Campaigns and Activities

Marketing Campaigns are the main messages that you wish to promote.  A retail example might be "End of Summer Super Sale".  The message would be promoted through a variety of means e.g. radio, television, direct mail, billboards, etc.  Each of these promotions are referred to as "Activities" and will be grouped together by Campaign.

To use the marketing functions you will have to create matter (action) types for both a Marketing Campaign and a Marketing Activity.

Setting Up Marketing Campaigns and Activities

Any Action Type can be optionally marked in the Admin "Edit Action Type" screen as either a Marketing Campaign or a Marketing Activity, but it cannot be both as they serve different purposes (see top of page).

After you have created your Marketing Campaign and Activity Action Types, you will need to create a Campaign action for each specific campaign you want to run.

This will bring you to a Campaign Setup screen where you can select the date range, what type of income tracking you want to view, and what action type(s) you want to draw this income information from.

Inside this matter you will be able to see a Campaign Overview screen that details the Campaign specifics and tracks the different types of income your activities are bringing in. This will depend on what you selected in the setup screen (e.g. Expected Income or Actual).

In the above screenshot there is nothing in the ROI summary yet. This is because we haven't added any Activity matters to the Campaign. You do this at the bottom of the Campaign Overview page.

In the example screenshot below, I am creating a new Marketing Activity matter for the promotional ad we set up with Loud FM. I am calling this 'Loud FM 96.3 - EP ad' and am applying an expected sale amount of $10,000 to the matter.

On the next screen I am asked to select a Marketing Campaign to assign the activity to along with some dates, accounting details and the marketing medium (in this case I am selecting 'Radio').

Processing New Clients

If a Marketing Activity called 'Loud FM 96.3' was to bring in new business here's how we would process the new information.

1. Create a new 'Client Enrollment' matter for the new client (or whatever Action Type you use to process new clients).

2. Enter the Sales information you want to display.

   You can edit what is displayed on the 'creation' step by going to Admin > Workflow > Action Types > select the Action Type > 'first step' > Sales Status > Ticking the information you want to be able to enter

3. 'Add activity' > Choose the correct marketing activity.
4. Add other info and 'Create Matter'.

To view and edit the Sales information in the new client's matter go to Accounting > Sales Opportunity:

Now if we go back to our Campaign matter we will be able to see the income information of the Marketing Activity that brought in the new client.

Using an All-Inclusive Marketing Campaign

If your firm has a simple marketing strategy then it may be beneficial to use one Marketing Campaign for all past and future Marketing Activities.

To do this, simply set the start and end dates of the Marketing Campaign matter far into the past and far into the future respectively.

This will create a general campaign that you can assign your activities to without worrying about the purpose of the campaign. The sole purpose of this campaign is to generate new business.

When using this type of Campaign, be sure to leave the 'Force activity dates to match campaign' field unchecked as the marketing activities should have more specific dates than this.

Using General Marketing Activities

If you are not going to be running Marketing Activities for specific events, you are also able to use Marketing Activities generally.

An example is if you wanted to report on all business generated by 'Word of Mouth'. In this case you would create a Matter called 'Word of Mouth' under your general Marketing Activity Action Type. Like in an 'All-Inclusive Campaign', you would also want to make the start and end dates far into the past and far into the future to collect all of the 'Word of Mouth' data you enter.

Here you are essentially using Marketing Activities to report on new business created by each Marketing Medium in general, instead of particular events underneath the Marketing Mediums.

Custom Overview Screens

When an Action has been created where the Action Type has been marked as "Use for Marketing Activities" or "Use for Marketing Campaigns" the Action will have a special overview screen where Campaign/Activity information is setup, collected and displayed.

Budgets and Return on Investment (ROI)

You can set budget and ROI for the campaign as a whole.

And also for each of the Activities under the Campaign.

Do this by going to the 'Edit' option at the top right of the Overview screen.

Lead Flow

The typical flow from marketing to sales inquiry can be depicted as follows



Marketing activities can generally be classified as "direct" or "indirect".

For direct marketing activities you contact specific people via email, phone, or regular mail from a list that you have either acquired commercially, or from your internal records. The Actionstep contact database can serve as a good lead source for direct marketing events if you set it up correctly. You can filter the list by participant types such as 'Client' or 'Prospect' and then export a file to feed your direct marketing event.

Media

Media are the communication channels used by the activities, for example 'print', or 'online'. Each marketing activity is linked to a single medium. If you want to get the same campaign message communicated over radio and television then you would create two activities. To setup marketing mediums, a list is available in Admin.