Find the best Campaign Management Software

Marketing is a complex business, and the proliferation of modern media only makes it more difficult.

In addition to coming up with strong messaging, brand assets and market-specific pitches, you now need to consider on what channels you'll be publishing your marketing materials—that could mean either traditional print, on your own website or on social media.

Fortunately, campaign management software can help you with this difficult process.

This buyer's guide will explain how campaign management software can help you segment, target and manage multichannel marketing messages.

We'll also examine specific features you should take into consideration when you're looking for a campaign management system.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is a Content Management System?

What Is Campaign Management Software?

Common Features of Campaign Management Software

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Key Considerations

Market Trends to Understand

What Is Campaign Management Software?

Campaign management software won't help you run for political office, but it will vastly improve your ability to manage marketing campaigns for your organization. So, actually, it might help you run for office!

More directly, though, campaign management software will give you the tools you need to make sure your marketing campaigns are optimized and getting the greatest response for the least amount of resources. By tracking those campaigns across multiple channels (email lists, social media, inbound content etc.) you can focus on what's working for your business and discontinue what isn't.

In addition to helping you assess your past and present campaigns, campaign management tools also help you plan for the future. By analyzing the data generated by prior campaigns, the software can give you recommendations for future actions and even automatically trigger certain actions given an activity or other input from customers.

Campaign management software goes beyond the basic tools of general marketing software in order to provide you with a more granular look at individual marketing campaigns.

Common Features of Campaign Management Software

Campaign Monitor's reporting dashboard, utilizing data mining tools

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Businesses in all stages of growth need marketing tools to help them get their products and services in front of as many eyes as possible. However, depending upon what your exact size is, you'll have different needs when it comes to buying marketing software, and especially marketing campaign management software.

Most of these buyers will fall into one of the following three categories:

• Small. These are businesses with under 100 employees and that make under $50 million a year. They also have no IT department and no dedicated marketing department. Without those resources, marketing campaign software may actually be a bit too granular and robust for a company; they are probably better off looking at general marketing automation software or email marketing software until they have expanded enough to have at least one of those two dedicated departments.

• Medium. These are also companies with under 100 employees, except that they do have an IT department and/or a dedicated marketing department. Because they possess the resources necessary to implement and utilize the software, they will find campaign management tools useful, though they might be fine with a basic campaign management system rather than a more expensive, more robust one.

• Large. These are enterprise-level businesses with more than 100 employees, making more than $50 million a year and with dedicated IT and marketing departments. Because they have dedicated teams able to focus on implementing the software and using it to its fullest, they will be looking for the most robust campaign management tools with the greatest number of useful functions.

Key Considerations

Campaign management software is just one component of a much larger set of marketing tools that you'll need more and more of as your business grows. Here's a list of some other types of marketing software you may need in conjunction with campaign management tools.

Marketing automation software. Marketing automation software helps businesses develop, plan, execute and track their marketing campaigns by providing tools that automate workflows (including email marketing), manage and generate leads and track and analyze campaign success.

Email marketing software. Email marketing software helps marketers reach out to prospects and customers via email using specific tools such as email templates, mass email delivery, drip (scheduled) emails and email open rate and click-through tracking.

Marketing analytics software. Marketing analytics software enables businesses to collect information and measure the relative success of marketing campaigns in order to inform decision-making and generate a higher return on investment per campaign.

Social media management software. Social media management software helps marketers reach out to customers and leads over various social media platforms. These systems include tools for publishing directly to social platforms, monitoring for brand mentions, locating specific users or conversations and measuring campaign success.

Note that many of these types of software can actually be found in the same systems as campaign management software, provided by the same vendors.

Market Trends to Understand

Cloud-based software. Cloud-based software solutions are increasingly popular with most businesses thanks to the advantages they tend to offer modern companies as compared to on-premise systems. On-premise software requires that you have the space for physical hardware and the IT knowledge and resources to implement the software. Cloud-based systems, on the other hand, are more easily and quickly implemented, with fewer up-front costs and less of a need for IT assets. As a result, cloud-based systems are particularly suited for smaller businesses that lack those IT resources.

Mobile functionality. There's a mobile app for almost everything these days, and that includes business software. As mobile app usage rises in prominence and popularity in people's daily lives, employees are increasingly accessing company systems in their work lives. Because of this, mobile functionality is a major market trend for campaign management software. The advantages of being able to access the software on-the-go are numerous, particularly if you will be aligning your marketing with a mobile sales team.