Creating campaigns

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Creating campaigns

    Campaigns in ServiceNow provide a robust tool for delivering targeted internal communications to employees efficiently. They enable organizations to share relevant information through multiple channels at optimal times, helping to drive actions, reduce inquiry cases, and keep employees informed about specific topics. Campaigns are intended solely for internal use and should not be used for customer marketing to avoid email reputation issues.

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    Key Features

    • Targeted Messaging: Deliver different content to distinct audiences (e.g., managers vs. direct reports) based on their roles or needs.
    • Flexible Triggers: Schedule content delivery using fixed or dynamic date ranges, conditions, or system events to ensure timely communication.
    • Location Targeting: Display content on specific pages, topics, or widgets to maximize relevance and visibility.
    • Content Variety: Communicate using diverse formats including links, videos, SMS, and email messages through the employee portal and other channels.
    • Campaign Structure: Organize campaigns into multiple stages (also called bundles) to sequence content delivery (e.g., pre-event, during event, reminders).
    • Content Experience Builder: A streamlined interface allowing end-to-end campaign setup, including audience definition, content creation, staging, preview, publishing, and analysis.
    • Legacy Option: Supports campaign creation via records and forms, suitable for custom widget publishing.
    • Demo Campaigns: Available upon installation of demo data to explore use cases and campaign configurations via Content Experience Builder.

    How to Create and Manage Campaigns

    • Content Creation: Use the Content Library to develop various content types for delivery; rich content must be created in the Rich Content Editor.
    • Define Campaign: Set up campaign details including audience, content approvers, and scheduling.
    • Stage Setup: Add stages to specify what content users see and when, enabling segmentation within a campaign.
    • Preview and Publish: Test the campaign appearance before publishing to ensure it meets communication goals.
    • Analyze Effectiveness: Monitor audience targeting and create goals to measure campaign impact, such as driving employee actions or reducing inquiries.
    • Continuous Evaluation: Adjust campaigns as needed based on ongoing analysis to improve outcomes.

    Why It Matters

    By leveraging campaigns, ServiceNow customers can enhance internal communications, encourage desired employee behaviors, and reduce support inquiries through timely, relevant messaging. The structured approach and rich content delivery options ensure that messages reach the right people at the right time, increasing engagement and operational efficiency within the organization.

    Campaigns offer a powerful content publishing tool that provides organizations with the ability to efficiently deliver targeted information to their employees. As a content manager, you can configure multiple channels to ensure content reaches the intended audience at the optimal time.

    Here are a few examples of what you can accomplish through the targeted messaging of campaigns:
    • Deflect: Prevent your employees from creating more inquiry cases.
    • Drive action: Encourage your employees to sign up for health benefits.
    • Provide communication: Ensure that your employees know about a specific subject.
    Note:
    Campaigns are intended for internal communications only. Please do not use campaigns for customer marketing, as doing so could potentially lead to the NOW mailsystem being flagged as spam by email reputation systems.

    Example campaigns

    Content Experiences includes demo campaigns to help you better understand campaign structuring, explore examples of bundle trigger configurations, and discover various use cases. To access the demo campaigns, navigate to All > Content Experiences > Content Experience Builder.
    Note:
    The admin must select Load demo data during the installation or upgrade of the Content Experiences plugin. If the demo data does not appear in your instance, ask your admin to install the demo data.

    Campaign components

    When planning a campaign, consider the following components:
    Who: Audiences
    Target different content to different audiences. You can have a campaign deliver one set of content to managers and another set to direct reports.
    When: Trigger
    Content becomes available to employees based on the configured trigger. Content can be made available based on a fixed or dynamic date range, when a condition is met, or a system event occurs.
    Where: Location
    Target content to specific pages, topics, and widgets to ensure the content reaches the intended audience.
    What: Information that you want to communicate
    Define the information, links, videos, SMS messages, and emails that you want to communicate to your employees.

    Campaign structure

    A campaign consists of a hierarchy of stages, where each stage contains content.
    Note:
    Some parts of the interface use the term "bundles" to refer to stages.
    Here's an example of how to structure a company benefits open enrollment campaign, consisting of three stages:
    1. Get ready for Open Enrollment: This stage delivers content before the open enrollment period to prepare employees.
    2. Open enrollment is here: This stage delivers content during the open enrollment period to provide the necessary information on employee benefits.
    3. Open enrollment ends soon: In this stage, reminders are sent during the final week of the open enrollment period.
    Each campaign stage includes content that will be visible on the employee portal and distributed via email. Chart showing campaign structure.

    Setting up a campaign

    Set up a campaign using one of the following methods:

    Content Experience Builder

    With the Content Experience Builder, you can complete the entire workflow of configuring a campaign within a single interface.

    1. Create content in the Content library

      You can create a variety of content types that can be delivered via the employee portal, email, SMS, or push notification.

      Note:
      News articles are not yet supported.
    2. Create a campaign

      Create a campaign to define the audience, content approvers, and start and end dates.

    3. Create campaign stages with Content Experience Builder

      Add stages to your campaign to define what content users will see and when they will see it. You can also use stages to further refine the audience. For example, you can create one stage to hold content for managers and another stage to hold content for direct reports.

    4. Add content to a campaign using Content Experience Builder
      You can add content from the Content library and create a variety of content types in the Content Experience Builder.
      Note:
      If you are creating a campaign that contains rich content, you must create the rich content in the Content Library Rich Content Editor, since the Content Experience Builder does not currently support rich content creation. See Microsites
    5. Preview the campaign

      See how your campaign will appear to your audience before publishing.

    6. Publish the campaign from the Content Experience Builder.
    7. Analyze the effectiveness of the campaign

      Verify that your campaign is targeting the correct audience. Create goals to see if your campaign is driving action from your employees, or reducing activity such as the number of inquiry cases coming in. Continually evaluate your campaign as it progresses.

    Legacy (records and forms)

    If you prefer to create campaigns using records and forms, or if you are publishing to a custom widget, follow these steps:

    1. Create content in the Content library

      You can create a variety of content types that can be delivered via the employee portal, email, SMS, or push notification.

    2. Create a campaign

      Create a campaign to define the audience, content approvers, and start and end dates.

    3. Create a campaign stage

      Add stages to your campaign to define what content users will see and when they will see it. You can also use stages to further refine the audience. For example, you can create one stage to hold content for managers and another stage to hold content for direct reports.

    4. Preview the campaign

      See how your campaign will appear to your audience before publishing.

    5. Publish the campaign
    6. Analyze the effectiveness of the campaign

      Verify that your campaign is targeting the correct audience. Create goals to see if your campaign is driving action from your employees, or reducing activity such as the number of inquiry cases coming in. Continually evaluate your campaign as it progresses.