The Expert’s Guide to Campaign Orchestration 101

The Secrets of Successful Marketing Campaign Orchestration

The world changes at a breakneck pace. Social media platforms spring up overnight and fade into obscurity just as quickly, new devices hit the market all the time, and consumer habits change at the drop of a dime. Businesses have to stay nimble to stay competitive. Along the way, most end up accumulating a bunch of disconnected and often redundant or conflicting marketing tools and data sources.  In fact, data problems cost U.S. companies an average of $15 million per year. This is where marketing campaign orchestration comes in.

Marketing orchestration refers to the unification of the data from all of your brand’s available sources and the use of that data to execute more relevant, personalized customer experiences. The goal is to ensure that all of your company’s resources are working together toward the ultimate objective of improving the customer journey, making sure separate teams and tools aren’t pulling in different directions. Marketing orchestration is not about implementing a series of isolated campaigns but about coordinating interactions across channels over time to create a cohesive customer experience. This translates to happier customers, as well as real dollars and cents. Ideally, in a well-orchestrated campaign, calendars, progress tracking tools, creative assets, analytics reporting and more are all centralized and working in harmony to execute on the broader plan.

Take a step back and consider it all in terms of the root word here—orchestra. Marketing, customer service, and sales may as well be brass, woodwinds, and strings, and if they’re not playing the same music, the audience is going to run out of the auditorium. This has never been truer than now, when more and more professionals are working from home, and more teams are scattered across time zones. This increases the need for platforms that allow separate teams to collaborate and tap into the same unified data source.

Marketing Campaign Management and Journey Orchestration: What’s the Difference?

The difference between marketing campaign management and journey orchestration (or marketing orchestration) is that marketing campaign management is usually focused on a customer’s trajectory through a series of interrelated actions, contextualized via the brand, while customer journey orchestration puts the customer more fully in the driver’s seat.

Journey orchestration is part of a broader movement among marketers toward a more holistic, lifecycle-centric approach to customer interactions. Journey orchestration platforms integrate with other marketing systems and data sources to learn what each customer is doing and determine what next step the customer needs. The brand, of course, reacts dynamically.

Examples: Marketing Campaign Management vs. Journey Orchestration

Marketing Campaign Management: A social media marketing campaign

The marketing team uses the data they have to develop KPIs, choose target platforms and customer segments, and establish a strategy. They execute, putting their ads into rotation, attempting to drive their audience to view a new product on their website. Then they step back, measuring their results and adjusting as necessary. This is a brand-driven process, in which their actions are appealing to a mass number of customers (and potential customers) at once.

Customer Journey Orchestration: Jane shops sustainable household goods

A particular customer — let’s call her Jane — signs up for a free sample of your company’s green, natural kitchen cleaning products. When signing up, she indicates that her primary reason for trying your products is that she’s interested in reducing her environmental impact. After a few weeks, Jane returns to your website once more, likely when she’s run out of kitchen cleaner. Your customer journey orchestration platform automatically sends her an email and SMS drip sequence inviting her to download your app to set up recurring monthly refills at a “members only” price, timed to when she’s likely to run out. In the app, Jane browses a page describing your bathroom cleaning products. So, in mailing list emails to Jane, she’s served messaging that invites her to expand her green home buying to include bathroom products as well. Eventually, all of Jane’s household goods come from your brand, and your brand has become a routine part of her lifestyle.

Reimagining Marketing Orchestration with a Customer Data Platform

Campaign orchestration requires organized, high-quality data. This makes a customer data platform (CDP) a potent tool for campaign orchestration efforts. But what is a CDP in marketing?

A customer data platform unifies customer data across sources for use by other systems and teams. CDPs with integrated marketing tools — like The Simon Platform — can leverage this data to deploy automated, personalized, relevant and timely cross-channel campaigns. It’s the modern marketer’s secret weapon.

Streamline your data for better journey orchestration workflows.

Managers spend an average of eight hours a week — a full workday! — on repetitive, manual data tasks. A CDP transforms disparate marketing tools and data sources into an interconnected marketing ecosystem, where everyone’s looking at the same information, and collaboration becomes seamless.

Get immediate access to real-time information that informs campaign orchestration.

Having a single repository for data that’s constantly collecting real-time updates means everyone’s working with the best data possible at all times. It also means easy optimization and experimentation are baked right in. Pull data dynamically to use with campaigns, then A/B test to your heart’s content. Refine customer segments, tweak design and messaging, and test again. With the robust automation of a CDP, constant iterative improvement can become a natural part of your team’s workflow.

Increased alignment between marketing, sales, customer service, and other departments.

Naturally, many of the advantages of marketing tech platforms are centered on the needs of marketers. But since marketing campaign orchestration touches every department that interacts with a customer, the strengths of this approach reach far beyond the marketing department. . Sales representatives, for example, can see what web pages prospective customers have browsed, or which social media initiatives they’ve engaged with. Customer service can approach clients in a much more personalized manner, with a 360-degree customer view on-hand, to offer insight into the customer’s habits and preferences.

Achieve better data governance and a safer data environment.

The average cost of a data breach in the US was $4.24 million in 2021, and with accidental leaks, ransomware and phishing schemes it’s easier than ever to fall victim, particularly when your data is scattered or siloed. Meanwhile, the ways marketers can collect and use data are becoming increasingly limited, as exemplified by Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookie support as well as legal initiatives like GDPR, CCPA and VCDPA. In other words, companies must now do a better job keeping user data private, and they have to get more from their marketing with less data from fewer sources.

With a CDP, all the right data is in one place, empowering marketing professionals to coordinate interactions across channels over time to create a cohesive customer experience.

Why Industry Leaders Choose Simon Data for Marketing Campaign Management and Customer Journey Orchestration

When it comes to CDPs, there’s no solution like The Simon Platform, used by the most innovative, customer-centric companies like Tripadvisor, ASOS and BarkBox. Here are a few of the reasons why:

• An intuitive interface and flexible tools mean your teams can get the most out of Simon Data. In a marketing campaign orchestration context, any centralized platform needs to be useful to everyone, even if those people have very different roles. The Simon Platform has been designed from the ground up to be generalized enough that individual users can create their own use cases within the platform. It also means minimizing repetitive tasks, and a much faster implementation process for your most creative marketing ideas.
• Insights to make smart decisions aligned to your key business objectives. In a well-orchestrated marketing campaign, all team members need to be able to keep their eyes on the prize and think in terms of the campaign’s primary objectives. Simon’s CDP provides real-time campaign performance, helping users monitor impact and identify when and where adjustments to the campaign are required
• Build lifelong loyalists. Marketing campaign management and customer journey orchestration place an emphasis on lifecycle marketing — and zooming out to consider a customer’s lifelong journey with your brand fosters deep connections between your customers and your brand. When customers become advocates, they buy more often, spend more on each purchase, and spread the word to friends and family.

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