4.1 : Example company campaign plan

Dr. Aleksej Heinze, Associate Professor at KEDGE Business School (France), Visiting Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

Digital marketing is an ongoing process. Therefore, it is always useful to break down your calendar year into specific timelines, which could be used to reflect on the processes and procedures being used by an organization.

Break down your calendar into seasonal campaigns
For each campaign, think about the project management triangle: Time, Resources, and Scope (revolving around quality expectations)
Always document your actions and reflect on your results

So therefore, if organization has a certain season, so for example quarters or winter sales, or any product launches – around the particular product launch and the campaign about that, and whenever the campaign is finished, it’s very useful to go back and reflect on what worked and what didn’t. And it is essential to write those things down because next time a similar product or campaign will be launched, that plan could be reused and applied for future projects.

So what does a complaint plan comprise of? So first of all you have time constraints, you have the resources, you have the scope, and the last but not least is the quality expectations. If your resources are not available or if your time is too short, you can appreciate that your scope and all the other components will be squeezed as well. This is also referred to as the project management triangle.

In digital marketing, what we do is try and use project management techniques because it is a complex process and it is always evolving, and we try and learn from every project and feed into the future projects to come.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

So we launched our campaigns and our digital marketing activity around conferences and exhibitions where we know there’s going to be a lot of digital marketing activity and noise from social media activity through Twitter, through Facebook, and through LinkedIn, where we can really promote our research and our digital activity amongst all the promotion that goes on. It doesn’t get lost because we do everything that complements and is relevant to what our candidate base is after.

Seasonal campaigns are grouped by industry events by The Candidate Ltd

So ultimately people in digital marketing are looking for digital marketing roles and therefore the research that we release and the content that we have on our site and the different pull mechanisms to bring people to the site and apply for jobs all fits in quite naturally with the different elements that are going on at that conferences and exhibitions. So we use, as an SME, other bigger opportunities and other bigger areas and events as a vehicle really to give us even more promotion, more PR and, therefore, more of a response from our digital marketing activities, which works really well.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

First of all you have to see what is the available budget but also what is the budget you have to have. Let’s say if you are in a competitive industry, because search is working like a stock market, OK, it’s based on how much you are willing to pay, it’s based on bidding, and relevance, of course.

Digital marketing campaigns are always relative to the actions of competitors

For example, in Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, the budget of the competition can affect what campaigns you use

So you can see which is the average spending of your competitor. So if your competitor, let’s say, spends more that 10K per month, and you don’t have this amount of money, it’s like dropping your money out of the window so you have to find something alternative. So if we know the budget, and we know what is the spending of our competitors, we can find alternative channels.

Exercise

Learning from past campaigns

Explore a campaign report and its artefacts for the JEMSS project (it is available to you in the Additional Material section of this unit). This work was undertaken in the Summer of 2014 by MSc Marketing students running a week long campaign. The team created a video, infographic, ISSUU and blog posts which are now available for you to review.

If you had to run a similar campaign, think about things that you would like to repeat in your practice and what you would NOT repeat in your own campaign.

Share your top three lessons using the #passion4digital community on Twitter

Before posting your comments below, see if the same point has been made by others and if so reply to their comment. Once you have posted your contribution, comment on at least three contributions of your peers.

Additonal materials

Digital marketing campaign templates

There are a number of different ways to structure your digital marketing campaign, please see the campaign report below as well as follow templates that you can find on the internet.

Please note that these can be very detailed and you would need to customise the ideas to suit your campaign needs.

Campaign report and deliverables example

Download JEMSS-campaign-example here

This report was undertaken by MSc Marketing students at Salford Business School working on a one-week long campaign to develop recognition for the JEMSS project http://mastersindigitalmarketing.org

Their artefacts can be seen here:

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPkgVki8ZMY
ISSUU: http://issuu.com/jemss/docs/jemms_e_book
Infographic: http://mastersindigitalmarketing.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/why-study-digital-marketingx500.jpg

Blog posts:

http://mastersindigitalmarketing.org/algorithm-digital-marketing-career/
http://mastersindigitalmarketing.org/msc-digital-marketing/
http://mastersindigitalmarketing.org/social-media-marketing-take-top/
http://mastersindigitalmarketing.org/international-digital-marketing/
http://mastersindigitalmarketing.org/masters-digital-marketing-key-success/

For other sections of chapter 4 follow these links:

4. 0 How campaigns fit into a wider implementation of the overall organisation strategy
4.2 Key elements of campaign management – Gantt chart
4.3 Risk management
4.4 Digital project management tools and techniques
4.5 Project plan monitoring and review
4.6 Marketing automation
4.7 PPC campaign planning