Marketing Campaign Roles and Responsibilities

Participating in a marketing campaign is a common activity of a product manager or product marketing manager. There is a lot of moving parts and players in each campaign, even a small one. It is very important to have an effective and efficient campaign management process even if you run a small number of campaigns, but if you find yourself running dozens of campaigns each year and several campaigns in parallel at any given point in time, the importance of having such a process grows immensely. This process needs to meet several key requirements:

• work well for a small number of campaigns run by a small team
• scale well (as the number of campaigns and the size of the team grows) without making the team to design and learn a new process
• support teams consisting of staff, free-lance contractors and agencies
• support both simple single-channel campaigns and complex multi-channel campaigns

In this and follow up articles we will look at the components of a good process for running marketing campaigns. We will start with campaign roles and responsibilities.

Campaign Roles

Please note:

• The roles and titles shown in the table below have nothing to do with existing positions at a company. In some companies, employees will wear many hats and have one or more roles in each campaign; in other companies more than one person plays a role, for example you may have several Social Media Marketing Specialists or IT Specialists etc.
• In some situations, all roles will be employees of the same company (all resources are internal); in other situations everyone but the Campaign Owner works for another organisation (service provider).
• Not all teams will have all roles
• In the table below, “accountability” only refers to the context of an individual campaign and has nothing to do with reporting relationships or the organisational chart of a company.

Role	Responsibilities and Accountability
Campaign Owner	Accountable for business results of the campaign Defines strategy & tactics in consultation with subject matter experts Prepares creative briefs and requirements documents Makes all business decisions Ultimately, ensures the campaign is a success according to predefined criteria / measures of success
Campaign Manager	Accountable to Campaign Owner Manages the campaign as a project Ensures cross-functional coordination
Media Planner	Accountable to Campaign Manager Prepares an external media plan in consultation with Campaign Owner (if required), Campaign Manager and subject matter experts, and does media buys as required
Creative Lead	Accountable to Campaign Manager Defines the campaign theme and messaging in consultation with Campaign Owner Defines the user experience to optimise the conversion rates
Copywriter	Accountable to Campaign Manager Develops text-based creative assets including text elements used in images
Graphic Designer	Accountable to Campaign Manager Develops assets such as banners and landing pages concepts
IT Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Provides support w.r.t. back-end systems and dynamic parts of the web site
Web Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Changes/adds web pages
Social Media Marketing Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Plans, runs and optimises the elements of the Campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, other social networks
Paid Search Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Plans, runs and optimises the elements of the Campaign on Google AdWords and/or Bing
SEO Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Defines SEO requirements for other specialists in consultations with the Campaign Owner
Display Advertising Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Plans, runs and optimises the display advertising elements of the Campaign
Email Marketing Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Plans, runs and optimises the email marketing elements of the Campaign
Affiliate Marketing Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Provides the interface between the Campaign and affiliates
Customer Relations Specialist	Accountable to Campaign Manager Provides the interface between the Campaign and the Customer Relations team Provides Customer Relations support to the Campaign as per the Campaign Plan

Notes:

• The same person may be both the Campaign Owner and Campaign Manager but it’s best to avoid this
• One Campaign Owner may own one or more concurrent campaigns
• One Campaign Manager may manage one or more concurrent campaigns

R-Chart

For any given campaign, it is simply a mapping of campaign roles to real people, for example:

Role	Real Person
Campaign Owner	John
Campaign Manager	Sabrina
Media Planner	Karon
Creative Lead	Karon
Copywriter	Carline
Graphic Designer	Charles
IT Specialist	David
Web Specialist	Paul
Social Media Marketing Specialist	Geoff
Paid Search Specialist	Kate
SEO Specialist	Kate
Display Advertising Specialist	Andrew
Email Marketing Specialist	Andrew
Affiliate Marketing Specialist	Chris
Customer Relations Specialist	Mary

 

In the next article on campaign management we will look at a typical life-cycle of a campaign.