Best Practices for Unica Plan
I had a client reach out and ask me about campaign measurement and reporting. As in, they couldn’t do it. They said, “we have a campaign measurement problem.” On closer inspection, they had a very good handle on tracking their digital media spend and performance. Still, they couldn’t align their paid media performance to the campaigns they were running in other channels like email and the call center, mobile, etc. Turns out, they had a very good unified tag management construct for paid media, but that’s it. They were using Unica Campaign for other channels but couldn’t put all of the pieces together. Also, they were rolling up campaign results between paid media and other channels manually in another external system to support marketing dashboards and reporting. Discovering this, I decided to be bold and tell them that they didn’t have a campaign measurement problem; they had a campaign execution framework problem. They needed a set of campaign identifiers that run across all channels, including paid media. Lucky for us, Unica has a campaign execution framework. It’s called Unica Plan. Diagram 1 below shows the campaign execution framework in Unica Plan. [caption id="attachment_4742" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Diagram 1: Unica Plan’s campaign execution framework[/caption] Marketing Plans sit at the top of the campaign execution framework in Unica Plan. Plans represent the annual marketing plan for a budget holding organization in marketing. That is typically a line of business, brand, or product group. For example, the credit card portfolio at a bank, the loyalty program at a hotel group, or the plus-size brands at a fashion retailer. Each Plan owner sets up Programs to fit their marketing organization’s structure. Programs represent a large marketing initiative with multiple marketing activities under it. Programs generally align with a specific product or audience. In our examples...