Managing marketing actions

You can find an overview of all marketing actions in the Sales / Marketing / Overview menu. From this overview, you can jump directly to a marketing action by clicking the keyword.

Usually, similar fields are used for general data and additional data in the main forms of marketing actions. Depending on the purpose and the goal of a marketing action, additional fields and tabs needed for time scheduling, cost and budget planning or resources are used.

Depending on the qualification of a marketing action, different procedures may result. They are covered by functions in the function bar. When creating a marketing action, standard activities may be assigned automatically. Via those activities and tasks, a marketing action is qualified and finally brought to a conclusion.

Open the forms via the Sales / Marketing / ... menu, click on the Keyword field, and create a new marketing action.

Note: Since a dedicated form is available for individual marketing actions for telemarketing, publications and events, selected fields from all kinds of marketing actions are described here for a quick overview. The availability of some fields depends on the installed version of the software. Note that the respective marketing action form can have a General and an Additional data section.

Field	Meaning	Comment
Keyword	The title identifying the marketing action all across the CRM	Free input
Project start / project end	Timeframe of a marketing action	Selection via calendar control
Appears from... until...	Timeframe of a publication	Selection via calendar control
In	Publication organ or publisher	Free input
Customer / our reference	Communication data for publications	Free input
When?	Timeframe of an event	Selection via calendar control
Where?	Location of an event	Free input
Responsible agent	Staff member responsible for the marketing action	Defaults to the current user
Organizer	Event organizer	External or internal main contact for external events (e.g. when participating as an exhibitor at a fair, etc.)
Substitute	Staff member responsible as a substitute for the marketing action	Selection of an internal contact
Status	Status of the marketing action	Status change via button
Evaluation	Assessment / weighting of the operation, e.g. priority	Selection list (adaptable)
Cost	Available budget, actual expenses, cost deviation	Enter a decimal value.
Type	Marketing action type	Selectable from predefined types
Agent tab	Internal staff members in the marketing action	Assignment from the database
Contacts tab	All participants of the marketing action	Assignment from the database
Activities tab	All activities created for the marketing action	Creation in the marketing action or by assignment to the marketing action
Attendee status tab	Predefined or neutral statuses as milestones of the marketing action	Free input and selection dialog
Properties tab	Specification of any kind of marketing action properties	Free input
Trace back tab	Display of any kind of subactions including their superordinate source records	Selection of records from the sales and marketing database

Admin: Your administrator or customizer can adapt various selection entries according to your requirements.

At a company that was entered as a service company (e.g. a supplier in the Group field), a new marketing action can be created directly in the same way as, for example, a new sales action, i.e., via the function bar ("+"/Marketing (new)/ ...).

The source contact is automatically created as an organizational contact.

Attention: The function does not serve to include a customer or prospect in a marketing activity, i.e., adding them to the participant list. This can be done via the functions for maintaining attendee lists in marketing activities.

Use case: This function serves to create a new marketing process or campaign quickly at a service provider, whereby the latter is automatically assigned as an organizational (!) contact, e.g. when creating an event at an advertising agency or a publication at a publisher. In most cases, you will always want to create a new publication or event, etc., at an organizational contact (e.g. supplier) and then qualify the attendee list.

Admin: The menu in the function bar may be hidden again in the CRM standard and can be made visible by the Customizer only for marketing employees, for example, if they need this function.

At all marketing cases have a Costs tab. Here, you can enter non-action-related planned costs or actual costs directly as defined cost types (Type field).

The prices entered are automatically compared with the budget at the case and calculated.

See also: Budget planning in marketing

Managing marketing actions

Creating a marketing action

Marketing process for service providers and suppliers

Integrated cost management and cost overview