In this article, I will walk through a system I developed during my time at Codeship which allows your team to create quantifiable, repeatable marketing experiments. I called it “Campaign Building Blocks”. These Building Blocks will help you and your team coming up with - and creating - repeatable, measurable marketing experiments.
If you’re interested in setting up your own Campaign Building Blocks I’ll provide a free downloadable template for you later in the article.
Finding Profitable Marketing Channels and Campaigns
Back in 2014, during this interview with the Rocketship Podcast, I talked about concepts and frameworks that help Marketing organizations make, test, and iterate on Marketing assumptions faster and with a high degree of confidence.
I had a good time explaining the system I developed to build scaling and quantifiable marketing experiments. At Codeship, this system had helped us to find our most profitable marketing channels.
How to Use Campaign Building Blocks
Campaign Building Blocks help your team execute on recurring, regular campaigns. Think of the building blocks as “templates” to work off from. One building block for example could be the “go-to-market” of a new feature. Another one simply the rolling-out of a new blog post. These template are not set in stone. If you see ways to improve them, please do iterate on them and make them better within what’s showing results for your organization. Definitely make time to re-evaluate your templates every couple of quarters. Your latest Channel Analysis might tell you that some of the time-consuming tasks you are executing don’t really pay off. When you use templates, it’s easy to fall into the trap of blindly executing.
The building blocks probabily will be set up differently for you specific case than they are in my example further below. What might be a good channel for you might not work for me at all. Which is only natural: Evey company is different. Regardless, the template should give you a good starting point that can also help spark conversation with your team.
Defining Your Campaign Templates
Discuss with your team which templates would be useful for your organization.
- Is there a lot of product feature development on the engineering roadmap which requires Marketing to execute efficiently on multiple go-to-market campaigns in the near future?
- Is there a big focus on content creation with an effort to maximize awareness about the product?
- Are you looking to experiment within the Event Sponsoring channel?
You and your team know better than I which Marketing work should prioritized in your organization’s specific case. Make a decision on what you feel will turn the needle the most and start thinking through how to best set up your Campaign Building Blocks.
Building Blocks, Departments, Sub-Categories and Channels
Building blocks consist of certain departments. One department might be Inbound Marketing. Another one might be Evangelism or Paid Acquisition. Which deparments can be utilized depends on your team setup. How many ressources (people + money) do you have available and how is the skillset distributed? Every department must have an owner who is responsible for their department.
The departments can be broken down into various sub-categories like Social Media, Blog, Email-Marketing, etc. These sub-categories, again, can be broken down further into channels. Think
- Department: Inbound Marketing
- Sub-Category: Social Media
- Channel: Twitter
Again, the sub-categories and channels that work for you will most probably differ from the ones that work for somebody else.
Free Marketing Campagin Template
As mentioned earlier, I set up a free template spreadsheet for you. This way, the things mentioned in this article will be a lot easier to understand and act upon. Feel free to copy this spreadsheet and edit it to your needs. As you will see, I have prepared some campaign blocks, departments, sub-categories and channels for you.
The yellow colored cells are the ones being executed on in a given channel. Most of the times you literally can “shoot” a promotion wave from the left side of the spreadsheet to the right (read: from one department to the other). Having your own template spreadsheet set up, with all the responsibilities and departments will give you a good overview of your campaigns and will make you aware of when it’s a good time to hand over a task to a different department. In short, the complete orchestration of executing on campaigns can be managed within your spreadsheet.
You can access my template here: Free Marketing Campaign Template
If you're interested in more free, helpful templates you should check out the guides and templates on thisisgoodmarketing.com:
Conclusion
Campaign Building Blocks will help your team execute on recurring, regular campaigns more easily, and help define and set up new campaigns more efficiently. Re-evaluate them consistenty and iterate on them. What works today might not work as well tomorrow.
Discuss with your team: Which Marketing activities work for you? Can they be grouped into a deparment with sub-categories, and can you build a campaign building block out of it?