Create a marketing plan, programs, and campaigns

In this module, you’ll learn to create a marketing plan, program, and campaign, set properties for a campaign, and describe how to use the schedule.

I will now show you how to create marketing plans, programs, and campaigns. For this exercise, we’ll use the Explorer view to create all the marketing activities. But note that you could also use the Home view to do this exercise as well.

In Explorer, select the Campaign Management folder that’s directly beneath the instance node. So this is your instance node, and we want the Campaign Management folder here. Now, make sure you’re selecting the right folder because there are subfolders within the structure that are also called Campaign Management. We don’t want to select those. We want to make sure we’re on the node at the top and then the following Campaign Management folder.

Right-click on this folder, click Add new folder and then Campaign Management, and finally select Plan. So we’re going to create our plan first.

Set the name of the folder.

Let’s call this CJR, and then add a dash, Increase 2020 Sales, and hit Enter. So now we’re going to right-click on this folder and select Properties. And down at the bottom, there’s an Internal name, and we’re going to change that. We’re going to set it to CJR and then uppercase 'cause we’re going to use camel case, Increase 2020 Sales.

The internal name, it’s very important that we actually change this. This will avoid conflicts when we’re trying to quote it over our marketing plans and programs and campaigns from a development to a production environment. So it’s really critical that you always use, you accustom naming convention when you’re setting the internal name.

Click Save.

Now, in the pane on the right, you can now see the Plan properties, and what we’re seeing by default is the Schedule. There are other tabs as well. But just to point out that what we’re seeing here are the properties. We’re going to click on the Edit tab.

We can see we have the label and the internal name as well, so we could modify them here.

Every plan has a start and end date, and it’s typically set to the current calendar year. These dates are not functional in the sense that they won’t restrict the marketing activities in any way. But they do, going to be set, and they’re used for planning purposes that we’ll see in the schedule later on. So for your settings, if your current year isn’t selected, please change that, mine is defaulting to the right here, and then we’re going to add a description here. So say Marketing plan to increase sales revenue in 2020.

And then click Save to make sure you save all your changes. Now, we’re going to create a marketing program within this plan. So let’s go back to our plan folder. We’re going to right-click again, and this time we’re going to create a new Program folder.

Set the name to Guest Loyalty Program, and hit Enter.

Right-click and hit Properties, and again, we’re going to customize this Internal name. Your lowercase initials, and then we’ll just use the same name, again, using camel case as a convention, and click Save.

Now, at the top, notice that we’re selected our program here, we’re seeing campaigns, but there’s also a Program tab. So go select the Program tab, and now we’re seeing the Program properties. And again, we have this Edit tab, so we’re going to click on that. We have our Label and Internal name as well. And programs also have start and end dates that are typically set to the current calendar here. So just like we did with the plan, if this is not your current calendar year, please modify that. Mine is 2020, so we’re good.

And if you do make any changes, make sure you save them. The Save button will only appear if I’ve actually made a change.

Now, we’re going to go create a campaign. So at the top, we’re going to select Campaigns this time. So we’re going to stay in our program. We’re going to create a campaign within the program. So just click on the Campaign tab here.

And over on the right, far right, there’s a New button, so click New.

When you create a campaign, the first thing you need to do is select a template. It can be a custom template that’s been built for your instance, or you can use the builtin templates.

We’re going to use the builtin templates for these examples. So this one is called New campaign. Now, we’re going to set the label for your campaign. So use uppercase, your initials, and then let’s call this Kickoff Email Campaign.

We need to set the channel for this campaign, so this is going to be an email campaign. So in the Main channel, just scroll around to find Email at the top. Campaigns also have start and end dates. By default, they’re set to five days apart, and they’re always set within the calendar year. So this works for me, May 25th to May 30th.

So go ahead and click OK. You can keep the default.

So now we see our campaign in a list view. So double-click that, and now we expand it to a better view here. We got a full view. On this Dashboard tab, so notice there are three tabs, we’re on the Dashboard tab, we can confirm the location of our campaign. So we could see it’s in the plan and program we just created.

If there were deliveries created for this campaign, they would show up here in the tasks.

If we click the Edit tab, in here we have access to more properties of the campaign. We’ve got the label and the internal name. So let’s go ahead and change that.

Select the Advanced campaign parameters.

Here, we can configure control populations, seed addresses, and approvals. And these would be set at the campaign level, so they would propagate to any deliveries that would be configured within the campaign.

We’re going to cover this functionality in other courses and modules. We won’t get into the details of how we configure these. But just note that this is where you would actually configure them at the campaign level. So go ahead and click either Cancel or OK. We didn’t make any changes, so.

And then let’s go to the last tab, which is Targeting and workflows. This is where you design the workflow that executes the campaign.

Again, we’re not going to actually design the workflow in this course or in this module. We just want to point out that this is where you would actually do it. This Targeting and workflows tab is where the workflows are configured for your campaign.

So you can go ahead and click Save.

Now, let’s go back to the Explorer view. We’re going to review the schedule. Click on your plan and make sure that you got the Schedule tab selected. In this view, you can drag and move the screen around. So if you click and drag over, we can see this is the year 2020. We can see that at the front here. And then we can see our program. That’s Guest Loyalty Program. If you click on it, you can see more details. You can see the schedule for it and which program it is. You can do the same. We have our campaign displayed here. We could see it’s much shorter, that little bar, because it’s only five days in our year. So it’s not, it’s just showing from a perspective of a calendar where that span is in the month. So we can see it’s in the month of May here. Campaign, we can see the Schedule, the Status, with Assigned to. So we can see all the details in there. We can notice that there’s an Add a program button. So if I did want to create new programs within this program, I can do it from this interface as well.

Now, let’s go back to the program here. Notice there’s an Open button, so you can also navigate to your different activities. Let’s click Open. Now, we’re in the Schedule view of the program. So we’ve gone in a bit deeper. And if we drag again the scheduler over, we’re seeing the marketing activities that are inside this program. So what we see here is the campaign that we created. Again, we could open this for more details. And let’s go and click Open. So notice that we can navigate back to the campaign properties that we were looking at before.

Let’s go back to the Explorer and the schedule. Let’s go back to the program. Let’s open that.

Notice that we can also add a program or a task or a campaign directly from this view.

So this schedule provides you a view of all the marketing activities that are currently configured. It also allows you to do the simple tasks, like navigate to the different marketing activities and create new ones, directly from within its interface. We only have one plan, one program, and one campaign at this point, so it’s not hard to track. But imagine if you had 10 to 20 campaigns that you were managing simultaneously. This gives you an overall view of all the upcoming activities and allows you to navigate quickly to them.

So let’s go ahead and create additional program so that we can see the multiple ones that are displayed in the scheduler. So go back to Explorer, and in the tree view, right-click on the sales plan. Notice that now we have an option to create a new plan and create a new program. So we have both options that appear. So at this point, we’re going to create a new plan within our plan. So we call this one Air Travel.

We hit Enter.

And we’ve already created our program under the initial plan. So if we wanted to have these nested, what we can do is simply select your program, and then click and drag it over into the new plan you created, and then say Yes, we do want to move it.

So you can see that it’s pretty easy to move your plans and programs around to rearrange them as you’re building your marketing activities. Let’s create another program in the Air Travel plan, and then let’s call this program Upsell Program.

So now we’ve got two plans, one nested in the other, and we’ve got two programs appearing within one of those plans. Now that you’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. -