How to organize marketing campaigns using programs in SAP Marketing Cloud?

The primary goal of the program’s app is to help marketing experts and managers curate, organize and track their marketing activities. Let’s take a use case of a fictional automobile company who is launching a new sports sedan in two markets: United States and Canada. A product launch of such magnitude involves campaigns across various regions, multiple media channels and of course a lot of money. Now, the question is how can the programs app help?

Let’s narrow down our focus to the Canadian region. Let’s assume CMO has decided to spend 1M Canadian dollars for this purpose. Here is a general framework the marketing manager has decided to follow.

Phase 1: Target outdoor advertising to give a very brief sneak peek into the sedan. Try to utilize all available outdoor channels such as billboards, posters, advertisings on airports. Also, do 30-second video advertisement revealing parts of the car. This phase should only take 20% of the budget.

Phase 2: Target potential clients individually, this could include previous owners, people in the age group of 35-50. Utilize email campaigns and mail in campaigns to invite them to see the car at the dealership at a specific date. Increase the video advertisements on social channels to one-minute spots to provide detailed specs of the car. This phase should take another 20% of the budget.

Phase 3: Nationwide reveal, full blast on all available channels such as Email, TV, Social, Video. This phase should take the remaining 60% of the budget.

So how does the marketing managers initial thought process translate to something tangible?

Let’s start by creating the program

Things to note here:

Marketing Area: This program is for the Canadian Region, so the marketing area is assigned as Canada, this is one way to ensure only employees assigned to this marketing area will have access to the details of this program.

Currency: Programs fully supports multiple currencies, this program is created in Canadian dollars, however, a user can choose to display the amounts in this program in the currency of their choice.

Now we already know that this program will have phases, so let’s go ahead and include them in the creation phase, they can be added later in the “Media Types”Tab.

Now that the Program is created, let’s continue to build a wireframe for our marketing activities. Starting with maintaining the media types. Here is what an empty program looks like

In the “Media Types” tab. The marketing manager can start putting his initial thoughts into tangible items.

The marketing manager can be even more precise in thoughts and specify exactly how much money he would like to spend in each month in the monthly distribution tab.

At this point, the program app gives an excellent overview of what the proposal of the marketing manager is, it also gives a beautiful snapshot of all possible spending.

Now that the marketing manager has done his job, he would like to invite his team to his program and ask them to start working on the program. He can do this by opening the collaboration tab and start to add people he wants to work on this program.

In this case, adding members to the team gives them instant access to the program, regardless of their own authorizations. They can also use SAP Jam Collaboration which is integrated right into the Programs app to discuss the program in more detail.

Now, over to the Marketing Experts, the goal of the experts is to closely follow the managers’ recommendations and create the marketing campaigns. Creating campaigns can, of course, be done in the Marketing Campaigns app, however, they can directly be created within the program’s app itself. Also, if Campaigns have already been created, they could be directly assigned to the program to the right phase.

Let’s see how the campaign creation process looks like.

Things to Note:

Planned Spend: This the amount money the marketing expert is planning to spend on this specific campaign.

Program Phase: The campaign can directly be assigned to the right phase during the creation process.

Currency: This is the currency the campaign is created in. Note that it is not necessary to have the campaign in the same currency as the program. All display amounts will be converted to same currency as that of the program. However, edit of planned spend amount can still be done in the campaigns original currency.

Notice the KPI chart on the header starting to reflect that planned spend in comparison to the proposed spend.

Let’s go ahead and create the rest of the campaigns for the program.

Now we start to get a fuller picture of the program and all the marketing activities related to this program.

Right now, the planned spend is the same as the proposed spend, however, there are no hard restrictions between plan and proposed. Let’s assume that that marketing expert thinks that the Program would benefit from a Facebook ad campaign during the teaser phase, he is free to add this campaign, let’s do that and see the impact.

As you can see the KPI chart changes to a red color showing the over spend. You can see more details in the Charts tab.

Great so now that the Program Planning is done, what comes next? You can get the program approved using the “Submit for Approval” button. The program can be sent for approval to a specific person or a preconfigured list based on various conditions such as marketing area etc.

Once the program is approved, campaigns can start execution. However, the Program can still be the one stop shop for all marketing activities related to this event. The chart you see above will continue to update as key figures such as Actual Spend get updated.

So whats next?

You can plan your spend in details using the Spend Tab in campaign app. Just search for “Detailed Campaign Spend” on https://help.sap.com/mkt

You can organize your programs using the Marketing Plan app. Just search for “Marketing Plans” on https://help.sap.com/mkt

Feel free to post any questions you may have!