According to HubSpot, inbound marketing campaigns are concentrated efforts that align all of your marketing channels around a single message and goal. After determining the message and goal, the campaign kicks off with a marketing offer—something valuable and relevant for your audience that you promote through your marketing channels. Next, you nurture the leads from that offer and move them down your sales funnel so they can become your customers. Throughout this process, it is crucial to measure and analyze all the moving parts of your campaign.
Setting Campaign Goals
As mentioned above, campaigns are concentrated efforts that align all of your marketing channels around a single message and goal. Therefore, be sure to ask yourself these two questions before running any campaign:
- What is the message you are sharing with your audience?
- What is the action-oriented goal you would like your audience to do?
Once you determine the answers to those two questions, it is time to set additional concrete goals you would like the campaign to achieve. Perhaps you want to generate 500 leads or convert 10 new customers. Whatever your goals, make sure they are communicated thoroughly to your team, and hold your team accountable to meet these pre-determined goals.
Marketing Offer
The campaign kicks off with a marketing offer—something valuable and relevant to your audience that you promote through your marketing channels. Here are some examples:
- eBooks
- Guides
- Webinars
- Case Studies
- Trials
- Product Demos
- Consultations
- Coupons
Along with these, there are many other types of marketing offers you can promote to your audience as a part of an inbound campaign. Keep in mind, a “Contact Us” form is not a marketing offer. A marketing offer is a content piece or promotion your audience receives directly from your company; by contrast, a Contact Us form is a tool your audience can use to communicate with your company about, well, anything! It would be my suggestion to avoid any campaigns that are centered on “Contact Us” form submissions.
Marketing Channels
Marketing channels are leveraged to promote your marketing offer. These channels are the best way to interact with your audience, introduce your offer, and drive them to your website to fill out their information on a form.
Related Article: A Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing
The three most common marketing channels are your website, email marketing, and social media platforms.
Website
It should go without saying that you need to use your website to promote your marketing offers. If nothing else, at least commit to the following tactics:
- UseCTAs throughout relevant pages on your website that direct web visitors to the current marketing offer being promoted as a part of your campaign.
- Write blog posts that complement and reinforce the offerto cultivate interest in form submissions from visitors (and place CTAs for the offer at the end of relevant blog posts)
Email Marketing
Email is without a doubt one of the most powerful tools for promotion; especially if you have the ability to personalize email content and record the analytics (you are really going to want that ability). If you have a database of leads at your disposal, segment your lead lists to target a group of people that will find your offering most valuable and relevant, and send them an email that encourages them to download. Sprinkle in some content personalization and you have a recipe for success.
Social Media
We have all heard the line, “Put yourself in front of your target audience,” right? People are constantly interacting on social media with family, friends, and brands; make sure your brand stands out. Social media platforms are a great place to engage your audience and promote your marketing offer.
Lead Nurturing
Once you have generated a new lead or reengaged an existing lead using your marketing channels, it is time to nurture that lead towards a purchase via email communications. Not everyone is ready to purchase your product or service. I am going to say that again; not everyone is ready to purchase your product or service. It is the marketer’s job to move leads down the sales funnel, driving them closer and closer to a sales-ready mentality through nurturing.
To accomplish this successfully, you must first understand where your campaign’s marketing offer belongs within the sales funnel. For example, if it is introductory (top-of-the-funnel offer), it wouldn’t be appropriate to immediately promote your product or service. Rather, it would be more effective to share a relevant case study or interesting video that reinforces the pain points discussed in the marketing offer. This allows the lead to identify the need for your product or service on their own without having to deal with an aggressive sales pitch.
Measure and Refine
As previously mentioned, it is crucial to measure and refine all the moving parts of your campaign. This is true for both the campaign at hand as well as future campaigns. The key metrics should always be defined by the concrete goals you set when constructing the campaign. In addition, it is a good business practice to dig a little further and identify areas of improvement by noting trends in your marketing channel analytics (website, email, social) and lead nurturing efforts. I suggest you take your time with this piece of the inbound marketing puzzle if you want to be successful with future campaigns.
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