The Seven Steps of Campaign Implementation

When companies decide to adopt a formal campaign framework to improve their marketing performance, they quickly come to the realization that they need to follow a process. We’ve helped hundreds of companies do this. Here are the main steps to follow:

1. Goal setting. Before determining which campaigns to run, organizations must understand and agree to cross-functional business goals. The outcome of the goal-setting process is a set of vetted, prioritized goals that map to communications and revenue objectives that marketing can address. Proceeding from these goals, marketing can build the architecture for overall campaign efforts. Model suggestion: The SiriusDecisions Marketing Planning Process provides an in-depth means to thoroughly assess business goals and ensure they are coordinated with sales. A lighter-weight version of this model is the SiriusDecisions Marketing-Plan-on-a-Page Template, which helps companies document business objectives, strategy, priorities, goals and actions. Additionally, it can be used every step of this campaign implementation process.
2. Needs assessment. Companies should use buyers’ fundamental business needs to create campaign themes, rather than try to construct them around the products they want to sell. To develop these themes, identify the buying audience, its fundamental business needs and the ways that the product portfolio addresses those needs. Model suggestion: Apply the SiriusDecisions Buyer Persona Framework to build buyer personas using functional, emotive, decision process and behavioral attributes for a job role.
3. Campaign definition. Here is where you decide which campaigns to develop. Develop a hierarchy and take the first pass at allocating resources. This effort is coordinated by the campaign lead, and conducted by portfolio marketing and the communications team. External agencies are frequently brought in to assist with campaign theme development.
4. Campaign targeting. In this phase, campaigns are refined to address specific geographies, industries, growth markets, existing customers and channels. The number of campaigns might be increased to address distinct markets. The content strategy is developed to support campaign efforts across different target markets and go-to-market channels. Model suggestion: Apply the SiriusDecisions Content Strategy Turbine – a repeatable, scalable approach for developing an audience-centric content strategy that better supports business objectives.
5. Program planning. During this phase, program plans are created, and content and tactics are defined for each of four program families (demand creation, reputation, sales enablement and market intelligence). Establish program objectives that support campaign goal achievement, and determine program tactics that address obstacles and support all stages of the buyer’s journey.
6. Execution. During the execution phase, marketing must kick off campaigns in cooperation with sales, ensure that campaigns are on track and performing as expected, and gain feedback from internal constituents. This phase involves the entire marketing team.
7. Post-execution. As campaigns wind down, the campaign team should ensure that resources are still committed to ongoing pipeline acceleration activities – and maintain high-value information assets required to advance deals through the pipeline. In addition, conduct a campaign post-mortem to assess its overall performance. The results of this analysis are useful for guiding the development of future campaigns.

Campaign themes are determined by buyer needs. They include programs that span reputation, demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence program families. They run for a long time – often years – and require collaboration across marketing teams as well as the sales and product teams. Campaigns enable companies to transform from product-centric marketing to truly focus on customer needs and distinct customer business segments.

To gain a deeper understanding of the SiriusDecisions Campaign Framework and campaign best practices, download our Global Campaign E-Book today!