The Expert’s Guide to Campaign Orchestration
Social media platforms spring up overnight and fade into obscurity just as quickly. New devices hit the market constantly; some fizzle out while others become blockbuster technology that changes how people interact with businesses. Consumer habits change at the drop of a dime. The world changes at a breakneck pace, and businesses must stay nimble to stay competitive.
Along the way, most accumulate 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.
The good news is that just because this is the status quo, it doesn’t mean things need to stay that way. Marketing campaign orchestration allows you to rethink your martech and analytics stack while delivering more effective campaigns.
Below, we look at marketing campaign orchestration and how it differs from customer journey management, another critical marketing concept. We also offer advice, best practices, and other insights that you can use to orchestrate your campaigns better.
What is marketing campaign orchestration?
Marketing campaign orchestration refers to unifying all of the data your business has collected or generated across its various systems and using that data to execute more relevant, personalized customer experiences.
The goal of orchestration is to ensure that all of your company’s resources are working together to improve the customer journey. At the same time, orchestration also helps you avoid the possibility that different teams (sales, marketing, customer support, etc.) might pull in different directions or work toward competing goals.
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.
In a well-orchestrated campaign, calendars, progress tracking tools, creative assets, analytics reporting, and more are centralized and harmonized to execute the broader plan.
Take a step back and consider it all in terms of the root word here — orchestra. If you’ve ever seen an orchestra in action, you know how powerful and beautiful it can be. But that’s only possible when all the different parts and sections work together in harmony. If they’re playing the wrong tune or tempo, the result will be a song nobody wants to listen to.
The same holds for your marketing, sales, and customer support teams. Campaign orchestration ensures that everyone in your business plays the same music and works toward the same goals.
Benefits of marketing campaign orchestration
Still need convincing that campaign orchestration is worth the effort? Consider these potential benefits that your business can realize by implementing it:
1. Improved customer experience
When all your teams work together, it promises a unified customer experience across channels regardless of which team your customer interacts with at any given time. Perhaps most importantly, they encounter the same messaging, resulting in less confusion and an overall more enjoyable interaction.
2. Brand consistency
Some companies will vary their messaging, branding, and even their tone and voice depending on which channel they are communicating through. While this can make sense sometimes, it can also be jarring for customers needing to become more familiar with your alter egos. Campaign orchestration reduces this risk, making ensuring a consistent brand experience easier regardless of how or where a customer interacts with your brand.
3. Increased ROI
In short, campaign orchestration leads to more effective marketing campaigns, less waste, and, ideally, more conversions and sales. That means more ROI for your business through customers and revenue.
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 usually focuses on a customer’s trajectory through a series of interrelated actions contextualized via the brand.
In contrast, customer journey orchestration puts the customer in the driver’s seat more fully. 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 their data 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 simultaneously appeal to many customers (and potential customers).
Customer journey orchestration: Jane shops for sustainable household goods
A particular customer — let’s call her Jane — signed up for a free sample of your company’s green, natural kitchen cleaning products. Upon signing up, she indicated that her primary reason for trying your products is to reduce her environmental impact.
After a few weeks, Jane returned to your website, likely after she had run out of kitchen cleaners. Your customer journey orchestration platform automatically sent 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 browsed a page describing your bathroom cleaning products. So, in mailing list emails to Jane, she’s served messages inviting her to expand her green home buying to include bathroom products. Eventually, Jane’s household goods came from your brand, and your brand became a routine part of her lifestyle.
How to enable marketing orchestration
1. Centralize your data
Effective marketing orchestration requires you to consolidate the data that may live in various systems, such as your CRM, website management platform, POS system, accounting system, behavior tracking system, and more.
Without this consolidation, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to take full advantage of orchestration and its benefits. If you are not already using them, consider implementing a Cloud Data Platform like Snowflake and a Customer Data Platform like Simon Data to help you in this centralization.
2. Create robust customer profiles
Once you have unified your customer data, you can generate detailed customer profiles that contain everything you know about your customers. These profiles make it easier for you to make informed decisions about the kind of messaging, promotions, etc., that a particular customer might be interested in receiving and can facilitate a deeper understanding of what tactics might and might not work for someone.
3. Segment customers into related audiences
Armed with your customer profiles, it’s possible to build audience segments of customers with particular characteristics, interests, goals, or traits. You might, for example, generate segments based on behavioral, geographic, demographic, or psychographic information, making it easier to provide highly targeted and personalized messaging to each of your customers.
4. Design campaigns for each segment
With your segments solidified, you can design, test, and implement campaigns tailored to each segment. How different these campaigns look should ultimately be informed by how different your segments are.
For example, if your segments are more alike than similar, they might involve minor word choice and image selection adjustments. But if your segments are very different from one another, it might involve dramatic differences in messaging, tone, and more.
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 other systems and teams. CDPs with integrated marketing tools 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 — an entire 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 always working with the best data possible. 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 marketers' needs. However, 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, mainly when your data is scattered or siloed.
Meanwhile, the ways marketers can collect and use data are becoming increasingly limited, exemplified by legal initiatives like GDPR, CCPA, and VCDPA. In other words, companies must now do a better job of keeping user data private, and they have to get more from their marketing with less data from fewer sources.
With a CDP, all the correct 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 Simon Data, used by the most innovative, customer-centric companies like Tripadvisor, ASOS, and BarkBox. Here are a few of the reasons why:
1. An intuitive interface and flexible tools mean your teams can get the most out of Simon Data. In marketing campaign orchestration, any centralized platform needs to be useful to everyone, even if those people have very different roles. Simon Data has been designed from the ground up to be generalized enough that individual users can create their use cases within the platform. It also means minimizing repetitive tasks and implementing your most creative marketing ideas much faster.
2. Insights to make smart decisions aligned with 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.
3. Build lifelong loyalists. Marketing campaign management and customer journey orchestration emphasize 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.
Interested in learning more about how Simon Data can help you unlock the power of campaign orchestration? Request a demo today.