Geek or Chic?

Geek or Chic? How to hire the best campaign managers

When it comes to hiring Campaign Managers, do you go with geek or chic? The answer I’m afraid is that chameleon creature between the two.

At times campaign management will be an extension of either a client or marketing team (think chic) or of a data and deployment team (think geek). Where your next recruit needs to sit is right between those two. They should be able to translate the customer engagement experience into something an analyst can build as easily as they can translate a deliverability report back to a client.

While your Campaign Manager must be able to present well in front of a client, they also really need to understand all the nuts and bolts that go into campaign creation too. Part of that comes with training and part of it is based on the skill set you hire.

Here’s a quick checklist of things to look for in a great Campaign Manager.

1. Organisation and communication skills: this role is the glue that sticks everything together, keeps everyone on track and isn’t afraid to say no or deliver bad news when the need arises. Strong communication and organisation skills are essential.
2. Analytical: I can’t emphasise more how important it is that Campaign Managers understand the basics of data manipulation and segmentation.  Pop a few simple targeting scenarios in your interview questions to see how they can talk them through on the spot and you’ll see whether they are likely to struggle in this area.
3. Attention to detail: if there’s one person that’s in the best position to spot an error in a campaign before it goes out that door, that person is the Campaign Manager. Why? Well, one of the big reasons is because they are exposed to the entire campaign lifecycle more than any other role and so they have much more opportunity to develop a full understanding of the end product everyone is working towards.
   
   The client may not notice a miscalculation in a variable data field, or an email developer may accidentally insert old terms and conditions into a message. These kinds of issues can be reduced significantly with a detail-oriented Campaign Manager overseeing each step of the campaign build and deployment process.
4. Strongly opinionated: not in a demanding, negative way but a good Campaign Manager comes with their own set of strong opinions, ideas and suggestions. And it should be expected of them.

Campaign Managers are not administrators or project managers, they are campaign experts and while their primary job is to get campaigns out the door on time and error free, they are also there to refine and improve said campaigns. They must have the knowledge and confidence to make suggestions, let the company or clients know when their targeting is off and push the teams around them to test, design and build the best possible campaigns.

At Purple Square our consultants have a wealth of experience in the implementation and best practice use of Marketing Automation technologies, campaign management practices and campaign execution, if you’re looking to augment your marketing team; to improve and enhance their skills using Acoustic Marketing Platform, Adobe Experience Cloud, HCL Software Marketing Suite or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or if you need to plug a resource gap or spike in activity for a while, please contact us.

Good luck with your next hire!