A campaign’s success is determined not on launch day, but at the planning table
Campaign management runs a campaign; campaign planning decides whether that campaign will be run at all, and to whom, with what, through which channels, when, and with what budget.
A good campaign plan gives clear answers to five questions: which business objective does it serve and how will success be measured; who is the target audience and how many people are there; what is the offer and what will its effect on margin be;
which channels will be used, in what order, and on which dates; how much is the budget and what is the expected return. A campaign launched without these questions answered is not a plan but a hope.
Planning also ensures the campaign’s alignment with the rest of the company: is there stock, can production keep up, are the sales team and dealers ready, and which other campaigns and launches fall in the same period?
When planning is skipped, campaigns get in the way of one another and of the rest of the business. The target audience is defined as “all customers” and the campaign becomes special to no one; the offer is set without calculating
its effect on margin, and the campaign sells a lot but loses money. When the campaign starts, the product is not in stock, or production is fully booked with another plan. Because the expected return was never written down, when the campaign ends it is said to have gone “well” or
“badly,” but relative to what is unknown. The most common problem is that the plan stays with individuals: the objective, audience, budget, and expected result sit in a presentation or an e-mail, and because there is no counterpart in the system,
during execution everyone applies the plan the way they remember it.
In Minerva, campaign planning consists of the pre-launch stages of the campaign record and works on the same data as the marketing plan, calendar, budget, and demand forecast. The campaign objective and metrics are defined;
the target audience is built with selection criteria from segmentation and business partner data, and its size, previous campaign contacts, and channel reach are seen at the moment of planning. The offer is defined with price and promotion
rules, and its turnover, cost, and margin effect is calculated according to the expected sales volume; alternative offer and channel combinations are compared as scenarios. Channel and date selection is made on the marketing calendar
with overlap checks; stock and production availability is verified from supply chain data, and budget availability from the budget item. The plan, together with the responsible team, preparation tasks, and approval flow, is entered on the campaign record;
the approved plan is handed over to campaign management for execution exactly as it is, and when the campaign closes, the actual result is compared with the planned expectation on the same screen. In this way, every campaign also teaches
how accurate its planning assumptions were.
Before launching a campaign, write its objective, audience, offer, channels, and expected return into the system; let execution apply the plan, and let the result test it.