Create a marketing plan, programs, and campaigns

Transcript

In this module, we will learn to create a marketing plan, program, and campaign, set properties for a campaign, and describe how to use the schedule. For this example, we’ll use the Explorer view to create all the marketing activities. It’s important to note that this exercise can also be done from the Home view. In Explorer, select the Campaign Management folder, found beneath the Instance node. This is our instance node, and we want the Campaign Management folder here. It’s important to make sure we select the correct Campaign Management folder under our node as there may be multiple Campaign Management folders in the overall folder structure. Let’s add a new subfolder for our plan and name the folder. Next, let’s edit the plan’s properties. From here, we can easily change the folder’s internal name. Changing the internal name with a custom naming convention will help to avoid conflicts when porting over marketing plans and programs and campaigns from a development to a production environment. We now see the plan properties on the right panel. By default, we see the schedule view. Moving to edit, we see another way to edit the label and internal name. Every plan has a start and end date. Typically, these are set to the current calendar year. These dates are not functional and won’t restrict the marketing activities in any way. They are mainly used for planning purposes, as we’ll see in the schedule later on. Let’s add a brief description for our plan and save our changes. Next, let’s create a marketing program within this plan called Guest Loyalty Program. Moving into the folder’s properties, we’ll again give it a new internal name and save our changes. At the top of our window, we now see a tab for Program, which will allow us to see our program properties. The Edit section again shows us many of the same options as before, including label, internal name, as well as start and end dates. The Save button will only appear if we make changes to any of the fields on this page.

Now it’s time to create a campaign. At the top, let’s select Campaigns and select the New button in the upper right. This will allow us to create a campaign inside our newly created program. The first step when creating a campaign is to choose a template. This could be a custom template built for our instance or one of the provided templates. Next, we’ll give our campaign a name and select a channel for our campaign. For this demonstration, we’ll configure an email campaign. Campaigns also have start and end dates and by default last 5 days, and are always set within a calendar year.

We now see our campaign in the list view. Drilling down into our campaign, we’re brought to the Dashboard tab. From here, we can verify the location of our campaign by making sure it’s in the plan and program we just created. If there were deliveries associated with this campaign, they would appear in the Tasks section.

Moving into the Edit tab, we can change the label and internal name for our campaign.

Under Advanced Campaign Properties, we can configure Control Populations, Seed Addresses, and Approvals. All of these would be set at the campaign level, so they would propagate to any deliveries that would be configured within the campaign. This functionality will be covered in other courses and modules. Let’s move into the Targeting and Workflows tab. This is where we would design the workflow that would execute our campaign. Designing workflows is covered in another module. Next, let’s take a look at the schedule by moving back to the Explorer view and selecting our plan. Here, we can move the schedule view by dragging the screen. Moving to the right, we see our Guest Loyalty program. Selecting the program will give us some more information.

The same can be done by clicking on our campaign. Notice how the campaign bar is much shorter than the program bar, as we set our campaign to last only 5 days.

This popup shows us information about our campaign, including schedule, status, and who the campaign is assigned to. This view also includes an Add Program button, allowing us to add programs for this interface. Moving back to our program on the schedule, we see an Open button. This takes us to the schedule view of the program. Dragging the schedule, we see all activities inside the program, including our campaign. From here, we can view the campaign properties that we were looking at before.

Moving back to our Explorer schedule and opening our program again, we are given the option to add programs, tasks, and campaigns directly from this view. This schedule provides us with a view of all the marketing activities that are currently configured. It also allows us to perform simple tasks, like navigation to the different marketing activities, as well as creating new ones, directly from within its interface. We only have one plan, one program, and one campaign configured right now, so it’s not hard to track. If we were managing 10 or 20 campaigns simultaneously, the schedule would give us an overall view of all the upcoming activities, and allow us to navigate to them quickly. Let’s create additional programs so we can see how they are displayed on the schedule. Navigating back to the Explorer, and in the Tree view, we’ll create a new plan under our existing plan. To nest our program under our new plan, simply drag and drop, and select Yes to confirm the move. Let’s create another program in our new plan.

We now see both of our programs nested under our two plans.

Now that we’ve completed this module, you should be able to create a marketing plan, program, and campaign, set properties for a campaign, and describe how to use the schedule.