Bottlenecked campaigns, missed deadlines, manual processes.
These are some of the surface-level symptoms of campaign velocity. But these are often signs of a deeper issue that is eating away at the effectiveness, morale, and performance of your marketing organization in the long term.
While excessive admin work and manual tasks may sound like just small inconveniences for your organization, in the game of campaign execution at an enterprise-level, it’s death by a thousand cuts. Manual tasks lead to costly mistakes, poorly reconciled campaign data, a lack of visibility on results, low employee morale, and missed deadlines.
That’s why modern marketing organizations are putting the focus on campaign velocity. By streamlining the people, process, and technology involved in campaign execution, organizations can achieve:
- Greater marketing ROI
- Better visibility and tracking of campaigns in the planning, execution, and reporting phases.
- Happier and more productive teams
When it comes to campaign velocity, organizations must focus on their approach to the following processes in order to achieve campaign success:
- Request Intake
- Creation
- Approvals Process
- Templatization
Six Steps to Achieving Campaign Velocity
#1 – Define Campaign Velocity KPIs
You can't manage what you don't measure, so your team must begin with identifying your own KPIs around campaign performance. Here are a few examples.
Time to launch: This KPI measures the elapsed time from the moment you begin working on the campaign to the go-live date.
Cycle time per task: If your team isn’t logging time, now is the time to start. Knowing how much time your team spent on a specific campaign, even time allotted on each individual step, will help identify bottlenecks. Toggl, HourStack, and Timely are just a few examples of time tracking tools.
Measure complexity: Tasks requiring involvement from multiple stakeholders and/or multiple systems will require more handoffs, indicating a complex workflow. These metrics typically include:
- # of manual tasks
- # of duplicate data entry tasks
- # of tool handoffs
- # of person handoffs
Mapping your campaign execution process will shed light on the KPIs indicated above.
Resources: Allocation and utilization of human resources, including human resources, throughout the campaign execution process will help evaluate the total cost of execution.
Satisfaction: Consider running an internal survey about campaign execution – is your team satisfied with the way campaigns are being run? Or maybe there is a recurring pain point that you are unaware of. Find out if your team is satisfied with the time to launch.
#2 – Map Your Campaign Execution Process
Creating a workflow diagram that incorporates the people, processes and technology involved will ensure mutual understanding and visibility. This workflow diagram should include every task that each team member is responsible for. User and/or system handoffs should also be identified – but be cognizant of too many steps and/or handoffs – this can oftentimes stall velocity.
You can use workflow design tools like Lucid Charts or Moqups to map it out, but Google Slides will do just fine - see the example below for a great workflow layout.
#3: Build and Utilize Templates
Email, landing page, and multi-channel campaign templates that contain reports, workflows and automation help to not only avoid gaps in information – further halting campaign velocity, but it also enforces COE best practices, improves time to market, and empowers junior team members to execute without risk.
Intake forms for templated assets help streamline the gathering of key information - such as CTAs, landing page links, and information like speaker names and titles (if it’s a webinar, for example). This way, marketers aren’t chasing colleagues for information and everything is readily available in one centralized location.
#4 – Simplify and Introduce Self-Service
Look at your campaign execution process from a holistic perspective and start to surface optimizations to remove unnecessary steps and identify integrations and automation opportunities.
You may be surprised to learn your team is spending the most amount of time gathering content or getting assets approval. These are productivity killers that can prevent campaigns from going live. Consider these three steps to streamline your campaign processes.
Improve Intake Processes: Project management tasks, word docs, or Google forms are often used during the intake process. But to allow a good self-service experience, it’s most efficient to centralize your intake requests in a single solution that allows for structured data input, advanced validation as well as a visual and rich text and image upload and editing.
This will lead to production-ready campaign data and will significantly shortcut the time to get from planning to creation of a new campaign, ultimately getting your message to buyers faster.
Reduce Tools, Handoffs, and Steps: This is the hardest part – reducing the number of tools, handoffs, and steps in the process is easier said than done. Is this information essential, or could you shorten the Intake form? Do you need a dozen tasks to track your project progress? Will anyone ever look at that report? Kill complexity and make it as easy as possible for your campaign managers.
Integrate Proof and Approval: When centralizing intake requests, be sure to integrate proofs and approvals. Sending email samples, getting comments, updating assets… Does this process sound familiar? Eliminate this productivity-killing cycle by providing self-service preview, edit, and approval capabilities to your users directly from the Intake stage.
#5 – Automate and Integrate End-to-End Processes
Once you have identified redundant and manual tasks in your process, automate and integrate as much as you can. Automation and integration tools exist for a reason and they are more performant and affordable than ever before, so organizations have no excuses for letting people copy and paste all day.
For example, Jeto is a proprietary tool developed to automate and integrate end-to-end processes to improve campaign velocity. In one instance, a client went from spending half his job on email and campaign execution to just 30 minutes of review every morning. Learn more about Jeto’s features here.
#6 Continual Optimization
Ultimately, the key to campaign velocity is continual optimization – team structure changes, technology is constantly evolving, and processes should be refined to reflect these changes. This is why it’s critical to routinely revisit your process, whether that’s every year or even every quarter.
Take Campaign Execution to the Next Level
Optimized processes, templates, self-service campaigns, and integration of tools such as Workfront and Marketo are key to campaign velocity, as marketers are empowered to produce their own campaigns from start to finish, all while reducing the total execution cost. Tools like Jeto help marketers accelerate value from their Adobe platforms by simplifying and automating campaign operations.
With Jeto, administrators are able to enforce campaign data parameters and validation on each campaign element. Campaign managers are also able to upload end images, preview their assets, and send themselves (or their team) sample emails.
Jeto allows team members to collaborate on editing, proofing, and approving content in a simplified UX. Administrators can also configure Marketo integration parameters like the program template to use, destination folder, and program naming convention. This allows inexperienced team members to remain in control of their campaigns.
Orchestrating people, processes, and technology to achieve campaign velocity is challenging. As an Adobe Gold Solution Partner and an Adobe Technology Partner, the experts at MERGE can help automate processes, align capacity to demand, and collect data and insights along the way. Get in touch.