Avoiding campaign Fire Fighting by planning ahead

5 tips showing how campaign planning prevents fires

Working in various marketing roles, I have noticed that even though we have advanced with technology to make our jobs easier, we have never been more short of time, with more jobs on our plate, and customers (internal and external) are demanding real-time updates and output work at an ever-increasing pace. When I catch up with my marketing network and ask how it’s going 'I'm fire fighting' is the common response.

This article addresses the challenges of getting campaigns off the ground and gives some ideas on avoiding mistakes that I have seen in my roles and network roles over the last 9 years.

We all know that integrated campaigns are the key to success, and we have all read and understood the templates that put them together. However, I found that when it was my time to create and orchestrate a campaign an integrated campaign, there I was, fire fighting.

I have also contributed to Smart Insights by creating this campaign project plan template.  It's based on an approach I developed over the years with the aim of overcoming the challenges that I faced when putting together different types of campaign.

5 Tips for Campaign Planning to reduce Fire fighting

• Fire fighting Tip 1 - Planning

I love a timeline to help here, it has been drilled into me from my very first marketing job, and my manager made me create a marketing timeline for every project so that I managed my time and covered all the points needed.

It became easy to see that front line, operational staff didn’t like or read that huge printed marketing plan that we wrote, it sat somewhere collecting dust. They liked to see project plans that quickly identified who did what, by when, how much it was going to cost and how long things took.

It was the latter that helped me. When you can see the process of say printing the Christmas Campaign, and that it wasn’t just a case of getting the artwork done, that we had to book the printers which took x days, send it to the post, which took another set of days, and each delay in doing 'one more round of amends' moved that deadline further and further away, which was going to cost them time and money.

It soon started to get the process moving, and stopper people asking for a campaign, days before the expected launch date.

• Fire fighting Tip 2 - What campaign?

Sometimes the speed that you fired out campaigns was so quick that you would forget to let other teams know. We would get angry calls from Membership, Reception, Customer Services, as customers had called them service numbers asking for details about the campaign, open day, or event that they have just seen. It didn’t look good when it was the first time the staff had heard about it.

• Email all artwork and information about the campaigns to Heads of Departments, before the campaign goes live. Let them know the top line information, what it is, how it works, how long it runs for, etc.
• Attend your fellow colleague’s team meetings to talk through the campaigns.
• In your updates, thank members of staff that have had input to the campaign, people don’t say thank you enough and it goes a long way.

• Fire fighting Tip 3 – keep on the right side of The Law

One little error and your campaign could get you into a LOT of trouble. If you have put the standard 'or T&C please visit our website' on your campaign artwork, make sure that it is on the website, check that the rules for your offer, event, and competition with your Legal team before it goes live.

Finally double-check how you word and phrase your campaign on social media sites and ad words, they are now covered under ASA Cap Codes.

• Fire fighting Tip 4- Help break down the stereotype

'Marketing just sits around going to meetings and play around with pictures'.  Just one of the comments I have had to my face from operations, HR, Accounts etc who saw marketing as a cost centre that just put together brochures and flyers when people needed them.

It is really important to manage expectations and work on the Marketing Teams Brand internally; I was taught that the Marketing department first served its internal customers, and then the external customer.

Why did Marketing get these stereotypes? When I asked, it was down to Marketing creating campaigns that didn’t involve sales or revenue, so the deal didn’t have enough yield, or it took away business from another segment, as easy way to send Revenue and Sales into a red mist.

Get them involved in the process of the campaign, share the ‘big idea’ and see if the offer/ campaign are viable.

I have also had experience of staff asking Marketing to create a campaign for them and the response would be 'fill in this brief and send me the copy', it was either not written, or badly written with gaping holes of key information.

To help, I would build relationships with people across the company and find out when they were likely to need marketing support, explain how we work, what information I would need, and help them understand the briefing document, I would even complete one for them so they could see.

• Fire fighting tip 5 – Get all your Agency support together

Communication is key, get your Agency help all in one place, this happened regularly at large companies, but on single site, or smaller budget roles I didn’t see this as much. Especially in the brainstorming session, having your SEO, PPC, Print, Design, PR, etc. all in the same room helped break down communication barriers with Agencies and can with all being represented your more likely to have better ideas come to the table, and you are less likely to forget anything.

The final tip to keep cool, especially for high-profile campaigns, is to schedule in advance a team outing, a lunch, dinner or drinks after the launch deadline is due, where you can all sit back, look at your creation and enjoy letting your hair down. Well, you have just fought a fire.