has complete understanding of their responsibilities and the overall scope of the campaign.
•  Develop a documented timeline for the campaign including milestones and dependencies.
•  Prepare a detailed list of specific deliverables and the resources assigned to each task.
•  Distribute a production schedule.
•  Establish the date and time of the next of the next status meeting.

2. Weekly Marketing Team Meetings
During the implementation phase marketing team members should meet weekly to review the progress of the campaign and any interim reports. Team members should share learnings and results to date and determine whether changes in strategy are required.

Weekly Marketing Team Meeting Best Practices:

• Highlight any changes to the campaign’s scope, functionality, cost or schedule.
• Discuss any anticipated changes. Identify the action steps and individuals responsible to accommodate those changes.
• Set the goals for the next weekly review, specific tasks that must be completed and any outstanding issues.
• Ensure that all interim reports to date have been reviewed.
• Summarize the campaign results to date.

3. Post Mortem Meeting
Each team member should prepare a post-campaign analysis. It is important that the team have the opportunity to review all interrelated events within the campaign and discuss results.

Post Mortem Meeting Best Practices:

• Review post-campaign reports and findings to date.
• Discuss all interrelated events within the campaign and the outcome from the perspective of each functional area.
• Evaluate the campaign process. What worked? What didn’t? Why? What would you do differently next time?

Of course, no two marketing campaigns are identical. And every marketing campaign has unique and unexpected challenges. Following these best practices doesn’t guarantee success. But adopting these best practices will afford you the organization, structure and feedback to necessary to more effectively mange your marketing campaigns, learn from previous mistakes and improve your future marketing efforts.