Campaign Planning Tools: What They Are and the Benefits of Implementing Them

The campaign planning tools you use (or don’t use) can make the difference between launching a successful campaign that gets you your anticipated ROI and launching one that’s a flop. As the saying goes, failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

So, what are these tools and how exactly can they benefit your brand?

Read on to find out.

What Are Campaign Planning Tools?

Campaign planning tools are an essential element of any respectable influencer marketing campaign. They help you streamline your campaign management process, automate many of your repetitive tasks, and access valuable insights into the impact your campaigns are having on your target audience. Without the right tools, your strategies are far less effective, and the success of your campaigns is left to chance.

So, what are campaign planning tools exactly?

Campaign planning tools usually include a range of features for leveraging each stage of your influencer marketing campaigns. This includes finding influencers, managing your collaborations, and controlling your budgets. They also help you track and measure the performance of your campaigns and calculate your ROI. All this helps you keep a firm hold on how your campaigns are progressing so that you can make the necessary adjustments to boost your performance in real-time.  

For example, with Influencity’s campaign planning tool you get:

• A dashboard with a calendar that tells you what is due each day
• A workflow that can be customized to your particular campaign
• Tools for assigning tasks to each influencer 

Benefits of Using Campaign Planning Tools

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using campaign planning tools like dashboards, customized workflows, task management tools, and features for managing costs and budgets.

More Efficient Workflows with Dashboards

With Influencity’s campaign planning tools you can create more efficient workflows for your campaigns. For example, a calendar where you can schedule all your campaign tasks and see at a glance which tasks are due on each day. This helps you create a visual timeline for each of your campaigns so that you can monitor an influencer’s progress and get in touch with them via email if they haven’t completed any of their pending tasks. This makes it much easier to stay on top of every stage of your campaign and address any potential scheduling issues before they crop up. 

You also get access to an intuitive and user-friendly customized dashboard where you can centralize all your campaign data. All your information is displayed in real-time so you can make the right strategic decisions at each stage of your campaign in line with evolving influencer marketing trends. This helps all your workflows run far more efficiently. It also ensures that your entire team has access to all the data they need at the click of a button. 

More Accurate Campaign Performance Predictions

The right campaign planning tools should also give you access to accurate performance predictions so that you can monitor the progress of your campaigns and make adjustments when needed. The best way to do this is by creating tasks for all your influencers so that you know who is doing what and for what price. That way, you can create a forecast based on how each task is likely to impact your overall campaign performance, and when.   

For instance, with Influencity’s campaign planning tools you can assign multiple tasks to an influencer across a range of social media networks through your own personal screen. Whether it's uploading a sponsored post or drinking your sports drink at a big match, you can add it here for all your team to see. You can then mark each task as complete once an influencer has updated you and estimate how these tasks add up and compare to your budget.

Although influencers aren’t notified when you assign tasks to them, the feature does serve as an excellent way for you to keep track of the status of each task that an individual has been assigned through other channels.  

Increased Control Over Costs and Budgets

Finally, the best campaign planning tools include features to help you manage your campaign costs and budgets. You can use them to forecast the reach of your campaigns and measure your expenses against your investments. 

These forecasts should be based on an influencer’s performance metrics and the tasks that you have assigned to them. They should also take into account the Earned Media Value (EMV) of each influencer and the price assigned to each task that they are performing. You can then use this data to calculate how much you are spending on each influencer and on each social media platform that they are active on. That way, you can control your influencer marketing costs and ensure you stay within your budget. You can then adjust your budgets in line with the needs of each of your campaigns.