One of the most important parts of marketing operations is mapping your campaign process. Process mapping helps you create an organized, efficient, and repeatable process for your campaign. Mapping out your approach should be visual so you can cross-functionally communicate the marketing plan with stakeholders, team members, and outsourced partners. While your process may vary slightly for each campaign, the goal of your process map remains the same. Build a visual map of the campaign elements to see your prospects’ intended journey from start to finish and how your marketing mix is defined. Your visual model should map the following:
- Website and Landing Pages: Determine how prospects will receive the intended information on your website.
- Forms: Identify the pages with forms for prospects to input their information to become new or re-engaged contacts in your database. This can be a form on the page or a pop-up form to drive top-of-the-funnel conversions.
- Traffic Sources: Determine the traffic sources that will drive traffic to each page type in your campaign. For example, you can drive traffic to your pages through social media, paid advertising, email marketing, and more.
- Offline Activities: Identify the offline sources that will drive traffic. This could be direct mail, radio advertising, billboards, or commercials. Offline sources are considered your more traditional methods of marketing and outreach.
- Desired Actions: Determine the desired action your prospect should take at each stage of the process. For example, when a prospect submits a form, decide if they will receive an email or phone call, go to another page, or take another identified action. Subsequently, if a prospect lands on a page and does not submit the form, determine if you will target them online with another ad to drive them back to the page. Make sure you map each step of the process to see how you intend to have prospects move through your campaign.
The following is an example of a campaign process map:
I’m often asked how marketers can keep track of all the moving parts of their campaigns. The answer is simple. It’s about having a defined process. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed. Once you have a defined process, you can create an operational and repeatable action plan that can be implemented for each campaign with excellent results. Marketing operations are one of the most critical aspects of the process and will help you see measurable success.
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