Origin Story: Campaign Builder
At WHYFOR, we’re always looking for ways to work smarter instead of harder. Not because we’re lazy, but because we actually aren’t — and we truly need to build in efficiencies wherever we can.
Our Campaign Builder, a tool built by WHYFOR’s Director of Strategy, Dustin Diehl, is an example of one of those efficiencies. He tells its origin story best, and explains how it saves clients time and money while putting the strategic planning and branding work they’ve done to use!
Q: Can you explain what the Campaign Builder is?
Luckily, the Campaign Builder is pretty much what it sounds like: It’s a tool designed to help marketers build campaigns! More specifically, it aggregates important information from a brand’s unique Anatomy (voice, tone, values, attributes, etc.) and a brand’s specific Audience (personas, customer journey map stages, and key questions and pain points) to create focused and tailored marketing messages.
Q: How did the concept for the Campaign Builder come about?
Content marketing has been around since the dawn of advertising, and it’s certainly not going away … so we asked the question, “How can we save time (and therefore resources and money) during our editorial planning process?” While creative brainstorms are an important part of marketing, there’s also a need for a focused, actionable approach to content planning, one that accurately maps back to key strategies and goals.
While our initial goal was to save time/resources/money, we quickly saw two important additional benefits: efficiency and efficacy. We saw an opportunity to take key, foundational strategy documents like brand guidelines, voice/tone/style guides, personas and customer journey maps and distill their core elements into the Campaign Builder.
This increased efficiency by taking sometimes overwhelming strategy documents and making them integral to the campaign building process, removing the need to sift through dozens (sometimes hundreds) of pages of documentation to find the insightful nuggets you’re looking for to build a specific campaign.
It also increased efficacy — the more we’re able to stay true to the strategic core of a brand through the execution of our marketing tactics, the more likely those tactics are to perform.
Q: What is it designed to do?
Two things in particular: 1) It ensures your strategic documentation (which you’ve probably spent a lot of time and money on) actually gets used in your tactical marketing campaigns, and 2) sets your marketing and content teams up for success by helping them identify their “north star” for any campaign.
Q: What makes it so great for clients?
Clients love the Campaign Builder because it saves a ton of time on editorial/content planning — in fact, we’ve found that it cuts up to 75% of planning time for our clients!
It also puts clients at ease knowing their strategy documents aren’t collecting dust in the proverbial desk drawer. As mentioned, these are usually labor-intensive strategies that cost significant amounts of money — clients are relieved to know this tool relies heavily on those insights, connecting the oft-missed dots between high-level brand strategy and “in-the-weeds” tactical execution.
Q: Is it complicated to use?
So far the feedback has been: “It’s a breeze!” We wanted to keep the user interface as simple as possible — it’s one of the reasons we use a relatively ubiquitous platform like Excel/Google Sheets. Most people are familiar with filter and sort functionality (from website to apps, etc.), making it simple for anyone to use.
But we’re always looking to improve, and we’re constantly collecting feedback from our internal and our clients’ teams to make it even more powerful, without losing usability.
To learn more about our Campaign Builder, contact our team.