Overview
A single campaign build typically involves multiple people from different teams who have to find a way to work together to create a successful outcome. With so many moving pieces and people that need to be involved, things can quickly go off the rails. One way to help ensure structure and governance for each campaign is to centralize campaign production.
What is centralized campaign production?
In the world of marketing operations (MOPs), centralized campaign production means that all stages of a company’s campaign production process, the request intake, campaign build, QA and launch, are managed by the MOPs team.
Why should companies centralize campaign production?
Centralizing the campaign production process within the MOPs team is beneficial for several reasons.
- MOPs practitioners are the experts when it comes to the marketing automation platform (MAP) in which the campaigns will be built. They know how programs need to be set up, what minimum requirements are needed from the campaign requester before a campaign build can begin, and they have the most involvement in the actual build.
- It’s much easier to establish and enforce the campaign build process when it’s managed by one specific team.
- Centralizing campaign production makes it easier to scale the process.
When should a company centralize campaign production and who should be responsible?
If your company does not already centralize campaign production, now is a great time to start! The MOPs team should work together with marketers, managers and any other stakeholders involved in campaigns for the company to define each step of the campaign production process, establish minimum valuable production (MVP) requirements and service level agreements (SLAs), determine roles and responsibilities, and set up a project management tool.
How should a company implement centralized campaign production?
As noted above, implementing centralized campaign production should be a collaborative effort involving everyone who touches any aspect of a campaign build. Together, the steps of each stage of the campaign production process should be defined, SLAs should be established, and a PM tool should be implemented so everyone has a central point of collaboration.
To go a step further, many highly efficient MOPs teams create a marketing Center of Excellence (CoE) which includes process documentation (process guidelines, SLAs, etc), standardized assets (intake form, design elements, email templates, MAP program templates) and also the technology being used (PM tool, MAP, etc) in the campaign production process. With a CoE, everything lives and is managed within one central hub to ensure brand consistency, campaign quality and allow for scaling.
Implementing a centralized campaign production process and/or a CoE will take some time to plan out, get buy-in from team members, provide training and more so another option to consider is to hire a consulting company for help. There are several consulting companies out there who are experts at standing up CoE’s for their clients and who already have the general process structures in place that can be customized to meet a variety of different business needs.
Conclusion
Whether your company has one MOPs specialist or an entire team building campaigns within your MAP, centralizing campaign production will save time, improve quality and consistency of campaigns and allow for easier scalability, especially if there’s buy-in across all teams.
