🎸 Pro Tips from 10+ Years: How to Run Campaign Ops Like a Rockstar

📝 1. Intake Is Where It All Begins — Do NOT Wing It

• Create a centralized intake form with *required* fields: Include campaign goals, audience, channels, assets, deadlines, and success metrics to ensure every request has enough context to be actionable.

• Integrate the form with your PM tool (like Asana, Airtable): This is great because it helps you track the work itself, AND a lot of these tools also have built-in reporting that you can easily pull for slide decks or to share and help justify adding new headcount to your team. It makes your team’s work visible and easy to reference.

• Enforce its use — no Slack DMs or drive-by asks: Reinforcing process protects your team's time and ensures fairness across stakeholders.

• Set SLAs to manage expectations for intake review: Stakeholders need to know when they’ll hear back, and SLAs bring discipline and predictability to the process.

🫵 2. Prioritize Like It’s Your Job (Because It Is!)

• Use a clear framework to assess each request: Tools like RICE or MoSCoW help you remove emotion and evaluate value objectively…and earn even more trust from your stakeholders, who can rest easy that no one is getting any personal favoritism.

• Maintain a shared roadmap or board with statuses and rationale: Transparency into what’s in progress — and why — builds credibility and prevents misalignment.

• Review requests with cross-functional stakeholders regularly: Collaboration ensures your prioritization reflects evolving business needs, not just what's loudest — and reinforces trust with your key partners, because you are on the same page.

• Evaluate against business goals and campaign readiness: Just because something is high-impact doesn’t mean it’s well-scoped or achievable. A big example of this is “implementing AI” — a worthwhile priority, but not something that can be done in one fell swoop, overnight. Make sure a new initiative like this won’t steal time from direct revenue-impacting projects that definitely need to be done ASAP to support the business here and now.

🏗 3. Build with Repeatability in Mind

• Create reusable templates for common campaign types: Whether it’s webinars, newsletters, or product launches, having kits accelerates setup and enforces consistency.

• Use tokenized programs and centralized assets in your MAP: These reduce duplication, minimize errors, reduce file back-and-forth, and make campaign cloning seamless. Marketo is great for this, but almost every MAP has some format of this for things like dynamic content and footers.

• Standardize naming conventions and UTM formats: Naming is critical for reporting and searchability — don’t leave it to chance, or spend hours organizing disparate formats for tracking.

• Document every step — from segmentation logic to QA protocols: A well-documented process enables new team members to ramp quickly and allows existing staff to move confidently. Stakeholders also love transparency and knowing what to expect.

🚦 4. Launch ≠ Done

• Validate audience logic, segmentation, and exclusions: Getting this wrong risks sending to the wrong people or leaving out key segments. Make sure you check this before launch, but also afterwards, to remedy any errors quickly.

• Test emails across devices and clients: Your audience sees your campaign on different platforms — make sure it renders well everywhere and nothing got stripped or malformed. Yes, even in Outlook. 🫠

• Confirm UTM parameters and pixel firing: Attribution lives and dies by your tracking setup, and it doesn’t hurt to double-check to make sure these still work after a page goes live — before tons of people hit the site.

• Monitor deliverability, engagement, and system behavior: Don’t set it and forget it, unless you want an unpleasant surprise a day later. 😅 Make it a habit to check in on campaigns in case there are any issues.

• Keep escalation protocols ready for real-time issues: Know who to call and what to do if something breaks mid-flight.

• Communicate launch success and surface early learnings: Share what went live, initial results, when you will be reviewing results, where to stay tuned.

📈 5. Measure More Than Just Performance

• % of campaigns launched on time: This shows your ability to deliver reliably and manage workload.

• Defect or error rate (QA issues caught post-launch): A high defect rate signals quality or process gaps that need fixing.

• Time from request to launch (cycle time): Measuring this helps identify bottlenecks and opportunities to streamline.

• SLA compliance at each stage: Tracking this ensures teams are upholding internal agreements and expectations.

• Stakeholder satisfaction scores: Use quick pulse surveys to assess how internal teams feel about Campaign Ops. Slack can be great for this — use tools like Polly to create anonymous feedback polls.

🔁 6. Close the Loop (Every Time)

• Schedule post-campaign retros with stakeholders: Even 15 minutes is enough to reflect and improve. If time is tight, send a pre-read or pre-work that folks can do async, to make the meeting as productive as possible.

• Ask what worked well and what didn’t: Create a trusted, professional space where folks can share their feelings and feedback without fearing judgment or retribution. It’s all of us against any problem that comes up, not all of us against each other.

• Document findings in a shared space: This helps the entire team avoid repeated mistakes and replicate successes. If you know your ICP well, you should have a sense of what works and what doesn’t — no need to reinvent the wheel every time a new member joins the team.

• Incorporate learnings into playbooks and templates: A feedback loop is only useful if it leads to action and change. Playbooks can make sure that the team considers the previous learnings and avoids easy-avoidable makes.

🧠 Remember: Campaign Ops Is a Mindset

• Build trust through clarity and consistency: When your process is predictable, people rely on you.

• Collaborate early and often with marketing, sales, and ops peers: Being proactive strengthens alignment and prevents fire drills.

• Anticipate roadblocks before they happen: The best Campaign Ops pros think two steps ahead and build in buffers for the unexpected.

• Learn how and when to say no. Not everything is important, and treating it like it is will be a major disservice to not only your team, but the business overall. Saying no to the wrong initiatives is what differentiates a strategic partner from a ticket pusher.

• Show off the work your team does: Speak loudly and proudly about the successes your Campaign Ops team has, within itself but also with partner teams. See if you can showcase at a marketing all-hands or post in a general marketing channel, to make sure your impact is visible.