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:
Reviewers' Choice
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
Reviewers' Choice Products
| ActiveCampaign | HubSpot Marketing |
| Marketing 360 | SharpSpring |
| SocialPilot | Percolate |
Our Reviewers’ Choice list shows the five highest user-rated software solutions for Campaign Management when adjusted for total number of reviews and recency of reviews.
If a software solution has more reviews, and more recent reviews, we value those ratings more highly than a product with fewer, older reviews. This is because is it much harder to get 100 five-star reviews than it is to get 10.
We also know that software vendors continually tweak and update their product, so we believe that more recent reviews tend to be more accurate.
To determine which products made the final cut, we looked at how users rated each solution's:
A solution can make the Reviewers' Choice top five in all three categories, or just one or two. All software solutions in the Reviewers' Choice have at least 10 reviews from real software users. The final products are listed in alphabetical order from left to right.
For more details on how we selected our Reviewers' Choice, read the full methodology.
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.
| Data mining | Analyze large amounts of information in order to predict customer and prospect behavior. Statistical models that predict certain customer activities can be run against a contact database to assign scores indicating the likelihood of a specific actions taken by those contacts, which will help you with customer segmentation. |
| Customer segmentation | Collect and analyze data from your customers in order to divide your consumer base into different relevant groups by age, income, interests, spending habits etc. This allows you to market specific messages, on specific media, to individually tailored audiences. |
| Customer-event triggering | Also known as “event-triggered marketing," this tool automatically triggers an action based on a customer activity. For example, if a customer purchases an item, it will set an email to go out automatically at a specified time to ask the customer if they've received the item and/or if they're satisfied with it. |
| Next-best-action recommendations | Take into account all of the various ways you can respond to specific customer actions and then decide upon the “best" one given a set of criteria you have provided it. These actions are determined by the customer's needs, interests and previous actions, as well as your own objectives, policies and campaign goals. |
| Campaign optimization | Constantly test and evaluate your marketing campaign materials and goals—including ads, keywords and targeting choices—and fine tune them so that you are receiving an optimized return on your investment. |
Campaign Monitor's reporting dashboard, utilizing data mining tools
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:
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.
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.
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