Time to Build a Relationship Marketing Campaign

Note: This is the third post in my series on How to Build a Relationship Marketing Program in 4 Weeks.
Now that you have your relationship marketing campaign work plan, it’s time to build your campaign. All of the necessary steps to develop the creative, interactions, and messaging are laid out in your work plan. The work plan must also detail the following:

1. Who: Anyone responsible for the channel or who is considered a dependency (decision marker, graphic design, etc.)
2. What: The application or service used to manage the channel (marketing automation, Google Adwords,, agency, etc.)
3. How: Flow chart and diagram illustrating what’s needed at each stage across each channel

You now have your blueprint which will guide your team through the development process. The trick here is to remember to be as clear and thorough as possible to avoid any setbacks. Using Scrum methodology will also help deliver quick and efficient outcomes.
Common implementation problems frequently become apparent during the reporting phase — after your deploy your campaign. Therefore, it’s really critical to ensure that you keep the following in mind before and during your implementation process.

3 Tips to Avoid Implementation Problems Before It’s Too Late

1) Isolate Campaign Events

Tagging links, building unique landing pages, and utilizing personalized URLs are all good ways to track your campaign’s success across shared channels, but sorting through campaign metrics is no fun. Make it easier by coming up with naming conventions for links, tagging, etc.

2) Centralize Your Reports

With the myriad of ways to track each channel, reporting can get cumbersome when you have to log in to multiple different platforms in order to pull your reports. Plugins and APIs can be a big help when aggregating different reports from otherwise desperate systems.

3) Ensure Closed-loop Reporting

Tying in your sales opportunity data with email drip campaigns is certainly one way to increase visibility into your email campaign’s performance. However, closed-loop reporting should really result in greater visibility of marketing’s efforts across each stage of the funnel through the lens of the sales team. Here’s a good illustration of this concept from HubSpot:

Ensuring closed-loop reporting requires that marketing and sales meet to review the success of the program. Here are a few closed-loop reporting analytics from Mark Roberge, SVP of Sales and Services at HubSpot, that you can apply to your relationship marketing campaign:

In my next post, I’ll discuss creating campaign benchmarks. Armed with some pretesting, you’ll be good to go and ready to deploy. With closed loop-reporting, you’ll also have the ongoing insight to adjust your campaign tactics for ongoing success.

What metrics would you include for your own closed-loop reporting?