Marketing Planning and Campaign Management

Purpose

As part of CRM Marketing, Marketing Planning and Campaign Management lets your department plan their activities and then, using existing data, such as customer data and profiles, to start direct marketing actions. Marketing planning and campaign management is referred to as marketing planning in the following documentation.

You can plan your activities at different levels from high-level marketing plans for the whole concern down to campaigns for individual products at local level or events. 

Marketing plans are intended for the long-term, strategic planning of activities. This way budgets and deadlines are taken into consideration. A marketing plan could form, for example, the basis for next year's costing in the Marketing department. As such, it is a management tool.

Campaigns serve as operative marketing planning. They describe actions that are carried out, for example, mailing actions, product promotions and telemarketing. Criteria such as target groups, products, documents, people responsible and the budget are defined in the campaign for these activities.

The central tool for maintaining marketing plans and campaigns is the Marketing Planner.

Integration

Marketing planning and campaign management are highly integratable. The following graphic depicts the interface of the Marketing Planner to other systems.

Features

The following functions are available in Marketing Planning and Campaign Management:

·        Marketing project structures

You can create and edit hierarchical structures for marketing plans and campaigns. You can assign new marketing plans and campaigns to marketing plans that already exist. For more information, see Marketing Plans and Campaigns.

·        Key figure planning

In the Marketing Planner, you can enter start and finish dates for your marketing projects. You use Microsoft Project for maintaining dates and scheduling in graphical form.  For more information, see Maintaining Dates

·        Document administration

You can assign documents (for example, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and so on) to marketing plans and campaigns. For more information, see Assigning Documents.

·        Assign product catalogs

You can assign product catalogs and catalog variants to campaign elements. For more information, see Assigning Product Catalogs and Catalog Variants.

·        Assign products and conditions

If you want to promote the sale of one or more than one products using a campaign, you can assign these directly to the campaign. You can also stipulate campaign-specific conditions for these products. Using this function you can promote products by offering a product for a limited time at a discounted rate, for example. If you sell the product with reference to the campaign, the campaign-specific conditions are taken into account in pricing. For more information, see Assigning Products and Campaign-Specific Conditions.

·        Cost planning using key figures

Use key figure planning for planning costs. You can plan quantities and values for predefined and/or user-specific key figures of your marketing elements.  You can carry out key figure planning time-dependent or time-independent. For more information, see Key Figure Planning

·        mySAP.com Integration

A direct connection to the Project System enables you to post actual costs and revenues directly to the SAP System.  The system automatically assigns a WBS element to a CRM marketing element in the Marketing Planner. Actual costs and revenues are posted to the corresponding WBS element. This means, for instance, that you can enter costs as normal in your Purchasing department and these costs can be posted to a campaign. See Connection to SAP R/3 and Actual Costs.

·        Transfer marketing projects to and from mySAP CRM and Microsoft Project

You can export marketing projects to Microsoft Project, edit them there, and then import the marketing projects back into mySAP CRM. For more information, see Data Exchange with Microsoft Project.

·        Transfer marketing projects to and from mySAP CRM and Protagona

To model complex target groups, you can export marketing projects to Protagona and then import them later to mySAP CRM. For more information, see Data Exchange with Protagona.

·        Marketing Calendar

When you use the table view or graphic view in the Marketing Calendar you get an overview of your various marketing plans and campaigns. For more information, see Marketing Calendar.

·        Assign marketing segment

You can assign selected marketing segments (profile, profile sets and target groups) to campaigns.  Integration with the Segment Builder allows you to edit the assigned marketing segments and create target groups, without leaving the Marketing Planner. For more information, see Determining Contact Partners.

·        Enter relationship category

In addition, you can enter relationship categories to the assigned marketing segments. For more information, see Determining Contact Partners.

·        Transfer target group to channel

You can transfer your target group to a communication medium you have already defined, thereby informing the selected customers of the contents of the campaign via telephone, telefax, e-mail, and so on. For more information, see Executing Marketing Campaigns.

·         Reporting using SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW)

SAP BW is the central data warehouse solution for SAP AG. Always when you create an object in the Marketing Planner this object is automatically saved in SAP BW. In this way, you can call up numerous reports and compare planned and actual values in SAP BW, for example.

·        Exchange campaign data between CRM Enterprise and CRM Mobile

A two-way data exchange enables you to integrate the planning and execution processes of marketing campaigns centrally in your business and in field service. For more information, see Connection to CRM Mobile