When you’re planning a marketing or advertising campaign, you need a strong framework in place. You’ll have to:
- Manage a complex timeline for creating and publishing your ads
- Build a system for sharing resources with different parts of your marketing team
- Ensure you’re producing and proofing your assets as part of a unified campaign
- Choose strategies to measure the results of the campaign so you can prove its value
- Stay responsive if circumstances change over the lifetime of the campaign
Let’s be upfront: it’s incredibly difficult to manage this many moving parts without using software.
If your team is small, campaign software helps you power through repetitive tasks so you can produce more assets and reach a wider audience, even with limited resources. If you have a larger marketing division with subteams for different channels, a platform will centralize your work to create a single source of truth.
So, in this guide, I’ll take you through six steps to plan an effective marketing campaign, with plenty of insights into the features that can make the process more efficient.
These steps include:
- Setting your campaign goals and objectives
- Developing your understanding of your target audience
- Calculating your budget
- Generating ideas and developing a campaign plan
- Producing and repurposing marketing assets
- Implementing your plan and measuring the results
Finally, I’ll introduce you to the features of Wrike’s marketing campaign planning template, which can help you plan and execute an impactful campaign and build your brand.
1. Refine your campaign goals and objectives
Your goals are the foundation of every decision you make for your campaign, so it’s important to set them (and share them) before you do any further planning.
To set goals for a new campaign, look at what your marketing strategy has achieved in the past — like getting your website traffic to a certain point, increasing online sales, or selling out an event. These results are a good starting point for setting fresh, specific goals for your new campaign. Consider which of these results has been most beneficial for your company and decide to build on that success.
Alternatively, you could identify areas where there are still gaps — like demographics where your brand awareness is still lower than your competitors — and direct your new campaign toward that group.
It’s important to be detailed in your goal setting. A crystal-clear objective gives your team something to rally around and makes it easier to measure your results at the end of the campaign.
In fact, the best way to think about your campaign objectives is in terms of SMART goals with relevant KPIs. In other words, your objectives should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, and you should have a corresponding strategy to show how well your campaign is performing.
In the context of marketing and advertising, this could mean:
- Increasing organic traffic to your website by 15% by the end of the next quarter
- Measured by using website analytics to track the results of your SEO strategy and your link building
- Expanding your social media following by 10% by the end of the campaign
- Using management tools to measure both the number of new followers you have and the level of engagement your posts are seeing
- Generating 10 qualified leads from a new eBook or webinar resource
- Measured by CRM data and surveys for new customers
All these goals are specific, easy to measure, and should give you a clear idea of the ROI your marketing campaigns are seeing. If you’re struggling to narrow your goals and decide which is the most relevant, try considering your marketing strategy in the context of your wider business goals.
For additional resources on goal setting in project management, check out Wrike’s guide: Goal-Setting Theory and Frameworks.
2. Get a deeper understanding of your target audience
Even if you already have a detailed and nuanced understanding of your target audience, the most successful marketing campaigns start by going deeper.
For example, while your software company might target small-business owners in a certain region, a marketing campaign can be more effective if you zoom in and create buyer personas for owners in specific industries or with different levels of experience.
To create these buyer personas, look at your analytics data to determine your audience’s understanding of your business, how they’ve engaged with you in the past, and how likely they are to buy a new or existing product.
It’s particularly helpful to consider:
- Pain points, so you can highlight the value propositions that connect with this section of your audience
- Demographics and psychographics, so you can create content that aligns with your customers’ interests, opinions, values, and lifestyles
- Brand perception, so you can tailor your content to inform your customers at different points in your sales funnel
- Response to existing campaigns, so you can keep the messaging that’s working to build your brand and generate new ideas to support it
- Industry trends, so that you can differentiate yourself from your competitors
By considering your target audience from all these angles, you can plan more memorable and engaging content and drive better campaign results.
Choosing the best channels to reach your target audience
This deeper understanding of your target audience will also help you choose the best channels to roll out your marketing campaign.
For example, when your goal is to increase sales in a certain demographic, you can identify the media channels where they’re most likely to see your content and either expand into or double down on that area.
It’s particularly important to choose marketing channels that suit your audience because effective campaign materials have to be created or repurposed for each channel, and you’ll need to allocate resources accordingly. An image that works well for a billboard or TV spot won’t necessarily catch someone’s attention as a search engine ad. Likewise, content that suits a professional networking site like LinkedIn might not grab attention on a channel your audience uses in their free time, like Instagram or Facebook.
Understanding the type of content you need to create to reach your target audience is crucial to everything from your budget to your timeline, so it’s important to make these decisions early in your campaign planning.
3. Determine your campaign budget
Once you know where you want to meet your audience, how long you want your campaign to run, and what you want to achieve, you can finalize your campaign budget and finance management strategy.
Depending on the intended reach of your campaign, your budget may need dozens of lines to build an accurate picture of how you’ll allocate your resources.
For example, imagine you’re running a multimedia, multichannel campaign based on research you’ve done to prove the results of your new product. In this case, your budget will include the amount allocated to each advertising platform and also:
- Staffing, including your in-house creative team and any freelancers or agencies you’ll work with to produce your marketing assets (this includes costs for influencer marketing)
- Asset production, which could include copywriting, scriptwriting, graphic design, photography, videography, post-production, and podcasting
- Market research, which could include the cost of running focus groups or A/B testing different concepts for your ads
- Software to manage your campaign, including any project management tools you plan to use and your analytics tools
- Website upgrades or SEO optimization ahead of your campaign launch
- Legal considerations, including writing privacy policies and checking your research claims to ensure they comply with the latest legal regulations
The budget you produce for your campaign should include a detailed breakdown of all of these costs and information to justify expenses. 
4. Generate ideas and develop your campaign plan
Whether you’re running a campaign for your own company or developing a proposal for a client, you’ll need a detailed project plan to outline the assets you can produce with the resources available, as well as the project timeline. Once you’ve set the parameters I discussed above, you can create a solid campaign plan document and send it for approval.
Your campaign plan should include:
- Your objectives and ideal outcomes, including a strategy for measuring progress and determining the overall success of the campaign
- The research you’ve done on your audience and the current market
- Your proposed positioning and core message for the campaign, including drafts, mockups, or examples of the content you plan to produce
- The channels you’ll target and your content strategy for each platform
- Your team and the roles they’ll play at each stage
- The tools and resources your team will use to create and execute the campaign
- Your plan for optimizing the campaign based on ongoing performance
- Your timeline
- Your budget
- Risk analysis and strategies for risk mitigation
Let’s look at how this plan could translate into three different types of marketing campaign plans:
Example 1: Brand awareness campaign plan
First, imagine a new company planning a brand awareness campaign before launching its product line.
This campaign plan will show how you decided on the product features to highlight and how you’ll use them to establish brand identity. You’ll show why these features will appeal to the customer and how they fit into a gap in the market (or build on a trend). This plan will also include strategies for creating an engaged community around the brand so you can increase sales and repeat customers over time.
As well as laying out strategies for various online channels and influencer marketing to grow your audience quickly, this marketing plan might also include information on a launch event or popup to engage more potential customers.
In terms of risk assessment, you’ll show an awareness of how saturated the market is already, how this could affect sales, and how you plan to build trust (not just interest) in a brand-new product.
Example 2: Lead generation campaign plan
Next, imagine an existing company needs more high-quality leads to expand its customer base. Instead of merely raising awareness scores or gaining followers, this campaign needs to move customers down the marketing funnel, capturing contact information to pass on to the sales team.
Here, your plan will focus on creating value-driven offers for the platforms where you can connect with potential customers. You’ll show how you put these offers together based on the customers’ pain points and the areas where their current solutions are lacking.
In contrast to the brand awareness campaign, you might devote more resources to your website’s landing page, email marketing, and PPC campaigns. This will also help you measure the campaign’s success based on conversion rates and email open/click-through rates, which will help you calculate the cost per lead at the end of the campaign.
Example 3: Event marketing campaign
Finally, imagine marketing an event like a conference. Here, your goal is to maximize attendance, increase engagement and participation, and ensure that the event has an impact in the long term.
Your campaign plan will lay out your strategy for targeting professionals within your industry through countdowns on your website and social media channels, email marketing, and ads or press releases in industry publications. When you create your marketing materials, you’ll focus on showcasing the value a ticket offers, including insights from speakers, networking opportunities, and the overall experience. Your goal is to generate excitement around the event (and, to an extent, FOMO).
In terms of KPIs, you’ll focus on advance ticket sales and then on attendance rates, attendee feedback, and leads generated as a result of the conference. These metrics can all help you establish whether you’ve established a reputation for thought leadership in your industry.
Whatever your campaign plan, it’s important to end this stage with a kickoff meeting to discuss your goals, strategy, and timeline. Once your team is on the same page and has the resources they need, you can get straight to work on producing your campaign assets. 
5. Start producing your marketing assets
Generally speaking, your team will have to produce a high number of separate marketing assets to populate your calendar and fulfill your campaign objectives. During the next stage of planning, you’ll start to delegate these individual tasks and build up your collection of assets.
Unless you’re a small team running a very short campaign, it’s difficult to complete this preparation stage without using some kind of creative project management software.
For example, you’ll need a system to make sure the assets you’re producing meet the specifications laid out in your plan, and that they all align with your brand voice to build a unified message. Plus, if you have subteams working on the assets for different channels (for example, a social media team vs. a website team vs. a video team), they’ll need to share and repurpose files to fit the channels where they’ll be published.
The best way to approach this stage is with:
- A fixed asset production and approval workflow
- A robust system for file management and version control
Software (like our platform, Wrike) streamlines asset production with features like:
- Templates for workspaces, tasks, and design assets, which reduce the amount of time your team spends on repetitive tasks, like setting up each visual in a collection
- Customizable proofing, review, and approval workflows, so someone with approval authority gives every asset the stamp of approval before it goes live
- Shared folders and file management solutions, which break down information silos and give team members access to the files they need
- Version control, to avoid time wasted by working on an outdated version of a file
- Powerful integrations with the tools your creative teams use to produce assets, so you can close gaps in your workflow and action feedback more quickly
With Wrike, each new item can be visualized as a template task, with a card featuring survey responses and an image submitted by the customer. This task can include a template workflow, with task-based stages like:
- Backlog
- Writing
- In review
- Scheduled
- Published
What’s more, these tasks can be cross-tagged in Wrike, which allows them to exist in different team spaces (like your content calendar and your web team’s workspace) without being duplicated. 
6. Implement your plan and measure the results
Some teams consider the planning stage complete once their first campaign posts go live. However, you can also continue “planning” your campaign as you make adjustments in response to ongoing analytics and customer feedback.
The final stage of campaign planning is finding a solution to report on and measure the results your content is seeing. When you can monitor these results in real time — using the KPIs you set right back in the initial stages — you’ll be able to prove your campaign’s success to your clients or managers, and uncover insights to help you plan more effective campaigns in the future.
Key tools for campaign analysis
To measure your campaign results accurately, look for tools to help you analyze your performance from several different angles over the entire lifetime of the campaign.
- To measure your progress: Keep a live overview of your campaign timeline to ensure the assets you need are ready when you need them. For some teams, this will be a linear roadmap of all the tasks that go into producing a video ad, visualized as a Gantt chart to keep them on track. For others, it could be a Kanban board showing where all the individual assets they’re producing currently sit in the workflow.
- To measure engagement: Social media management tools track both impressions and engagements to give you an accurate impression of cost per click.
- To create reports: Tools like Wrike sift through your project data to update you on the headline results of your campaign. By taking these reports and drilling down to view more information on your campaign performance, you can adjust your strategy to get the best possible results.
When you follow these six steps to plan and execute your campaign, you’ll:
- Build a memorable campaign by tailoring your marketing assets to a specific subsection of your audience
- Maximize the ROI by allocating resources to the areas that promise the highest return
- Create a clear and easy-to-follow campaign plan that motivates your team and makes it easier to reflect on your results
- Organize your content production to launch and run your campaign more efficiently
- Continuously improve your process to inform your future campaign plans
By using Wrike as your campaign planning software, this process can be frictionless and collaborative from the very first day of campaign planning.
To find out more about how Wrike can support your marketing or advertising team, book a demo with our sales team today.
Bonus template: Marketing campaign planning
Planning, executing, and tracking marketing campaigns can be a juggling act, especially if you manage campaigns for multiple clients.
When you’re facing challenges of volume, complexity, or communication, you need a reliable framework for your campaign team. With the right features in place, your campaign workspace stops tasks from falling through the cracks and gives you the tailored overview you need to inform your decisions.
Wrike’s marketing campaign planning template includes everything you need to manage marketing campaigns. With this template, you can launch new projects quickly, with all your tools and strategies in place from the very beginning.
Streamline incoming campaign requests
Custom request forms help your team manage their incoming tasks and build an effective campaign schedule.
Instead of vague requests that lack the detail you need to create and kick off a realistic plan, request forms gather all the information you need and automatically create campaign tasks to add to your team’s backlog. Plus, with Wrike’s custom workflows and item types, you can automatically launch new tasks and show your team how to complete jobs — like campaign briefs and launch timelines — in exact detail. 
View key marketing metrics in real-time reports
Wrike’s marketing campaign planning workspace includes automatically generated reports based on up-to-the-minute information about your campaign’s performance.
You can customize your overviews to help your team and clients understand your latest marketing data by campaign or platform. Whether you measure success by clicks, conversions, or overall costs, this is the fastest and most efficient way to get the overview you need throughout the entire campaign cycle.
Wrike’s marketing campaign template includes a Gantt chart progress view, a campaign tracker dashboard, and a productivity dashboard. Find out more about these features here. 
Proof new assets in pinpoint detail
Creating a formal approval workflow for your campaign assets is the best way to ensure they meet the brief, fit your brand voice, and resonate with your ideal buyer.
Wrike speeds up your review and proofing processes by allowing your team to add feedback directly to a visual asset like an image or video. Add your comments, @mention your colleagues, and approve the final version with just one click. 
Seamless campaign planning with Wrike
To plan campaigns that truly connect with your audience, you need insights, organization, and access to the data that proves your results.
Even for the most complex, long-running, multichannel marketing campaigns, Wrike makes it easy for your team to coordinate, schedule, share resources, and measure the results of the work they’re producing. Our campaign planning tools can optimize your process from your initial goal setting, through asset production, all the way to your final reports and campaign auditing.
Plus, with a template, it’s easy to kick-start your campaign today.
