How a Campaign Framework Can Help You Measure Marketing Performance and Align the Revenue Team
If you ask a room full of marketing leaders what keeps them up at night, the two things you’ll hear most often are 1) pipeline and revenue and 2) proving return on investment (ROI).
According to a study by research firm Kantar, only one in five marketers are very confident in their ability to measure and prove ROI, and 78% find it difficult to assess marketing performance across channels.
Without a way to align the tactics that are being deployed across marketing and sales and accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, you may be spending unnecessary time and money on random acts of marketing that don’t get results. That’s where a campaign framework comes in handy.
As Jane Ostler, Global Head of Media, Insights Division at Kantar said, “[Marketers] need to create a framework to monitor impact on business and brand metrics while harmonizing measurement tools and insights to improve performance across all channels.”
In this article, we’ll dig into what a campaign framework looks like and what this strategic approach can do for your team, along with some tips for creating your own framework.
What is a campaign framework?
Most people’s natural inclination is to think tactically. We are often most concerned with what is right in front of us or the next thing on our to-do list. But for strategic marketing teams, it’s important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
A campaign framework is a strategic plan to thematically align your marketing efforts behind a cohesive campaign, so the entire team can work smarter, not harder. The idea is to create each campaign based on an asset, solution, or persona and then to document and track each strategy and tactic within that campaign.
Thinking about an overarching theme for each of your marketing campaigns can inform the different channels and tactics you use and help focus and enable the entire revenue operations team (sales ops and marketing ops) on those campaigns.
As you can see in the example above, the campaign framework itself doesn’t need to be overly complicated. The idea is to simply illustrate and outline your campaign themes and tactics and create a hierarchy that can be followed and measured at each step.
What are the benefits of a campaign framework?
Imagine you’re at an airport that has no air traffic control on the ground or in the tower to guide the planes in. You’re probably picturing a pretty chaotic scene, right? You really need those people with the orange sticks directing the incoming planes in the right direction. That’s kind of what a campaign framework does for your marketing efforts. It creates alignment and points prospects in the right direction, for optimal efficiency and trackability.
By rolling each marketing tactic up to a parent campaign and theme, you can drive buyers to one motivation and get a better idea of which levers to pull or where to make changes to your current tactics. The framework puts structure in place, while allowing for flexibility to make agile decisions based on how a particular campaign is performing.
Some of the most significant benefits of a campaign framework include:
More efficient content creation and ability to create a consistent message across all channels
Increased creativity and innovation (iterate on a theme instead of reinventing the wheel for every campaign)
Better insight for sales and business development to see where their leads are coming from and how to add value
Ability to measure performance by campaign, not just one-off tactic
Who should be involved in developing the framework?
Creating an effective campaign framework that the entire revenue team can get behind requires input from some key players on the team, including (but not limited to) product marketing, demand generation, marketing operations, and marketing leadership.
Product marketing—often with input from marketing leadership—is typically in the best position to come up with themes and campaigns that will resonate in the market and align with the organization’s current goals.
Once themes are in place, your demand gen team can recommend and deploy the appropriate tactics, while marketing ops can operationalize processes and technology and own campaign measurement. It can also help to include input from sales or field marketing to hear what prospects are asking about most, and to work with your content team to brainstorm some creative ideas for your campaigns.
5 best practices for creating a strong campaign framework
While there’s no exact perfect way to develop a campaign framework, having one in place is a no-brainer. (Otherwise, you could be wasting time and money throwing marketing spaghetti at the wall.) That being said, we do recommend a few best practices that work well for most organizations:
Prioritize sales and marketing alignment. For optimal success with any marketing campaign, sales and marketing must be on the same page and pushing the same agenda. Marketing and sales leadership are critical to making sure their teams are aligned.
Focus on internal communication and enablement. From marketing to sales to customer success (and beyond), internal teams should be informed about the current campaigns running and be enabled on the strategy and messaging. Everything the team does should roll up to the appropriate theme.
Build out personas for each theme/campaign. When developing your themes and subsequent campaigns, it’s important to understand the target audience and what they care about. If you don’t already have documented audience personas, prioritize that first (you’ll be glad you did).
Ensure all your UTM parameters are in place. Your URLs should be tagged with Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters so each marketing tactic can be tracked. If you’re not tracking UTMs, you can’t adequately measure campaign performance.
Enlist the help of a RevOps expert. If you don’t have the expertise or bandwidth on your team to develop your own campaign framework, it can help to talk with someone who specializes in revenue operations.