How to Plan and Execute a Marketing Campaign with MindMeister and MeisterTask - Focus

How to Plan and Execute a Marketing Campaign with MindMeister and MeisterTask - Focus Whether you’re a seasoned marketer with a large budget and team, or just starting out with nothing but your laptop and a big idea â€" in this article we’ll introduce you to a simple and effective workflow for all your creative marketing campaigns, using MindMeister and MeisterTask. First, let’s go over the essential ingredients for any successful marketing campaign, and then we’ll show you exactly how MindMeister and MeisterTask support each of these elements, providing you with a collaborative environment that maximizes the creative output of your team. Key Ingredients for a Successful Marketing Campaign 1. A Detailed Plan A marketing campaign is essentially a project, and every successful project needs a concrete, detailed project plan, including measurable goals, a resource plan, and a finite start and end date. We’ll show you how to use MindMeister to create project plans that set you up for success. 2. Creativity Now more than ever, you need a truly creative approach and innovative implementation to stand out from the crowd. MindMeister helps you leverage the combined brainpower of your team and enables you to visualize ideas, collect research, structure your thoughts and more. 3. A Coordinated Team Good communication, transparency, real-time collaboration, and a simple way to keep stakeholders in the loop â€" that’s what your campaign needs to come to fruition. We’ll show you how to manage your entire marketing campaign in MeisterTask, and manage all tasks from start to completion. 4. Tracking Analytics One of the worst mistakes you can make is not to track and measure your successes (and failures). How else will you be able to improve and optimize your efforts? In addition to analytics tools such as Google Analytics you may (and should!) be using, MindMeister and MeisterTask offer valuable insights into your productivity and the development of your campaign. Launching a Successful Marketing Campaign â€" Step by Step: Step 1: Creating a Marketing Campaign Plan in MindMeister You can create a marketing campaign plan in any number of formats, including a simple text document. However, creating a plan in a visual format such as a mind map has a number of benefits: The mind map format lets you visualize the entire plan on a single ‘page’, so it’s easy to see all key points and how they relate to each other at a glance. The format is flexible, which means you can add information wherever it fits, move elements around and restructure them as your plan grows and changes. You can add comments, notes, links, images, videos or attachments to the elements in your map â€" a great way to collect all the essential information you need without cluttering up your plan. Best of all, MindMeister supports real-time collaboration, which means that you can work together with your colleagues to fill the map with information. You can also export your finished mind map as a Word doc in case you need to submit an official campaign plan to superiors in written form; Alternatively, you can turn your mind map into a dynamic slideshow and present it to them. So, what does a marketing campaign plan look like? We’ve prepared a mind map template, which you can also clone to your account for reuse. Here it is: Your browser is not able to display frames. Please visit Marketing Campaign Plan on MindMeister. And this is what the plan looks like once it’s been filled with information â€" in this example, we’ve planned a marketing campaign for the launch of a white paper (click to enlarge): Note that you can still grasp the entire plan at a glance, even though the mind map is now filled with information. Many of the topics now have little icons indicating that there are notes, links or files attached to them, which you can view by clicking on the icons. Let’s quickly go over each branch in the map and discuss what it should contain (and why that matters): 1. GOALS The goals of a marketing campaign should be clearly defined and measurable, such as “3000 downloads and 400 new leads by the end of the year”. In this example, our metrics are download and lead numbers, and our campaign’s success will be determined based on whether we have reached those numbers by the end of the year. Other potential metrics you might want to look at are: Traffic Brand mentions Time spent on site Bounce rates Conversions and more. 2. TIMELINE You should at least give a start and end date for your campaign. Additionally, you can define milestones or provide other known due dates within the campaign. 3. MARKETING PERSONAS Knowing who your marketing personas are is crucial not only to determine which channels you need to focus on in your campaign, but also to determine the length and wording of your copy and other content. You can outline marketing personas in separate mind maps and then  link to those from your campaign plan. 4. RESOURCES Estimate the resources that will be necessary to execute the entire marketing campaign â€" that includes human resources, working hours, and of course expenses for everything from stock photos to freelancers and agencies you might be hiring to help you accomplish your goals. 5. ACTIVITIES This is the branch where you should write down all activities you want to undertake as part of the campaign. An activity could be “Write launch blog post” or “Create Facebook campaign”. You can add detailed descriptions as well as links, due dates and assignees to each of these activities â€" all of which will be exported once you go from planning to execution with MeisterTask (more about this under Step 3). Step 2: Facilitating Creativity and Innovation with MindMeister Creating a realistic campaign plan is the starting point for any successful marketing campaign, but what you need to stand out from the crowd are truly creative, innovative tactics and ideas. MindMeister can help you leverage the full creative potential of your team and come up with those innovative ideas, via online brainstorming sessions. Example: Brainstorming a Blog Post Each activity in your marketing campaign probably deserves its own brainstorming session, and mind maps are perfect for this purpose. In opposite to your campaign plan mind map which is meant to be updated throughout the campaign lifecycle â€" these brainstorming maps are simply meant to be jumping boards. You can use them to do a braindump with your team, compile links, research and inspiration, and discuss and vote on ideas. Taking a little time to brainstorm an activity before jumping head over heels into the execution will help you explore ideas and build connections you may have missed otherwise. Aside from brainstorming sessions, you can also use mind maps to plan events related to your campaign, create marketing personas (get our marketing persona template or check out the fully filled-in example below), and much more. Step 3: Managing a Marketing Campaign in MeisterTask You’ve now learned how to use MindMeister to create a detailed campaign plan and brainstorm ideas for individual activities of the campaign. In this third step, we’re going to show you how to take those plans and ideas, and turn them into action, using MeisterTask. MeisterTask is a collaborative task manager that provides visual project boards with vertical lanes, called Sections, to structure tasks. Project Boards are completely customizable, so you can adapt them to fit your team’s and campaign’s particular needs. Be sure that you’ve signed up for both MindMeister and MeisterTask with the same email address. This will automatically connect your accounts, and allow you to export ideas from MindMeister to MeisterTask. Setting up Your Project Board Once your marketing campaign plan in MindMeister is complete, open the MeisterTask footer in the mind map and select the option to create a new project. The project will automatically be shared with all mind map collaborators, and you can immediately start assigning tasks. To do this, simply drag and drop individual topics from the map onto your team members’ avatars in the footer. The tasks will instantly appear in your connected MeisterTask project board, assigned to the selected team members. As soon as you’ve exported all planned activities from the map, switch to MeisterTask and start customizing the Project Board. By default, all projects start out with three sections â€" Open, Next, and  In Progress â€" but you can add as many as you like and rename them if needed. This way, you can set up static to-do lists, dynamic Kanban boards, marketing funnels, or any kind of agile workflow. Define and Add Tags Tags are a great way to indicate the priority, urgency or category of a task. Open the Project Settings and switch to ‘Tags’ in order to define tags for your project. Once you’ve created all the tags you need, add them to the individual tasks. Not only will tags provide information about tasks at a glance; you will also be able to use the filter view to quickly hide all tasks except for those with a specific tag. Add Checklists, Due Dates, Watchers and more Any information you haven’t already added in MindMeister, you can now add to the tasks in MeisterTask. Aside from a description, which specifies exactly what needs to be done, your tasks can include: Checklist items (=sub tasks) Due dates and times Watchers (team members who want to follow the task’s progress) File attachments (mind maps, documents, drafts, Excel files etc.) Relationships (tasks can block one another) Comments (discuss tasks with your team members in real-time) Use Automations and Integrations As a MeisterTask Pro user, you can connect your project with an unlimited number of other tools you use. This is a great way to keep for instance the members of your Marketing channel on Slack updated about project progress, or track the time you spend on tasks in a connected Harvest account. Once you’ve finished setting up your marketing campaign project, it’s time to get productive. Move tasks from one section to another to indicate project progress, check off checklist items, discuss issues as they come up, and complete tasks as you go along. MeisterTask will ensure that your team members are always on the same page, whether you’re sitting in the same room or are working remotely. Step 4: Analyzing Your Campaign Success We don’t need to tell you how important it is to track all your marketing efforts â€" it really is the only way to determine whether your campaign has been successful, and to find out what you need to improve. But in addition to Google Analytics, Amplitude, Kissmetrics and other analytics tools you’re probably already using, here are two ways to gain insights into your campaign’s success, using MindMeister and MeisterTask: Statistics Reports Throughout the lifetime of your campaign, you can check MeisterTask’s Statistics Reports area to gain insights into your team’s productivity. You’ll be able to see exactly which tasks are taking the longest, which tasks are overdue, coming up, or have been completed. Make sure that all team members reliably track the time they spend on tasks. This will provide you with even further insights into how long each task is taking. MeisterTip: Export the reports as CSV files and attach them to the campaign plan mind map, alongside screenshots and metrics from your Google Analytics or Amplitude reports. At the end of the campaign, you can create slides with these mind map topics to present to your team and superiors during a postmortem meeting. This is a great way to discuss your achievements and what you can do better next time around. History Mode If you’ve continually updated and adapted your marketing campaign plan mind map, you might end up with something that doesn’t look much like the original plan you set out with. You may have adjusted the milestones and end dates, changed your goals or deleted activities during the campaign. Using MindMeister’s History Mode, you can retrace the entire change history of your mind map at the end of the campaign, to see exactly who modified the map when and in which way. This will give you insights into the disparity between your original intentions and estimations, and what you’ve ended up doing. You might find out that your resource estimates were way off, or that you’ve far exceeded the goals you had set for yourself. These insights will help you plan more realistically next time around. To Summarize Use MindMeister to plan and brainstorm your next creative marketing campaign, and use MeisterTask to turn those great ideas into action. Measure your campaign’s successes â€" and failures â€" to ensure that your next campaign makes an even bigger impact. Plan amazing marketing campaigns Try MindMeister its free Try MindMeister