Imagine you’ve been asked to plan and execute a new campaign around your company’s key initiative. It’s a big campaign with lots of moving parts. Where do you start? Do you have the processes in place to make sure you don’t get off track or miss deadlines? How can you be sure your campaign won’t fall flat or miss the mark?

We’ve all been there, and it can be intimidating. But optimizing the processes involved in a typical campaign ahead of time is a proven way to smooth out rough edges, simplify campaign preparation and execution, and enable you to focus on what you do best—ensuring the right messages get in front of the right audience.

DemandGen offers a service called Campaign Process Optimization (CPO) as part of our Campaign Execution Services. Sounds promising, but what is it—exactly?

The goal of CPO is to optimize campaign processes and related activities to enable a scalable, repeatable and consistent way of planning, deploying and tracking campaigns. There are important steps in achieving process optimization and key success factors to consider. Let’s break it down and look at how we can help to optimize each phase of a campaign project.

CPO with DemandGen

The specific steps to CPO are unique to your Marketing Automation (MA) system and your company. So, when you engage with DemandGen for CPO, we start by taking a close look at how your team currently executes campaigns. For example, we look at the processes used for identifying target audiences and content, how assets are built and how you determine the calls to action. We don’t simply focus on campaigns that live inside your MA platform; we also evaluate webinars and events, and identify if and how the elements of those programs can be captured or attributed.

Next, we recommend best practices for improving your current processes to best align with your MA platform and content management system (CMS). We work closely with your team to build alignment between marketing and sales activities, including workflows, communication, tools and service-level agreements. Finally, we identify and write documentation needed to support the execution and deployment of campaigns. This may include how-to guides or QA checklists. Of course, all documentation is designed to address your company’s specific needs.

Here are some examples of processes and deliverables we can help you develop for each stage of the campaign:

• Planning: Defining roles and responsibilities for team members working on the campaign is essential for improving productivity, eliminating duplicate work and speeding approvals.
• Design: Creating templates that can be copied and reused in multiple campaigns eliminates rework and leaves more time to focus on honing the message. You can simply pop in content and skip the design and testing. Such templates are essential for handling a high volume of campaigns.
• Execution: Before executing the campaign, establishing timeframes with respect to company policies is important to eliminating approval bottlenecks. Having a delivery window (i.e. morning or afternoon) helps to accommodate various schedules and ensures all necessary stakeholders have the chance to approve the piece before it’s sent out.
• Tracking and measurement: It’s critical to have metrics and reporting processes defined before the campaign begins. Important KPIs include not only email metrics, but also campaign volume, team efficiency, request processes and utilization, because these are the metrics that will help you further refine and optimize your campaign processes.

If you’re among the 78% of marketers too busy to properly plan or measure your campaigns, it might be time to enlist DemandGen for CPO. Contact Us to learn more about how your team can start saving time and money and get better campaign results with our proven process optimization strategies. You can also download our Campaign Process Optimization Checklist to help you plan, develop and execute your email campaigns.

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Carolyn Acker is a marketing operations and customer experience management professional. As a DemandGen Sr. Project Manager, she drives consistent project management practices across all DemandGen products to create a unified and effective customer experience. In her previous role as a DemandGen Campaign Manager, Carolyn provided a strategic campaign framework for our clients to help them develop, implement and enforce workflow processes. She has extensive knowledge of campaign generation, execution tactics and best practices, to help the client achieve campaign success. Other articles by Carolyn Acker: What’s the True Cost of Email? 

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