Digital Marketing & Campaign Management Platform

Summary

INNERLUXES developed a custom digital marketing platform for campaign management, workflow automation, API integration, and performance reporting for a digital marketing firm.

Big Data: The Digital Marketer's Playground

For digital marketers, data guides consumer outreach campaigns, directs SEO strategies, and drives personalized brand interaction. One of the ways to manage an excess of data is through a digital marketing platform that compartmentalizes the moving parts and brings cohesion to the marketing process.

The Client is a marketing firm that needed a new source of data for its email and direct marketing initiatives. The company was undergoing a merger, combining a data-centric agency focused on targeted marketing with a creative team to form a single digital marketing agency.

Driving Success With a Custom Digital Marketing Platform

The Client wanted to build a custom digital marketing platform to create orders and campaigns, distribute tasks and assignments, approve or disapprove elements, and sync campaigns to a single database. To keep things simple, INNERLUXES engineered an inclusive, intuitive dashboard where users could view all these modules holistically from one platform.

INNERLUXES designed a technology toolbox around the Client's project objectives and must-have features, selecting Laravel 5.4 as the development framework. After discussing the Client's expectations at length — reviewing preexisting digital marketing platforms and identifying where they excelled and fell short — INNERLUXES engineered a solution for the Client's full list of needs. The application was created in a local environment and syncs campaigns using the Act-On API: all events are reported through the API, and certain events trigger email notifications when they match a predefined set of parameters. The Admin user can create and modify orders and relay them to other users through the Act-On API, notifying others of changes in creative direction and campaign setup. Campaign data is also retrieved from the EZanga API to populate reports and issue notifications when specific campaign events occur.

Add New Order: A Four-Step System

• Campaign Details: basic campaign information — campaign name, white-label, broadcast date, representative name and email, special instructions, etc.
• Geo Details: geo-location, demo, email quantity, and suppression file. Geo location is divided into Zip Code (a list of zip codes in the 'A' column of a CSV file) and Misc (add by state, city, or zip code via search or copy/paste).
• Creative Details: upload the HTML file, images, from line, subject line, SeedList Test (CSV) and SeedList Live (CSV).
• Digital Plus: vertical, omnichannel, and social channels — dictating channels based on the content.

The User Journey

The Order Listing Screen displays all open orders accessible to assigned users, with filters based on campaign data, status, or white-label. From here, users navigate to more specific tasks — cloning, completing, deleting, or testing an order — according to its context. Campaigns can be compared by selecting multiple projects, which the Client uses for A/B testing and strategic planning.

Users move to the Creative Screen for the ideation stage — formatting email campaigns and coordinating content workflows — after which information passes to the Approve Campaign Screen, where the Admin approves user requests on a case-by-case basis and screens out flawed strategies. All campaigns are geotagged and localized so users can produce a hyper-relevant campaign for their client's target market. The Campaign Setup Screen lets users add further details and upload links via a CSV file; selected links can be sent to the Campaign Monitoring Screen, which displays all campaigns that passed through setup. After creation, the API processes the campaign on the Creative Screen and displays the result based on the API's response.

The Results

• INNERLUXES delivered a data-centric digital marketing platform tailored to the Client's needs.
• This is an ongoing project, with functionality added incrementally — additional API integrations for the email campaigning modules and link-generation efforts, plus a refined reporting dashboard with graphical and chart displays.
• The engagement has evolved into a long-term partnership.

Technologies and Tools

Laravel Framework 5.4, PHP, MySQL, Act-On API, EZanga API.