Does your marketing campaign management tool give you the right overview?

A marketing campaign is not just one project. Which is why getting a complete marketing campaign overview becomes so difficult. A full campaign contains multiple projects like planning, content creation, scheduling, execution, reporting and optimization for next time. And staying on top of it all requires a good marketing campaign management tool.

Without one, all of the project parts will be difficult to manage, and your campaigns will in turn  become unnecessarily difficult to coordinate.

Thankfully there are several campaign management tools that can help you get an overview of your marketing campaigns from start to finish, and help visualize the different parts of the project in the best way possible.

What is a marketing campaign management tool?

Campaign management tools for marketing teams are tools that help structure the lifecycle of a marketing campaign. But because each industry or even marketing activity varies as much as it does, there are several overlapping campaign management tools that fill out different needs.

Among the more common marketing campaign management tools are:

• Promotion management software that are used to coordinate product promotions across multiple platforms
• Social media management tools that handle scheduling campaigns and promotions on social media
• Email marketing platforms that handle email marketing campaigns
• Digital marketing and customer relations platforms that are used for nurturing and upselling.

How to get a complete marketing campaign overview

While there are many different marketing campaign management tools, and you are more than likely to be working with more than one of them, getting a complete marketing campaign overview is a little more complicated than just looking at a dashboard.

Thankfully, there are a number of standardized common formats that most service providers give you, so you can visualize your marketing campaigns.

This means that even if you change from one marketing campaign management software to another how you visualize information will usually remain the same. 

We’ve provided an overview of the different view types below:

Listview (also known as ‘table view’ or spreadsheet view’)

Campaigns are made up of activities, and listview is the simplest and easiest way to get a complete marketing campaign overview. This is essentially the overview you know from spreadsheets, except it’s part of the platform you work in. 

Spreadsheet views are commonly used for any sort of listing, whether we’re talking task overviews or an information database. 

Generally, you can add as many rows or columns as you like and incorporate drop-down boxes, and color coding is an essential feature that makes it easier to navigate and interpret information.

Kanban view (also known as ‘board view’)

The design of the kanban view was created by a Toyota engineer in the 1940s, and it is still the one of the easiest ways to get a complete overview of all of your campaign elements.

The view is based around categorizing tasks and activities on information cards. You can group and structure the cards horizontally and vertically, and you can usually move information around just by dragging and dropping the cards.

Kanban view is also based on layered information, which means that each card can contain more information and another type of views within it. 

It is useful for organizing activities by status and managing resources. 

It is most frequently used in project management to monitor task progress, as it allows project managers to highlight bottlenecks, and address issues delaying progress while they can manage workloads across teams.

Timeline view (also known as ‘roadmap view’)

Timeline view usually presents information that needs to be structured in a quarterly or annual planner format which makes it quite common for campaign and promotion planning as most campaigns have a time element to them.

It is most commonly used for managing longer term campaigns that may run over weeks, days or months, and given that many organizations plan out their campaigns over a 12 month period at the time, this view is particularly popular when it comes to management marketing projects.

Gantt view

The gantt view is extremely similar to the timeline view as they share a similar layout, but there is one key difference. 

The Gantt view outlines all of the tasks involved in a project, and their order, shown against a timetable. This gives a good overview of all project elements and when each task needs to be finished. 

Whereas a change in timeline view is completely isolated, the gantt view reflects both the change and adjusts everything else that it is dependent on. So, if one action is delayed, the gantt view adjusts all the other activities that follow, so it doesn’t need to be corrected manually. 

This is most valuable for longer-term plans or activity heavy plans because it saves time for the project manager and reduces the number of errors related to changes in the project timeline.

Calendear view

Calendar view is a very flexible layout which allows you to manage campaigns and activities from a daily, weekly or monthly view in a diary-like format. 

It is useful when managing projects that are time sensitive, where activities need to happen within a particular time period. It’s great for working on short term projects with multiple deadlines.

Split view

Split view is often used to manage the layout and formatting of hierarchical content at the top level of an app, for instance.

In this view, information is presented within a side panel which allows for quick navigation between items in a sorted list. It often consists of a two- or three-column interface showing a primary column, a middle column, and an end column each containing different content.  

A good example of the split view is email inboxes displaying a column of all emails in the inbox with the preview pane showing the content of a selected email next to it.

Gallery view

The gallery view is an easy way to browse activities at a glance. And it lends its strength to presenting data with a visual component, such as product or creative overviews as it is usually easier to find a specific category, product or activity through images rather than reading through a textblock. 

The use of gallery view tends to be more suitable for storing imagery, applications and videos. It is most useful when the visuals themselves are of more value than the data the file contains. 

You see this in your digital asset management platform or on applications on your computer or mobile phone.

Which views do you need in your marketing campaign management tool?

Some views will clearly be more suitable than others, depending on the context. Gallery view may make the most sense if you need a visual overview of your product line, while you will probably be better off using listview if you need to browse data like prices or product numbers, and Kanban view would be the way to go if you needed to group the products according to brand or category.

Most marketing campaign management tools from proofing software to supplier management systems or digital asset management platforms will give you access to all of these different views.

But even though you may have a preference for using one or more of these views, in reality, you need access to all of them.