By Shane Johnston, Director of Nortel North America Marketing Communications

What is a campaign?

Try this simple test: Ask a number of people in different parts of your company to tell you what a campaign is. It’s a straightforward question with multiple answers – not only between companies but within them. A campaign is not a press release. It’s not an advertisement. It’s not a promotion. It’s not training, offers, direct mail, websites, etc, etc, etc. It’s all of these items. You probably saw that coming.

As a marketer, you may use any of the tactics briefly mentioned above in isolation but, when you do that, you’re not developing and launching a campaign. You’re employing a stop-gap tactic to remedy a temporary market or business situation.

A campaign should drive purposeful, cross-functional, and organizational collaboration to accomplish stated business objectives such as driving revenue growth, improving profit margins, increasing consideration, and other meaningful goals that contribute to the core business objectives of the company. It is a comprehensive, business case driven, portfolio management approach to delivering revenue, margin growth, and return on investment based upon key business objectives and offers that are aligned across relevant business functions.

When you’re trying to make an impact in the market, don’t forget the impact a campaign has on your internal sales team and employee base. Communications around a campaign should create the “single source of truth” that summarizes the objectives, strategies, tactical overview and assumptions to drive an integrated marketing approach internally and with channel partners. A properly communicated campaign is vital to direct and indirect channel execution and creates clarity on marketing roles and responsibilities.

The “Campaign Stack”

It’s essential to identify the core functions and tactics and develop a structured approach that can be consistently replicated in order to improve the chance of success for your campaign. One approach is the “Campaign Stack” in which each function integral to the campaign is displayed in blocks making up the entire structure of a campaign. This is a simple way to determine if you’re covering all your bases and it provides a good visual orientation for presenting your campaign plan at a high level to approvers. Campaign business development, analysis and approval processes are topics worthy of their own articles. If you’re still awake this deep into this article maybe I’ll be asked to write about those topics.

Here are some brief descriptions and examples for each block:

Air Cover – How are you (or are you) going to generate widespread awareness of your product or service? This is where classic media usually fits and is often your biggest budget line item in your campaign business case. This includes print, online, TV, radio, press releases and editorial outreach, online banners/search, webinars/podcasts, out-of-home (billboards, airports, etc), and other forms of marketing communications. However, this also includes small-budget campaigns that are typically limited to online, buzz, and word-of-mouth tactics.

Demand & Lead Generation – The push-part of the marketing campaign relying on specific communications to targeted markets with a call to action. The sales team loves this tactic, of course, because it generates leads for them. This includes direct mail, email, newsletters, events (real and virtual) and any number of other direct response tactics. Effective tactics in this block usually involve a lead nurture plan in which a prospect is sent several offers over a period of time to increase their consideration of the product or service. Usually the more expensive the item, the longer the sales cycle and the more complex the nurture plan becomes. However, on the back end of this nuturing activity you deliver a “qualified” lead. And good, qualified leads will cause the sales team to fall deeply, madly in love with Marketing – for a short period of time, at least.

Collateral – This is can consist of customer-facing materials such as briefs, presentations, white papers, customer case studies, product slicks and other “leave behinds” that sales uses to sway the customer’s decision. Internal collateral not meant for customer eyes is referred to as sales enablement tools and can consist of value propositions, positioning, target market information, elevator pitches and other information to help sell the product or service.

Training – Training includes all aspects of the campaign, not just the product or service. It’s important for sales and other internal teams to understand how the solution is being marketed, who the target is, and what materials are available to support the sale. Typical training tactics include workshops, eseminars, podcasts, and online exams.

Commercial Offer - A call to action with commercial terms that may include a combination of solutions, products, services, packaging, promotions, distribution channels, and pricing to fit regional needs for competitive replacement, new customer acquisition, migration, cross-sell, and renewal.

Promotions and Sales Incentives – Promotions are designed to be the “hook” that pushes the customer to buy. Incentives are internally focused and are designed to capture the sales team’s attention around a product or service. Incentives may be essential in a company with multiple product lines. Promotions and incentives include bundled discounts, partner incentives, rebates, and awards.

Campaign “Cardinal Sins”

With so many moving parts, there are plenty of opportunities to make mistakes while launching a campaign. Campaign development and management takes a very disciplined team and focused approach to marketing. Here are a few mistakes from which to learn:

Not telling Sales. This is the big one. How many times have marketers been so focused on media planning, collateral, demand generation and other activities aimed at the end-customer that they forget to tell Sales what’s going on? The last thing you want is to hit the customer target then lose them to an uninformed Sales force.

Telling channel partners before direct sales or field marketing. If you have a multi-channel distribution system make sure all channel’s involved in the campaign are informed at the same time. And definitely make sure your marketing brethren in the field can support your campaign with the sales team.

No call to action. This mistake is usually picked out in a rigid campaign review process. Sometimes marketers spend so much time on creative concepts, positioning the brand, or explaining the product or service but don’t tell the customer the next step. Should they go to a website for the latest offers? Should they visit a retailer? Where is the retailer? And how long does the offer last?

No training. Training may not be the classic marketing responsibility but, for the sake of a successful campaign, marketers better make sure it’s in place for sales channels, field marketing, customer service teams, and other front-line employees. This issue is closely related to “not telling sales.” The more complex the product, solution, offer or process is the more vital training becomes.

Bad timing between air cover and demand generation.Essentially, this is integrated marketing communications. Dropping media too far in advance of direct marketing tactics will cause a break in your messaging to your target and you’ll lose the customer. On the other hand, dropping demand generation tactics well in advance of media will lessen the effectiveness of direct marketing. The timing between marketing communications tactics depends mostly on the sales cycle and the customer’s typical decision-making process.

Inconsistent message. Make sure to carry out the “theme” of your campaign throughout the campaign stack. Most savvy marketers ensure that their message is consistent in print, online, broadcast and other air cover. But we often overlook linkages across the campaign stack. For example: Don’t launch a campaign touting the energy efficiency of your high-tech solution then offer a Hummer as a contest give-away to drive lead generation.

Conclusion

Creating a campaign is a structured, disciplined process with specific deliverables, milestones, key gating factors, and cross functional team participation. The campaign process must be a consistent, flexible, concise, and pragmatic approach to ensure top line revenue growth with direct ties to corporate strategy and objectives. Successful campaigns have all the elements of the “Campaign Stack.” And it doesn’t matter how big or small the budget is – in fact, the smaller the budget the more vital the stack becomes, very few marketers can afford to throw money away.