Overview

If you’re a campaign operations professional (or you work with them often), then you know that your role and workload cannot survive without a tried and tested campaign production process. Etumos as a whole believes strongly that any organization of any size should have a campaign production process embedded in its demand center. We believe our framework around campaign production combines industry best practices and a high standard that every organization can adhere to. You may have read through a few pieces of content on our Insights blog that describe the different parts of our framework already.

Are you still feeling like you’re not getting the whole picture? We’ve decided to combine all of our content below in one blog so you have a singular source of reference for all of our content on our campaign production process framework. The content is broken out into the different stages of campaign production: Intake, Build, QA, and Launch, so you can tie our content together with each stage for better understanding.

Intake Stage

Intake, or the first stage of your campaign production process, is the stage where request, triage, and assignment of the campaign is completed by the campaign planning stakeholders, the campaign production lead and/or the campaign build specialist. All MVP (minimum valuable production) requirements needed to complete the campaign are provided to the build specialist and are properly vetted for any gaps. The SLA for the campaign build is not kicked off until all required criteria have been fulfilled by the campaign planners.

How to Manage Marketing Operations Campaign Request Intake

This article goes into greater detail about what campaign request intake usually looks like at the start of production. It also covers why and how you would manage intake within your production process, and gives some great tips on how to structure your intake process in order to kick off production on the right foot. Utilize this piece of content to educate your other team members about the importance of locking down your intake process and earn their buy-in.

Use A Marketing Campaign Intake Process to Uplevel Your Campaign Production

This article breaks down the different substages of the Intake process in greater detail. This will help you get started in documenting and defining your intake process if you haven’t already. Keep in mind that no intake process will look exactly the same in every organization. Different roles within your marketing team may need to be involved in the various stages of the intake process.

Build Stage

Next up, we have the build stage of campaign production. The name is relatively self-explanatory. It is the stage in which the campaign build specialist (or in some instances, the campaign production lead) will build the entire campaign per the requirements given in the intake stage. The build stage may be done in multiple platforms (i.e your MAP, your CRM, and other technologies).

The typical timeframe it takes to complete the build stage is dependent on what you have available to you such as program templates, a project management tool, efficient email templates, etc.

How to Optimize Campaign Build Times with a PM Tool

This article goes in-depth about optimizing your PM tool to speed up your overall build times and maximize your overall investment in the tool. Stay tuned for current and future content on how we optimize build times with other PM tools like Asana, Wrike, JIRA, etc.

How To Optimize Campaign Build Times With Instance Organization

Ever inherited a messy marketing automation instance and don’t know where to start? Start with building out an organizational strategy to clean up your MAP. Even the littlest strides made to organize your program templates, naming conventions, folders, etc. will also reduce the typical time it takes you to build a campaign. Technologies like Marketo Engage have updated their UI in recent years to make it easier to locate specific assets in your instance, but still having organizational standards in place will uplevel your experience even more.

Marketing Operations Build Times by Campaign Type

So you’ve kicked off your campaign production process and have defined all the stages and the requirements that go with them… NICE! But, how do you know if you’re building at peak efficiency? The campaign operations team at Etumos has spent a lot of time analyzing the typical amount of time it takes them to build various campaign types when working with different clients. Keep in mind, these build times assume streamlined program templates are in use and you have a structured intake process in your PM tool.

How To Optimize Campaign Build Times With Program Templates

Did you read the last section and think “Oh no….we don’t have program templates set up!” Don’t worry. It’s not too late to start building out program templates. In fact, Etumos believes that program templates, while they drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to build a campaign, are always evolving and improving. This blog takes you through the process of how to build program templates and ensure they reflect the typical build experience for each campaign type. Keep in mind that while your processes, campaign requirements, and technologies may change over time, so should your program templates.

How to Optimize Marketing Operations Campaign Build Times

We’ve gone over the different ways you can utilize the tools at your disposal to help structure your build process for different campaign requests. Now, with program templates, a PM tool, and internal buy-in from your campaign operations team in your back pocket, you can begin to analyze what is and isn’t working in your build process. This article will take you through the steps you can take to analyze your build times, monitor time spent and implement additional strategies to help optimize even further.

QA Stage

The QA stage (arguably the most important part of your campaign production process) directly follows the completion of the campaign build. In some scenarios, the campaign build specialist will perform their own self-QA upon completion so they can deliver a more timely and accurate build to the reviewing stakeholders. However, when you combine large campaign request volumes, shortened timelines, and fewer resources for these campaign builds, sometimes mistakes can trickle through even after self-QA. The QA stage is imperative to the production process so that you can reduce the overall number of errors made in your campaigns, and uplevel the reputation of your internal marketing team and company brand as a whole.

How to Implement a Marketing Operations QA Process

If you are just starting to implement your campaign production process… or you’re noticing quite a few campaign errors falling through the cracks, it’s time to take a hard look at how your team is performing QA. This article will walk you through exactly how to set up your QA process for your marketing campaigns.

Tips for Creating Confident QA Process of Marketing Campaigns

You’ve taken the steps to structure your QA already, but you’re still seeing some gaps in the process. It’s important to identify what exactly should occur in the QA phase, but also how to ensure that your team members are completing every necessary step on the checklist. This article will walk you through how to revisit your QA process and empower your colleagues to feel confident in the QA process they are following. It also introduces some tips and tricks on how to optimize your QA stage.

Launch Stage

3…2….1…. Lift off! Your campaign has finally launched. Now what? The launch stage, or the last stage of campaign production, is the scheduling and post-mortem review of the campaign performance. Like all of the other stages of campaign production, the steps involved in campaign launch need to be planned for and executed accurately.

Marketing Operations Role after Campaign Launch

This article details all the steps that are normally involved right before, during and after the campaign launch. If you think a campaign launch is simple and can be completed in just a few steps, think again. Campaign launch, like all of the other stages of campaign production, should be heavily planned for before the QA step is completed. This content also helps you think about campaign objectives and how you should be planning the structure of your campaigns to report on performance.

Checklists, checklists, everywhere!

For all the Marketo Engage and Hubspot users out there, here are some checklists to follow when launching your campaigns.

What to include in your Marketo Campaign Launch Checklist

What to include in your HubSpot Campaign Launch Checklist

We hope you found this compilation of campaign production content useful! Check back in the future for more content incoming from our team.