“Just Do It.”
In 1988, a newly formed advertising agency coined this slogan for its first client, a small sportswear company from Oregon called Nike. Surprise, surprise: the marketing campaign was an instant hit.
The phrase is certainly catchy, but that’s not the only reason the ad campaign was a success. The agency also timed it well.
Clearly, marketing campaign management matters, but it can feel daunting for agencies. How do you balance campaigns across clients? How do you keep control over campaigns without being in-house?
No sweat!
In this guide to marketing campaign management, we’ll cover everything you need to know to carry out successful campaigns for your clients from start to finish.
What is Marketing Campaign Management?
Marketing campaign management is the process of planning, executing, and monitoring strategic marketing efforts. It includes all of the tasks necessary to organize, launch, and evaluate a marketing campaign over the course of its entire life cycle, from strategy to kickoff to post-mortem.
If you’re handling marketing campaign management for clients in an agency setting, you’re likely responsible for things such as:
- Defining marketing strategy
- Performing market research to know the target audience
- Helping clients determine and manage their marketing budget
- Building out and managing a content calendar
- Strengthening your clients’ brand recognition via content and social media marketing
- Creating visually stunning graphics and videos conveying your clients’ messaging for ads
What should you include in marketing campaign planning?
As part of marketing project management, you need to define all the components your clients’ marketing campaign needs to succeed.
Here are six key elements to focus on when planning marketing campaigns for clients:
- Audience: Who are you marketing to? Your client’s target audience will determine the messages that will resonate, the channels to reach that audience, and the content formats the specific audience uses most.
- Marketing goals and OKRs: Why are you running a campaign? Clear objectives keep your team accountable as they work on client projects. And with well-defined OKRs, you have a way to track your team’s progress toward those goals. These metrics keep both your team and your clients informed on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how effective your efforts are.
- Budget: Your client’s marketing campaign budget sets a concrete limit on how much you or your client can spend on this specific initiative. While you don’t want clients’ budgets to crush creativity, use the amount to gauge whether your team’s ideas for the campaign are feasible.
- Marketing activities: What type of campaign will you create for your client? This question is key for figuring out resource allocation, expected deliverables, and timelines down the road. A television commercial is going to require far more resources than an email newsletter campaign. The type of marketing campaign you run will also depend on the channels you are using to reach your client’s target audience. For example, if you want to speak to Gen Z, social media marketing campaigns on short-form video platforms like TikTok are the way to go.
- Timeline: How long will your client’s campaign take to plan and execute, and when will your message be the most effective? Set a start and end date for your campaign, and plan out appropriate milestones on a timeline. If you’re advertising a back-to-school sale in the U.S., you’ll probably want to run the campaign from late July to mid-August. Planning should start no later than June, with all deliverables wrapped up by mid-July, and you’ll evaluate the results of the campaign in September.
- Team: Like the Avengers, you’ll need to assemble a dream team of contributors in your agency (copywriters, designers, you name it) who can tackle each to-do on your marketing campaign’s task list. Factor in team members’ skill sets and their availability when picking your group.
Bonus: Brand Management Software
The Benefits of Managing Marketing Campaigns Really Well
Any marketing agency leader can tell you that a campaign has a lot of moving parts. You have people working across departments to create deliverables. And there are multiple deadlines to track while keeping clients updated on progress. Let’s just say, the list goes on.
But the goal is to make all these moving parts more predictable. With marketing campaign management, your agency team members can breathe because they know:
- What are their responsibilities
- When are their deliverables due
- Where to find client feedback
TL;DR? Marketing campaign management sets up your agency’s team members to deliver the campaign on time and achieve your client’s goals, while also positioning your agency as a strategic partner rather than just another vendor.
Clients want high-quality marketing campaign deliverables that arrive on time and deliver tangible results. While effective marketing campaign management doesn’t guarantee those outcomes, it does make them more achievable.
Great campaign management at your agency might look like this:
- Account leaders check in on project progress to make sure agency team members meet deadlines. At the same time, they relay client feedback to team members to make sure the deliverables are high quality.
- Your team members all individually know their assigned tasks and due dates, which makes it easier for them to get all their to-do’s done in time.
- Your clients know what to expect from you and, in turn, what’s expected from them, i.e., giving feedback by specific dates.
Effective marketing campaigns simply get the results your clients want, keeping them happy. And satisfied clients are more likely to be repeat partners. You want parallel success so they spread the word about your agency’s ability to get things done quickly and successfully.
A good marketing campaign builds your client’s brand and revenue, but a well-managed marketing campaign builds your agency’s!
On the flip side, poorly-managed marketing campaigns can have catastrophic results for both your clients and your agency’s brand. See Burger King’s International Women’s Day tweet or that one Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad…definitely not the kind of marketing campaign you want prospects to associate with your agency!
How to Manage a Marketing Campaign in 7 Steps
To show how marketing campaign management works in practice, let’s imagine you’re a marketing manager at a social media marketing agency. Your client is MySkinDoc, a growing startup; its product is a telehealth app that remotely connects licensed dermatologists with patients. The client hired you to run a (hopefully viral) social media campaign that elevates their brand awareness.
Let’s break down your marketing campaign management strategy into seven actionable steps.
1. Understand your target audience 🙋
A campaign’s success depends on how well it resonates with the brand’s target audience. As an agency, you have to dig into research about your client’s key customers before diving into campaign creation.
Ask these questions to get inside the target audience’s heads and market to them more effectively:
- Who benefits most from your client’s product or service?
- What are the target audience’s wants, interests, and behaviors?
- What are the audience’s pain points, and how can your client solve them?
- Where in the marketing funnel is the target recipient of this campaign: top (awareness), middle (consideration), or bottom (buying)?
To answer these questions, you and your team will likely need to do some market research and audience segmentation. Ask the client if they have any buyer personas or ideal customer profiles they can share to supplement this research.
Customer surveys from the client also help you understand their target audience and its needs, which will help your marketing campaign management process.
Example Answers: People who would sign up for MySkinDoc:
- Are individuals suffering from skin issues who can’t or don’t want to visit a dermatologist in person
- Want to have clear, healthy skin and use social media to follow brands that are relevant to their interests
- Possibly self-conscious about their appearance and unsure of their options outside of seeing a doctor in person; MySkinDoc can connect them with a dermatologist remotely, judgment-free
- Are still top-funnel at this point and becoming aware of MySkinDoc; you want them to choose to stay connected with your client by hitting that “Follow” button
2. Set specific goals and campaign types 🎯
What does the client want to achieve with this campaign, and what type of campaign will best fit that goal?
Clients usually have a general idea of their goals and what they think the campaign should look like. Your job is to get specific so that there are no surprises about what is delivered. Consider this list of possible marketing campaign objectives and types of marketing campaigns:
- Increase free trial sign-ups: Run paid social media ads targeting potential customers on LinkedIn and Twitter
- Successfully launch a new product feature: Create fresh, exciting landing pages and draft press releases for publication on Hacker News
- Drive sales: Run an email marketing campaign that reminds people of their abandoned carts within 24 hours of leaving your website
- Increase website traffic and improve organic reach: Create a series of SEO listicles that rank on Page No. 1 of the search engine results by the end of the year with “best product/software/tool” listicles.
Example: Let’s go back to our MySkinDoc example. It’s a fairly new product, so the company’s team wants to increase brand awareness through a series of paid ads on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. You plan to catch social media users’ attention by showing “before” and “after” photos and videos from real MySkinDoc users.
3. Establish metrics to measure success 🔢
Once you know what your client’s marketing campaign should accomplish, you can then decide how you’ll evaluate the campaign’s effectiveness. Marketing KPIs should be tied directly to how well the marketing campaign is achieving the client’s objectives you defined in Step 2.
Some examples of marketing metrics you can use to measure success based on your client’s goals are:
- For launching new products and generating revenue: Conversion rates, email click-through rates, qualified leads, new sign-ups, upsells, ROI
- For driving traffic: Keyword rankings, domain authority, organic search traffic, total pageviews, unique page visitors, bounce rate, the cost for pay-per-click campaigns
- For brand awareness: User sentiment, social media engagement metrics, views on YouTube, mentions on social media or in the press, search volume for branded keywords
- For events: Total sign-ups or ticket sales, total attendance, qualified leads, the customer acquisition rate
Example: Increase social media followers and engagement, MoM, by 100% across all channels (Twitter Impressions and likes, Instagram and TikTok likes and comments).
4. Identify your available resources ✔️
When planning your client’s marketing campaign, determine which folks at your agency have the skills and availability for the tasks at hand. From there, your marketing campaign management strategy should provide these people with timelines and deadlines to help keep the project on track.
Along with team members, determine what tools or equipment you need for your campaigns, like marketing automation tools and access to your client’s CRM and Google Analytics. Great campaign management software like ClickUp helps you keep track of all your campaigns and their to-do lists, ensuring your team hits every deadline.
Make sure to also keep in mind your client’s allocated marketing campaign budget so that you don’t over-resource.
Example: You’ll assign three social media marketing managers to this project, Sam, Lydia, and Marco. Each person has experience running campaigns on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, respectively. You’ll create assets in Canva and Final Cut Pro and schedule posts through Hootsuite. The budget for this campaign is $15,000.
5. Plan out your campaign project on a timeline 📅
Create a content calendar to clarify milestones and manage expectations between your agency and your clients. You or your marketing campaign manager can own the content calendar in a simple spreadsheet or, better yet, collaborative project management tools like ClickUp.
Example: Your campaign for MySkinDoc consists of social media copy and assets for marketing on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram:
- The MySkinDoc Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram campaigns will run from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31
- Your agency will draft all deliverables at least two weeks before their due dates, and MySkinDoc’s marketing team will provide feedback or approvals within a week after delivery
- Your team will schedule each social media post in Sprout Social, following their best practices for the best time to post on each platform
- You will map out your deadlines for each action item on a content calendar and assign it to the responsible party, e.g., Sam to draft Twitter copy by Sept. 9, Marco to shoot and edit TikToks by Sept. 14, etc.
6. Execute your plan 🏃
Planning a marketing campaign is like preparing a rocket for launch: ensuring it has enough fuel and the right astronauts on board. Executing your campaign is hitting the “take off” button and making sure that the rocket ship stays on course, shooting for the moon!
To keep momentum at this stage, check in on team members to make sure they’re creating deliverables on time. Encourage everyone to stick to the outlined plan, but be prepared for unexpected upsets, like clients changing the scope of the project midway through. Otherwise, your campaign rocket could come crashing down out of nowhere!
Communicate regularly with your client to make sure all stakeholders—including your marketing campaign manager—are aligned on expectations and any impacts to deadlines. Adjust your campaign timeline and deliverables only if absolutely necessary. Remember, delays make it difficult to keep campaigns within budget and often introduce scope creep.
Example: Your team is doing great. They’ve met every deadline, and MySkinDoc has approved all of your drafts without any feedback. But Sam got in a ski accident over the weekend and will now be out of the office for the rest of your marketing campaign.
You’ll have to find a new team member who can take over the Twitter campaign management. Luckily, Po is available to help with various social media platforms. Since he’s new to the account, his first few posts miss the mark on speaking to MySkinDoc’s target audience. The client provides feedback and the subsequent revisions and final approval process cause delays in your Twitter posting schedule.
There are a few ways you get ahead of all these unexpected disruptions. First, let your client know immediately about Sam’s situation.
Ask for their patience as Po learns the ropes. Adjust your timeline and content calendar to reflect the time he needs to be properly onboard to the account. Lastly, ask Lydia and Marco to lend a helping hand to Po so he can get a better grasp of MySkinDoc’s needs ASAP.
7. Monitor KPIs 📈
Use the KPIs you already defined in Step 3 to evaluate campaign performance.
If your campaign isn’t doing as well as expected, you gotta pump those numbers up!
Brainstorm ideas internally about how you can boost your metrics. Maybe the Instagram ad needed a more colorful image, or the caption needed shortening. Keep your clients in the loop of the campaign management process and get their approval on any shifts in marketing strategy or deadlines.
Example: At the start of your campaign, MySkinDoc’s Twitter account only had 30 followers. The goal was to double their follower count each month. October saw the account gain 40 followers, exceeding your goal, but the account only gained 50 followers in November. For December, how can you make sure to go from 120 to 240 followers?
Giveaways are a wonderful way to boost engagement on Twitter. You ask MySkinDoc if they could run a promotional giveaway, gifting a free consultation with one of their platform’s dermatologists to one lucky Twitter follower. The client agrees, and Po gets to work promoting this giveaway on Twitter.
Quickly, the Twitter account gains followers who are interested in this free consultation. Even if they unfollow after the campaign ends, you’ve ensured that you’ve achieved your KPIs and that you’ll reach people directly in MySkinDoc’s target audience for the rest of December.
Easy-to-use Templates for Marketing Campaign Management
Who doesn’t love a good template? We definitely do. They make life so much easier because you don’t have to design an entire system or document from scratch.
Whether you’re marketing for one brand or 12, check out six of our favorite (free!) templates that can help you manage all your marketing projects.
1. ClickUp Marketing Campaign Management Template
The ClickUp Marketing Campaign Management Template is an all-in-one resource for any marketing campaign manager or stakeholders across marketing teams.
This template comes with six ClickUp Views to help you visualize and plan your marketing campaigns from different angles:
- Product Launch Campaign: At-a-glance, high-level checklist of all tasks, grouped by campaign phase
- Social Media Team Tracker: Breaks down social media tasks into action items, organized by which team is responsible. Identifies the type of content deliverables and relevant social media channels
- Marketing Phase: Separates tasks by phase into a Kanban Board
- Calendar: Plans out all your marketing tasks on a calendar for easy visibility of what’s due next
- References: Stores your need-to-know marketing resources, such as your marketing proposal, brand guidelines, and product info, in ClickUp Docs
- Budget Tracker: Shows each to-do’s allocated budget, so you always stay under budget
2. ClickUp Marketing Campaign Brief Template
Need to concisely summarize your marketing campaign, especially to receive client approval?
Make sure you and your clients are on the same page with ClickUp marketing campaign brief template that helps you outline goals and draft a proposal for any marketing campaign.
This template guides you through defining the following essential marketing campaign components one by one:
- Campaign overview
- Target market (including buyer persona templates)
- Proposed budget
- Significant dates
- Marketing efforts, materials (a.k.a. assets or deliverables)
- References (links to relevant marketing resources, i.e., brand guidelines, competitor list, login credentials, etc.)
- Summary and approval
3. ClickUp Campaign Tracking and Analytics Template
The ClickUp Campaign Tracking and Analytics Template puts what matters most, your results, front, and center. No more harassing marketing teams for updates or digging deep for KPIs. This campaign tracking template helps you:
- See all your campaigns and their conversion metrics at once, choosing which specific KPIs you want to track with customizable data fields
- Visualize your campaign workflows on Kanban boards, updating tasks based on status, priorities, and channels
- Connect the dots between your campaign elements visually on a whiteboard
- Stay on schedule and manage deadlines with a high-level calendar and adjustable timeline
4. ClickUp Social Media Campaign Template
ClickUp’s social media campaign template helps you plan content creation for posting across various social media platforms. It allows marketing teams to:
- Create a social media posting schedule and ensure posts are spaced out and timed well
- Draft each post’s copy and attach visual assets to easily pass along to your clients for approval
- See all of your social media to-dos on one big List and segmented by platform
5. ClickUp Creative Brief Document Template
ClickUp’s creative brief template provides a short-and-sweet overview of what your campaign is all about. Perfect for helping you and your client align on basic details and timelines. This is a must for marketing teams.
Here’s what’s included:
- Campaign overview: Outline your campaign’s goals, milestones, budget, and target audience
- Creative briefs: Explain how to define your campaign’s messaging, calls to action, and deliverables
- Video briefs: Plan your video production with a storyboard, shot list, and shooting schedule
6. ClickUp Campaign Calendar Template
The ClickUp Campaign Calendar Template helps your team stay organized while managing all of its marketing campaigns. This calendar gives you the big picture of all your active campaigns by mapping them out, enabling high-level strategic planning, and allowing you to:
- Plot your campaigns on a calendar of events, viewable by day, 4-day, week, or month
- View your campaigns side by side on a timeline to understand how your campaigns overlap with each other. Drag and drop to adjust campaign start and end dates or duration
- Surface action items that need your immediate attention via the right sidebar, which lists all unscheduled and overdue tasks
- List all your campaigns and group them by duration to differentiate between your one-off, short-term and long-term campaigns
- See the current statuses of all your campaigns so marketing campaign managers can adjust their progress by dragging between columns on a visual Kanban board
Optimize Your Marketing Campaigns With ClickUp
Not every marketing campaign can be “easy, breezy, beautiful” like Covergirl, but we can get you one step closer to that. 😉
ClickUp is an all-in-one campaign management tool that helps agencies and marketing teams streamline how they collaborate with clients on marketing campaigns from start to finish.
Here are just a few of the ways ClickUp helps you spend less time organizing and more time doing:
- Store your clients’ need-to-know info, content calendars, and brand guidelines in dedicated collaborative Docs
- Visualize exactly how long your campaign will take and draw connections between tasks with ClickUp’s Gantt charts
- Keep campaigns on schedule by monitoring KPIs on your ClickUp Dashboards and automatically tracking your team’s progress toward measurable Goals
Sign up for ClickUp for free to start managing more effective marketing campaigns today.
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