Understanding Campaigns and Activities
Suppose that you're about to sell a new line of commercial grade kitchen appliances. You create a marketing campaign with the primary objective of launching your new product. You define campaign attributes, including a budget, dates when the campaign starts and ends, and a campaign owner. You define several campaign activities, incorporating trade publication advertisements, direct mail, email blasts, and so on. You define concrete campaign tasks, such as contracting ad space and creating campaign collateral, including market research summaries and print advertising. You assign a campaign team to design and carry out the campaign; the team consists of a campaign manager, a marketing analyst, a graphic designer, a focus group coordinator, a writer, and several others. You set up a promotional offer of free accessories with the purchase of a new freezer during the six weeks of the campaign. You create several audiences of potential customers whom the campaign will target, including prior customers, readers of restaurant trade publications, and even some designers of high-end residential kitchens. You set up metrics to measure the campaign's effectiveness. The vice president of marketing approves the campaign, the campaign team carries it out, and you sell more new product than you ever thought possible.
This section discusses:
Campaign structure.
Roll ups.
Campaign characteristics.
Activity characteristics.
Associate audiences, offers, collateral, and scripts with activities.
Campaign triggers.
Tasks associated with campaigns.
Campaign and activity status.
Campaign objects associated with activities.
PeopleSoft Marketing functionality is based on the concept of campaigns and activities. A marketing campaign is an initiative by a campaign team to achieve a specific marketing objective such as launching a new product, raising awareness of existing products, or cultivating customer loyalty. An activity represents action taken as part of a marketing campaign.
All standard campaigns must include at least one activity, but can include many. Multiple activities in a single campaign usually share a common marketing theme, and focus on the same product or product line. You can perform multiple activities sequentially (different activities at different times) or simultaneously (all activities at once).
Marketing Programs
The term marketing program refers collectively to the types of marketing campaigns that you can define. The four types of marketing programs are:
Campaigns.
Roll ups.
Dialogs.
Events.
Campaigns and roll ups are discussed in this documentation. Dialogs are discussed in the Online Marketing documentation. Events are discussed in the CRM for Higher Education documentation.
A roll up is a marketing program created to serve as a parent campaign to one or more child campaigns or dialogs. A roll up enables you to create a master campaign with elements shared by several subcampaigns, and with reporting capabilities at the roll up level. For example, suppose that you're promoting a line of sportswear (SportTogs by PeopleGear) that is divided into three segments—children's, women's, and men's. You can create a large campaign with elements shared by all three of the smaller campaigns (such as campaign objective, campaign team members, start and end dates, and collateral), and make that large campaign your roll up campaign. Then you can define three discrete campaigns for your three market segments—children, women, and men.
Note: You designate marketing programs as roll ups so that you can establish campaign hierarchies. Marketing programs function the same, whether they are roll ups or standard campaigns. A roll up occupies the highest level of the PeopleSoft Marketing hierarchy and contains one or more standard campaigns or dialogs. The Marketing Program page for a roll up lists its child campaigns and dialogs, if any exist.
Every campaign has the following characteristics:
|
Field or Control |
Definition |
|---|---|
| Campaign objective |
An effective campaign combines various marketing activities in a concerted effort to achieve one central goal, or campaign objective. |
| Campaign team |
A campaign team represents people who are responsible for or interested in the results of the campaign. A campaign team can include not only workers (employees), but also other companies and sites. Including someone in the campaign team enables workflow functionality. You assign the campaign team on the Plan Campaign Program or Plan Rollup Program page. |
| Campaign owner |
The campaign owner is an employee who is responsible for the campaign. A campaign owner:
|
Every activity has the following characteristics:
|
Field or Control |
Definition |
|---|---|
| Budget |
The money that is allocated for the activity. |
| Activity Type |
The tactic that you use to influence the target audience. |
| Marketing Channel |
The medium that you use to deliver the message. |
| Channel Detail |
A specific media outlet that you use to deliver the message. |
Define activity characteristics on the Campaigns - Activity Detail page.
Activity Budgets and Costs
You can enter any amount of money as an activity budget. When you design and carry out activities, you can enter the actual costs incurred and compare those with the existing budget.
The system verifies budget amounts—it checks activity budgets within the overall budget of the campaign and checks the campaign overall budget against the roll up budget (if one exists). If any of the budgets are exceeded, the system displays a warning. As an example, assume Roll up A has two child campaigns, Campaign B and Campaign C. If the budget for Roll up A is $10,000, for Campaign B is $7,000, and for Campaign C is $5,000, a warning message appears because the total of the two child campaigns' budgets, $12,000, exceeds the $10,000 roll up budget. Likewise, if Campaign B (budget $7,000) has two activities that each have budgets of $4,000, a warning appears because the activity budgets exceed the campaign budget.
The system includes cost metrics to measure the cost effectiveness of the activities.
Note: Child programs using different currency codes can be added to roll ups—the budget of the roll up takes this into account.
Activity Type
An activity type is a tactic to influence the target audience. For example, you might use events as tactics to convey a persuasive message; your company might sponsor a concert tour in exchange for prominent placement of the company logo at concert venues; or you might announce a new service in an audio recording that plays whenever a customer calls your telephone support line. Communicating through the telephone support line is your tactic, or activity type.
Marketing Channel and Channel Detail
The term channel refers to how you deliver the campaign message. PeopleSoft Marketing defines the more general medium such as TV or radio as a Marketing Channel, while it defines the specific outlet, such as the NBC network or a local newspaper, as the Channel Detail.
The most commonly used marketing channel and channel detail options are predefined and delivered with the system. You can define additional marketing channels on the Marketing Channel page in setup. You can define additional channel detail on the Channels page in setup.
You can associate various campaign objects with each activity for organizational and reporting purposes. While preparing and implementing a campaign activity, you can easily access those objects that you have associated with the activity. After the campaign ends, you can analyze the activity, considering the role that the associated objects played in its success.
Audience
An audience is a group of people to whom you target a marketing campaign.
Offer
An offer represents everything that you offer to customers. An offer includes the following elements and attributes:
Product list.
Price rules (complex or simple pricing structure that includes product discounts and giveaways).
Dates when the offer is valid.
Collateral
Collateral (sometimes also called content) includes all the material that you produce to support a campaign, for use both inside and outside the organization. Examples of collateral include:
Press kits.
Television commercials.
Market research summaries.
Scripts
When employees communicate with customers about campaigns, they can follow interactive scripts that you have prepared in advance.
Scripts can guide the system—and the employee—through the steps of a customer interaction. For example, when a salesperson receives a call from a customer who wants to buy a computer hard drive, a script can trigger the salesperson's system to open a web page on which hard drive information appears. Through the web page, the salesperson might be prompted to collect such information as the customer's computer type, the desired hard drive size, and so on, before the system presents a selection of hard drives for sale.
You can associate a script with each activity. The type of script is determined based on the marketing channel selected. All channels use inbound scripts as default.
Note: Only the script name, not its type (inbound or outbound) is displayed.
|
Field or Control |
Definition |
|---|---|
| Inbound |
Inbound scripts guide interactions with customers who initiate contact with the company. |
| Outbound |
Outbound scripts guide interactions with customers with whom the company initiates contact. |
Note: You cannot run scripts within the PeopleSoft Marketing application. You can run them using various other PeopleSoft CRM applications.
The system can initiate campaign events at specified times or when specified conditions are met, using campaign triggers. Set up campaign triggers on the Plan Marketing Programs - Triggers page.
Trigger Schedules
Using triggers, you can initiate up to six actions:
Execute Campaign.
Execute Campaign Activity.
Stop Campaign.
Stop Campaign Activity.
Send Notification.
Generate Audience.
Triggers can recur for the Send Notification and Generate Audience actions, repeating the execution multiple times based on schedule and date range.
Campaign tasks are those activities that produce a campaign. Tasks can be any number of things including designing advertisements, distributing brochures, and polling members of the target audience. When a task is configured to do so, associating a task or changing task status can trigger workflow items.
You select tasks to add to the campaign by using the Task or Task Sets drop-down list boxes on the Program Tasks summary page. You maintain tasks on the Program Task Detail page by clicking the task name or by modifying the task data within the summary grid. You associate tasks with campaigns on the Marketing Programs - Tasks page.
Campaigns and activities pass through structured life cycles. You create a campaign or activity, define its attributes, associate objects with it (collateral, audiences, channels, and so on), send it for review, execute it (if approved), complete it (unless you stop it prematurely), and archive it. At each stage in its life cycle, a campaign or activity has a status.
Status changes can trigger events such as notification of team members and execution or completion of related activities. Status changes must follow predefined status rules; you can use the status rules that are delivered with the system, or you can redefine status rules, on the Status Rules page.