The Telco Training Academy

   
Campaign Management
 

The proof for your customer management activities is found in running programs, campaigns, and promotions. Here is where you find out whether your efforts have been effective.

The process of conceptualizing, prioritizing, targeting, developing the creative, contracting, and executing campaign, programs, and promotions is therefore critical to your ultimate success.

 

The Telco Market Execution Crisis

Few telcos have been able to come up with a good standardized, well executed methodology for the control and monitoring of the overall campaign management process. Instead, there are many, many people and groups (sometimes hundreds), all creating, developing, and executing programs, campaigns, and promotions any way they like with little regard for what anyone else in the organization is doing. The result is a cacophony of conflicting programs, contradictory market messages, and an incredible level of duplication of effort and wasted marketing dollars.

While high profit margins and the lack of serious competition made such inconsistencies acceptable in the past, today's market requires that something be done about this chaos — and soon!

The challenge is to find some way to consolidate efforts, standardize approaches and, in general, get focused and pointed in the same direction, without robbing the individual groups of their own particular strengths, perspectives, and budgets.

In other words, management must deal with the same kind of problem that the cowboys of the Old West faced when trying to move a great number of cows and horses from their untamed state in the wilds of Texas to the markets where they could generate the most value. For the cowboys, the ultimate solution to this challenge was the cattle drive.

 

The  -TrailBlazer Marketing Approach

Realizing the chaotic state of telco program, campaign, and promotion development,   has put together a best practices-based methodology for correcting the weaknesses that the current approaches engender, while at the same time creating a roadmap to a more disciplined, well-managed, and focused marketing future.

Our  -Marketing TrailBlazer© Approach is the only comprehensive approach designed to provide telcos with a clear blueprint for renovation and migration of existing marketing practices into the more focused, intelligence-driven, closed-process marketing activity.

 

Key to the  -Marketing TrailBlazer Approach

The core concepts that underlie the  -Marketing TrailBlazer approach are simple and straightforward:

  • Each department, division, and group (with a few exceptions) that currently has a marketing budget, and has it for a reason, should continue to manage those budgets and activities.

  • The core issue for telco marketing activity will not be solved by changing who manages the budgets, but by how.

  • Each group has different needs when it comes to program, campaign, and promotion development and these needs should be recognized and respected.

  • There is, however, an overriding need that the overall organization has for:

    • Streamlining the processes wherever possible to reduce costs

    • Consolidating redundant activities

    • Injecting certain levels of consistency and quality into all activities

    • Assuring that all activities leverage the power of the brand and contribute to brand equity as one of its core missions (in addition to its tactical requirements)

    • Standardizing the effectiveness of any activity (assuring a certain level of return on investment)

    • Guaranteeing that all activities collect intelligence about customers, approach effectiveness, and activity efficiency (closed loop processes) so that all groups and management become smarter and better informed each time a program, campaign, or promotion is run (intelligence momentum)

The  -Marketing TrailBlazer approach honors each of these principles and enables the organization to accomplish all of the stated objectives.

 

Overview of the  -Marketing TrailBlazer Methodology

The  -Marketing TrailBlazer Approach is series of processes, checkpoints, and gateways, which guarantee management that practitioners are making the best decisions, at the best time possible, and are leveraging as much historical information, market intelligence, segmentation, and customer identity information as possible to get the absolute best return on marketing investment. The major phases and steps in the methodology include:

 

  • Making preparations

  1. Program Roundup
    Creativity, team building, and due process guarantee that all the best ideas are considered for inclusion in the marketing process

  2. Thinning the Herd
    Ideas are prioritized and those with the most potential are forwarded for further consideration

  3. Targeting
    Decisions are made about which products will be offered to which market, making the most informed selection possible by using segmentation, modeling, and other market intelligence

  4. Funding
    Sponsorship and needed funding are secured to make the drive to market

  5. Recruiting
    The team of experts is assembled that will be responsible for developing the program, campaign, or promotion

  • Driving the development process

  1. Message selection and tuning

  2. Media and channel selection and pricing

  3. Market selection - fine tuning the market targeting and results forecasting

  4. Margin development - reviewing and selecting price models

  5. Creative development and testing

  6. Management of the entire process

  • Delivery and follow-up

  1. Delivery testing, sampling, and final forecasts

  2. Production costing, negotiating, quality assurance, and creation

  3. Delivery costing, negotiating, quality assurance, and creation

  4. Tracking and monitoring

  5. Follow-up and feedback

 

Value Propositions for Telco Marketing Management

For the telco management, the need for a systematic, well controlled, value based, closed loop marketing discipline is clear. Standardization of methods and implementation of disciplines can only help to:

  • Reduce overall market expenses

  • Increase overall marketing effectiveness

  • Eliminate marketing message redundancy and market confusion/conflict

  • Create trackable measurement criteria

  • Provide meaningful and enforceable KPIs for department and project budgets

  • Inject brand leverage into all marketing activities

  • Improve brand equity and investment value return on investment

  • Improve customer loyalty and affinity

  • Reduce churn

  • Improve results from all program, campaign, and promotion activities

  • Inject customer intelligence into all decision-making

 

  Offerings for Telco Marketing Management

  can help with upgrading your program, campaign and promotion development activities. These include offerings from the highest level (professional, disciplined, accountability-based marketing practices) to the most tactical and immediate level (conceptualization, design, and execution of specific, focused, intelligence-driven marketing activities).

  • High level offerings
    Overall management, budgeting, and monitoring of marketing disciplines

    •  -TrailBlazer training and indoctrination

    •  -TrailBlazer roadmap development

    •  -TrailBlazer assessment and evaluation

    •  -TrailBlazer migration and implementation

    •   -WAR methodology implementation

  • Tactical offerings
    Specific practices in the areas of interest to your organization. Skills enhancement and incorporation of intelligence-based best practices

    • Campaign development overall process audit and assessment

    • Campaign conceptualization and prioritization

    • Campaign targeting

    • Creative development for print media (layouts), Internet (Web sites), and phone solicitation (scripts)

    • Campaign development (message, media (channel), monetary (price), and method development

    • Campaign execution discipline

    • Campaign tracking and evaluation

    • Direct marketing and campaign management best practices implementation

  • Objective specific offerings
    End-to-end specific programs, campaigns, and promotions to support specific market objectives

    • New customer acquisition (startup and new market penetration)

    • Predatory acquisition

    • Revenue enhancement

    • Cross-selling and bundling

    • Churn prevention and management

    • Customer winback

  • Training, vision development and consensus building

    •  -TrailBlazer introduction and training

    • WAR methodology training

    • Best practices in marketing

    • Best practices in direct marketing

    • Best practices in creative development