The 10 best campaign management tools for marketing teams
Airtable's Marketing Team
8 min read
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Airtable's Marketing Team
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Marketing
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There are countless details—timelines, deliverables, resourcing, budgets, and workflows—that go into delivering awesome marketing campaigns. When these details come together, they result in a coherent, attention-grabbing campaign that reaches the right people at the right time. But orchestrating this work is easier said than done.
As a campaign manager, you're wrangling multiple teams, fielding feedback from cross-functional partners, and working toward tight deadlines with steep goals. Perhaps your team is feeling the pressure of mounting workload and you're looking for a tool that will help alleviate the operational burden of planning and executing revenue-driving integrated campaigns.
An effective campaign management tool should connect workflows and aggregate information in one place. It should give you real-time visibility into the work and progress happening in all functions across your marketing org. But, if you invest in the wrong tool, you risk deepening silos between teams, overcomplicating your processes, or paying money for a solution that no-one ever uses.
The 10 best marketing campaign management tools
Best practices for campaign planning
To help you decide which campaign management tool is best for your team, we’ve researched and tested a handful of solutions that global companies use to plan, execute, and sharpen their campaign strategies. We believe Airtable is a great platform for this use-case, but we wanted to provide a clear-eyed evaluation of what else is out there. Below, we unpack where each platform shines (and where it falls flat) so you can choose the option that best meets the needs of your organization.
What features should campaign management software have?
While the definition is broad and encompasses tools that accomplish a wide range of tasks, there are some traits all great campaign management software have in common. Let’s unpack these essential features.
Ease of use: All software, and especially those designed for enterprise, will have a learning curve. But once you’re over that learning curve, how intuitive is the interface? How easy is it to customize and manage your campaign? How quickly can your team knock out routine tasks? If your campaign management software is challenging for your team to use, your productivity (and profit) will take a huge hit.
Flexibility: Marketing campaigns require input from several teams. You want a solution that enables your teams to work the way they want, without sacrificing connection to each other.
Scalability: Your software should be able to expand as you do. Today’s campaign may be geared toward a small section of your audience, but when the time comes to launch a larger campaign with more assets, teams, and prospects to keep track of, your solution should be able to accommodate that.
Reports and insights: A comprehensive campaign management tool should capture data and use it to inform future strategy—you should be able to track resourcing, budgets, channel distribution, and performance all in one place. Ideally, the tool you choose will also generate easy-to-read reports that unpack data and reveal patterns.
Task automation: We’re living in the 2020s. Don’t waste your precious time and resources filling your employees’ schedules with repetitive tasks—the right software will automate these processes.
1. Airtable
Airtable is a connected apps platform that enables users to build and customize workflows on top of shared data. Among marketing teams, one of its most popular use cases is campaign management. That’s because Airtable’s flexibility makes it easy to connect and align content calendars, launch plans, creative deliverables, and more.
Unlike highly focused point solutions designed with one task in mind, Airtable enables large departments and teams to collaborate and align on workflows. You could invest in several tools designed for content management, DAM, campaign planning, and branding, but this leads to tool sprawl and isolates your teams’ workflows—issues that plague enterprise organizations all too often. Airtable is a flexible, all-encompassing solution that links teams and enables live collaboration.
Here are some specific features that make Airtable stand out:
Interactive relational database: Airtable syncs information in real time across teams. When a team member edits a launch date in Airtable, for example, that new date appears for every impacted team member, across every associated workflow. You’ll never have to stress about teams clashing and overriding each other’s work, and you won’t waste so much time answering questions like: “Where is this?” “What’s the status?” “Who is the owner?”
Dataset aggregation: With Airtable, you can aggregate all of your datasets—performance, timelines, Cbudgets, resourcing, activities, audiences, and channels—to improve comprehensive campaign visibility and planning.
Dynamic views: Airtable enables you to share relevant calendars and upcoming programs with channel stakeholders (such as sales and paid media) to drive effective promotion and maximize campaign impact.
Scale to 250,000 records and advanced automations: Airtable is built for enterprise-level organizations, handling up to 100,000 items per table and 250,000 items per base with our Enterprise plan. With automations, large teams can turn their base into a machine, scaling operations with the help of trigger-based actions. For example, when a team member marks a project as complete, you can program an email to automatically be sent to the team, detailing next steps.
Reviews:
G2: 4.6 stars; 2,114 reviews
Capterra: 4.7 stars; 1,754 reviews
An overview of Airtable for Marketing teams
2. Asana
Asana is a collaborative project management platform that marketing teams use to organize and visualize projects, plan sprints, and track toward goals. Campaign management is one of its most popular use cases, as it helps facilitate cross-team communication and accountability.
Because Asana isn’t a relational database, it doesn’t sync information between projects, and it also risks duplicating information across multiple workflows—making it tricky to understand which version is the most accurate. That said, it’s an effective, easy-to-use tool for working with small teams toward deadlines and reporting on a campaign’s status.
Here are some of Asana’s most notable features:
Task automation: Asana allows you to set rules to automate repetitive and tedious tasks. This is great for managing team communications, social media posts, and approval notifications. To trigger the automations, you can either select from preset rules or create your own custom rule.
Real-time monitoring: Asana enables leadership to view their team’s progress in real time—as soon as a project or task is updated, it’s reflected across the platform. It also makes it easy to gauge team bandwidth to identify who has the capacity to take on a task.
Large template library: Asana offers over 140 free templates for a variety of use cases, including creative production and project management. This makes it relatively easy to get started, so you will likely see fast adoption across the marketing org.
Reviews:
G2: 4.3 stars; 9,252 reviews
Capterra: 4.5 stars; 11,930 reviews
3. Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a collaborative, spreadsheet-based work management tool. With it, you can assign tasks to users, track projects, manage calendars, share documents, and more. It has a familiar look and feel for users who have used other spreadsheet apps while offering additional tooling that makes it fit for marketing campaign management.
While Smartsheet doesn’t update in real time and doesn’t enable users to save custom views, its advanced project management features make it a solid option for teams looking to organize their campaigns.
Here are some of its most practical features:
Workflow automations: Smartsheet offers several templatized automations to complete tasks like trigger-initiated reminders, data movements, sheet updates, and more. If you don’t see a template for an automation you want, you can also create a custom automation.
Project management features: The platform offers dependencies, critical path visualizations, resource management, and more, enabling effective task organization and project tracking.
Reviews:
G2: 4.4 stars; 11,069 reviews
Capterra: 4.5 stars; 2,831 reviews
4. Monday.com
You can also use the project management system Monday.com to manage your marketing campaigns. The platform is very structured and task-oriented, making it easy to visualize how tasks and subtasks fit into the success of the greater project. Granted, Monday.com can only capture 20,000 items (compared to Airtable’s 100,000), making it better suited to smaller organizations.
Some of Monday.com’s most notable features include:
Drag-and-drop dashboard: Monday.com’s drag-and-drop dashboard is minimalistic and relatively easy to use. Your team is therefore likely to adopt Monday.com quickly, compared to tools with more complex interfaces like Jira or Smartsheet.
Visualizations: The platform offers several types of views (some of which are unique to Monday.com) that help you visualize people, phases, and tasks involved in marketing campaigns. For example, using the “Workload” view, you can easily see which team members are under- and overcapacity and distribute work accordingly.
Reviews:
G2: 4.6 stars; 2,111 reviews
Capterra: 4.7 stars; 1,750 reviews
5. Jira Work Management
Jira Work Management is a collaborative project management tool from Atlassian. It is designed for agile teams and technical users, making it a go-to project management tool for IT scrum masters and software developers. But it also offers templates and features for managing marketing campaigns.
Like many of the other software we’ve looked at, Jira offers several types of views (list, kanban, calendar, etc.). It also allows you to tag team members and create automations.
Here are some features that set Jira apart:
Agile features: Jira enables you to break your team’s tasks into small, manageable chunks. It also offers pre-built templates for scrum frameworks, making it easy for your marketing team to set goals and collaborate.
Issue visibility: The platform includes an issue tracking feature that allows you to identify problems and assign them to team members. It makes it easy to quickly identify progress toward issue resolution, as it even provides live updates as changes are made.
Reviews:
G2: 4.3 stars; 5,172 reviews
Capterra: 4.1 stars; 22 reviews
Best practices for campaign planning
6. Wrike
Wrike is a flexible project management tool for driving and delivering marketing campaigns. Features include a variety of view types (including Gantt charts), team member tagging, project approvals, automations, time tracking, and more.
Here are some features unique to Wrike that allow it to empower marketing teams:
Intuitive view features: Wrike doesn’t just provide access to several types of views, but it also allows you to set a specific view as the default for a project. One of those views is an intuitive Gantt chart that automatically schedules tasks in the correct sequence, helping to reduce human error.
Communication tools: The platform offers an inbox feature that shows users their mentions, new tasks assigned to them, and more. This reduces the chances of team members missing or forgetting new to-dos items.
Risk detection: Wrike uses AI to identify project risks and provide a risk score based on factors you configure, such as project complexity, previous task history, and more. With this feature, your marketing team will be more likely to catch issues that could bottleneck campaign rollout.
Reviews:
G2: 4.2 stars; 3,266 reviews
Capterra: 4.3 stars; 2,319 reviews
7. Sprinklr Marketing
Customer experience platform Sprinklr also has a point solution for managing marketing campaigns. Sprinklr Marketing has all the essentials for campaign management—project views, automations, reporting, team collaboration, customizable templates. It also offers powerful AI capabilities and advanced reporting features. Since Spriklr strictly centers around campaign management, you’ll need to integrate it with other tools to avoid creating and exacerbating silos.
Here’s what sets Sprinklr apart from other campaign management tools:
AI implementation: Sprinklr incorporates AI technology into its marketing platform, offering tools such as self-service chatbots, smart content intelligence, and AI-powered insights from real-time data analysis.
Content and ad features: The platform is often praised for its content marketing and publishing features, as well as its ad management features.
Reviews:
G2: 3.9 stars; 60 reviews
Capterra: 4.2; 76 reviews
8. Hubspot
HubSpot is a CRM platform with a wide variety of tools that assist organizations with sales, marketing, content, and customer management. Its ranking as one of the best campaign management tools primarily comes from its advanced yet user-friendly email marketing features.
The following features make HubSpot stand out as an email campaign management tool:
Workflow automation: HubSpot automations make it easy to send out emails and complete other tasks when certain dependencies are met, saving your team time and freeing them to focus on more impactful work. For example, a marketing team could program HubSpot to send follow-up emails if a contact opens an initial campaign email, saving time that could be spent on more impactful work like campaign strategy.
A/B testing: HubSpot enables you to send two versions of an email to see which performs better. Testing and tracking different subject lines, messaging, and attachments can help sharpen your email marketing strategy for greater conversions in the future.
Revenue reporting: The platform also provides insight into how much revenue each email brings your company. Few tools offer such a granular view of ROI.
Reviews:
G2: 4.4 stars; 9,440 reviews
Capterra: 4.5 stars; 5,472 reviews
9. Mailchimp
Like HubSpot, Mailchimp is a great tool for managing email campaigns. It offers drag-and-drop email templates, automations, A/B testing, an intuitive dashboard for analytics, and more.
Here are some of the platform’s highlights:
Advanced email dashboard: Mailchimp’s email analytics dashboard is impressive, showcasing engagement metrics like click-through rates for individual emails and collectively over time.
Creative Assistant: The platform’s new Creative Assistant feature leverages AI to quickly generate branded designs you can use across your marketing channels.
Relatively inexpensive: Compared to HubSpot, Mailchimp is the less expensive email marketing campaign platform.
Reviews:
G2: 4.4 stars; 4,892 reviews
Capterra: 4.5 stars; 15,953 reviews
10. Salesforce
Salesforce provides a wide variety of CRM, marketing, and analytics tools, but in a marketing capacity, it best serves as a customer journey mapping and analytics tool. That said, it also serves as a great tool for tracking the flow of marketing campaign spending and income, as well as communicating campaign ROI to stakeholders.
Here are some features that make Salesforce stand out:
Variety of marketing tools: Salesforce enables you to run and test email marketing, social media marketing, and more. It’s almost a one-stop-shop that tracks campaign performance alongside the customer journey.
Use of AI: Salesforce’s AI feature, called Einstein, helps optimize the timing and personalization of customer emails and messaging. This helps improve customer engagement, while reducing your team’s workload.
Reviews:
G2: 4.0; 4,013 reviews
Capterra: 4.1 stars; 351 reviews
What is campaign management software?
Campaign management software refers to any tech solution that can help your marketing team organize tasks, simplify workflows, and streamline general operations.
Also referred to as marketing campaign management software, this tech should support each aspect of your marketing campaigns and help you execute everyday tasks. From notifying other team members when assets are ready for review, to generating reports on performance metrics, good campaign management software should free your team up to focus on the more important (and, frankly, fun) stuff like brainstorming creative content ideas or collaborating on strategies to reach new audiences.
While all of the above campaign management tools have their pros and cons, only Airtable offers the flexibility, scalability, and user-friendliness that enterprise organizations need to break down data silos and streamline campaign workflows.
An overview of Airtable for Marketing teams
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