Using Real Time Planning to Boost Marketing Efficiency & Effectiveness
Marketing is constantly evolving thanks to the real time web which means that the Chief Marketing Officer’s job will be changing at breakneck speed. To stay ahead and on top of your game as a CMO, you must embrace real time marketing and data-driven campaigns. However, with the increasing volume of information available on the web, where should you begin? How should you consolidate and plan for effective campaigns that drive real ROI?
The hard truth is that while the roles of CMOs and marketers in general are constantly changing, many marketing departments are still ill-equipped to adopt and deploy newer cloud-based solutions that could help with these challenges. 93 percent of multinational companies are still in the process of changing their business models, but only half of these executives believe their companies are ready for this transformational change.
In order for CMOs and key decision makers to be ahead of the pack, they need to possess deep insights and have control over their operations. Moreover, they will need to align marketing and sales operations, engage in budget management across all marketing channels, and enable granular insights into what works in marketing and more importantly what doesn’t – all in real-time.
Here’s a few simple ways to keep track of the abovementioned, which will boost the effectiveness of your company’s marketing campaigns, through an effective and holistic marketing campaign, from the planning stage right up to its execution.
Planning Across Channels
Marketing planning never stops and the challenges presented to the entire marketing department by the complexities of this process are monumental. However, these challenges can be overcome if you have a framework to support creativity. Planning frameworks that structure processes without restricting the creative process should be built while at the same time fitting into the deadline-driven corporate expectations. The catch is that this can only be done if components are consolidated into a single platform. A recent SiriusDecisions study also states that organisations which maintain an integrated process between sales, marketing, and product achieve up to 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability. Other important things to include would be the need to embed a revenue criteria into the planning process for prioritisation purposes as well as adding in a final layer of metrics to fulfill the marketing plan.
Production Planning
As you may know, campaign production includes copy creation, channel selection, and audience segmentation. CMOs know that each of these components are vital in ensuring the success of a campaign, but here’s the catch — they need to be able to efficiently manage these interconnected processes when building and designing a campaign. To kickstart this production process, CMOs have to develop a structure that enables creativity by testing their messages on a small control group in order to get an unbiased opinion. A tailored process in the form of an agile framework will help streamline the huge amounts of unnecessary administrative work for the creative team.
Also, what is a great product without a structured feedback channel? Reviews and feedback are necessary to limit confusion, resulting in the pain of having to engage in hours of rework. Part of production also includes audience segmentation, channel selection, and offer management. Many times, as campaign briefs struggle to answer vital questions, analysts need to document the component that highlights the alignment of each segment with the correct channel, creative element, and offer, while taking into account spending caps so that a campaign doesn’t go over budget.
Another important component of production is measurement preparation, and measuring the effectiveness of your production process. As CMOs, it is your duty to optimise your marketing campaigns in real time. As there is no better feedback than that of your target audience, you need to be an effective listener, tuning in to your audiences’ signals so that your campaign can pivot appropriately. Again, measuring the effectiveness of your production process may seem arduous, but it’s important to take note of these points:
- Avoid too much rework by revisiting the campaign brief to see how you can improve the information flow. Keep a log of reasons for content rejection or reworks and don’t forget to include the new changes that are to be incorporated.
- Provide time from brief approval to final approval. As marketers, it’s important to build practical benchmarks and measure against them. This will help in identifying process efficiency issues.
- Planned effort versus actual effort. When it comes to ROI calculations, marketers have a tendency of missing out how much effort is being put into coming up with a stellar campaign. It will help if you ask questions like “Is it more effective to use a freelancer or should this be done in-house?” Not only will it help enable you to identify learning for future campaigns, your employees will thank you for it.
Execution & Forecasting Success
Launching a campaign might seem like a piece of cake but the complexities lie in what you do before publishing and how you plan for success or failure. In essence, it’s all about forecasting. To do this, you’ll need to have a baseline of what success looks like. One way to do this is to compare your activity against this baseline, which varies across different channels (e.g. performance curve showing click-through rate by the hour). On top of this, you’ll also need to consider the expenditure across each channel by evaluating if your content on a specific medium performs up to your expectations. This would help you redeploy your funds to maintain results from the best-performing channels. Remember to plan for resource availability post-campaign deployment, so that if there is a need for you to change direction to get the best results, you’ll already have the right people available to spearhead this change. Make sure your team is A/B testing new messages and if you have a large enough dataset, it’s always great to build control groups to identify segments which are performing either above or below expectations.
Want to learn how our planning tools can help make your marketing campaigns more efficient and effective? Sign up for a webinar at Anaplan to get a better understanding of how cloud-based business planning works.
Marketing is constantly evolving thanks to the real time web which means that the Chief Marketing Officer’s job will be changing at breakneck speed. To stay ahead and on top of your game as a CMO, you must embrace real time marketing and data-driven campaigns. However, with the increasing volume of information available on the web, where should you begin? How should you consolidate and plan for effective campaigns that drive real ROI? The hard truth is that while the roles of CMOs and marketers in general are constantly changing, many marketing departments are still ill-equipped to adopt and deploy...
Marketing is constantly evolving thanks to the real time web which means that the Chief Marketing Officer’s job will be changing at breakneck speed. To stay ahead and on top of your game as a CMO, you must embrace real time marketing and data-driven campaigns. However, with the increasing volume of information available on the web, where should you begin? How should you consolidate and plan for effective campaigns that drive real ROI?
The hard truth is that while the roles of CMOs and marketers in general are constantly changing, many marketing departments are still ill-equipped to adopt and deploy newer cloud-based solutions that could help with these challenges. 93 percent of multinational companies are still in the process of changing their business models, but only half of these executives believe their companies are ready for this transformational change.
In order for CMOs and key decision makers to be ahead of the pack, they need to possess deep insights and have control over their operations. Moreover, they will need to align marketing and sales operations, engage in budget management across all marketing channels, and enable granular insights into what works in marketing and more importantly what doesn’t – all in real-time.
Here’s a few simple ways to keep track of the abovementioned, which will boost the effectiveness of your company’s marketing campaigns, through an effective and holistic marketing campaign, from the planning stage right up to its execution.
Planning Across Channels
Marketing planning never stops and the challenges presented to the entire marketing department by the complexities of this process are monumental. However, these challenges can be overcome if you have a framework to support creativity. Planning frameworks that structure processes without restricting the creative process should be built while at the same time fitting into the deadline-driven corporate expectations. The catch is that this can only be done if components are consolidated into a single platform. A recent SiriusDecisions study also states that organisations which maintain an integrated process between sales, marketing, and product achieve up to 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability. Other important things to include would be the need to embed a revenue criteria into the planning process for prioritisation purposes as well as adding in a final layer of metrics to fulfill the marketing plan.
Production Planning
As you may know, campaign production includes copy creation, channel selection, and audience segmentation. CMOs know that each of these components are vital in ensuring the success of a campaign, but here’s the catch — they need to be able to efficiently manage these interconnected processes when building and designing a campaign. To kickstart this production process, CMOs have to develop a structure that enables creativity by testing their messages on a small control group in order to get an unbiased opinion. A tailored process in the form of an agile framework will help streamline the huge amounts of unnecessary administrative work for the creative team.
Also, what is a great product without a structured feedback channel? Reviews and feedback are necessary to limit confusion, resulting in the pain of having to engage in hours of rework. Part of production also includes audience segmentation, channel selection, and offer management. Many times, as campaign briefs struggle to answer vital questions, analysts need to document the component that highlights the alignment of each segment with the correct channel, creative element, and offer, while taking into account spending caps so that a campaign doesn’t go over budget.
Another important component of production is measurement preparation, and measuring the effectiveness of your production process. As CMOs, it is your duty to optimise your marketing campaigns in real time. As there is no better feedback than that of your target audience, you need to be an effective listener, tuning in to your audiences’ signals so that your campaign can pivot appropriately. Again, measuring the effectiveness of your production process may seem arduous, but it’s important to take note of these points:
- Avoid too much rework by revisiting the campaign brief to see how you can improve the information flow. Keep a log of reasons for content rejection or reworks and don’t forget to include the new changes that are to be incorporated.
- Provide time from brief approval to final approval. As marketers, it’s important to build practical benchmarks and measure against them. This will help in identifying process efficiency issues.
- Planned effort versus actual effort. When it comes to ROI calculations, marketers have a tendency of missing out how much effort is being put into coming up with a stellar campaign. It will help if you ask questions like “Is it more effective to use a freelancer or should this be done in-house?” Not only will it help enable you to identify learning for future campaigns, your employees will thank you for it.
Execution & Forecasting Success
Launching a campaign might seem like a piece of cake but the complexities lie in what you do before publishing and how you plan for success or failure. In essence, it’s all about forecasting. To do this, you’ll need to have a baseline of what success looks like. One way to do this is to compare your activity against this baseline, which varies across different channels (e.g. performance curve showing click-through rate by the hour). On top of this, you’ll also need to consider the expenditure across each channel by evaluating if your content on a specific medium performs up to your expectations. This would help you redeploy your funds to maintain results from the best-performing channels. Remember to plan for resource availability post-campaign deployment, so that if there is a need for you to change direction to get the best results, you’ll already have the right people available to spearhead this change. Make sure your team is A/B testing new messages and if you have a large enough dataset, it’s always great to build control groups to identify segments which are performing either above or below expectations.
Want to learn how our planning tools can help make your marketing campaigns more efficient and effective? Sign up for a webinar at Anaplan to get a better understanding of how cloud-based business planning works.
