By now most marketers are aware of the concept of Inbound Marketing . But how many have set up an inbound marketing campaign from scratch? It may seem a little daunting at first, but never fear, we have your back.
Depending on your objectives, you will concentrate on a different aspect of the campaign. If, for example, you are looking to up your website traffic, you’ll want to really focus on blogging and social media as they drive traffic to your site. If your aim is to generate more leads, you’ll do well to put a lot of energy into the offer, CTA and landing page. Not that you won’t be doing all elements for all campaigns, it’s simply about the area to focus on for the campaign goal.
Once you’ve done the initial planning then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and put all the bits and bobs together. Let's have a look at the 7 steps that make up the inbound marketing campaign framework.
The Alluring Offer
The offer is the crux of your campaign. It’s that piece of valuable content that you’re going to beautifully package for your prospects. It’s going to answer their questions about their pain points and educate them how to go about resolving issues.
It's probably a good idea to mention that before you set about creating this amazing offer that you need to have perfectly outlined your buyer persona, so you know exactly what it is that they need assistance with. You can read up more on developing your buyer persona here.
A premium piece of content generally has 6 characteristics:
- A killer title to entice would-be readers to
- An author page to bring a personal approach, build rapport and position you as a thought leader on the subject at hand
- Includes stats and quotations to build credibility
- Clearly separated chapters
- Strong design with appealing visual elements
- Additional CTA’s and embedded links throughout the piece
The Badass CTA and Landing Page
Once you have the offer wrapped up you’ll need to work on a badass call-to-action that leads your prospects to the landing page where they will exchange their contact details for your content masterpiece.
We call the CTA BADASS when it matches these requirements:
- Bold – Give it some attention drawing qualities. Contrasting colours works well to stand out
- Action-Based – Use words such as ‘download’, ‘register’ or ‘sign up’ to give the reader a clear indication of the action required
- Descriptive – Present a crystal clear description of the offer with no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding
- Aligned – Testing has indicated that using a consistent headline across CTA and landing page results in better conversion rates than those that aren’t
- Suitable – The CTA needs to be suitable to the visitor’s buying stage
- Specific - Ensure that the CTA provides an offer that is the pertinent to the content the reader has shown interest in
There are a few best practice guidelines when it comes to landing pages. An effective landing page will include:
- No navigation to other pages that could detract attention of the viewer
- A headline that matches the headline of the CTA and succinctly explains what is on offer
- Short copy including bullet points of the contents or value of the offer
- An appealing image of the digital offering (this also helps to make it more tangible)
- A form to complete to receive the offer
- Social sharing buttons so that they may tell all their colleagues and peers about your wonderful offer
The Workflows
Once they have grabbed your content, you’re going to want to enroll them into a workflow (series of emails) to nurture them through the buying cycle. Having a clear workflow set up based on lead interest will allow you to send highly relevant content to educate them.
The Enticing Email
You’ll want to promote your stunning content with an email that is sent to a segment of your database that you know will appreciate the offer. Depending on what the offer is you could segment by location, job title, company size or even buyer persona. Considering that more than 60% of email is marketing, ensure you have a stellar subject line that makes the reader want to open the email and back it up with a well-crafted, well-written email and explicit CTA to take them to your landing page.
The Brilliant Blog
Promote your offer in your blog real estate by including CTAs in the sidebar and in relevant posts. In order to attract more of the right type of traffic to your blog (so they can see your offer of course) you’ll need to develop a long tail keyword strategy and also consider both problem and solution based keywords. Include these keywords in your blog title and body to aim for better organic rankings in search engines.
The Social Spread
Promote the heck out of your offer through your social media channels. With HubSpot’s Social Inbox it is really simple to schedule your social media updates ahead of time across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and you’ll want to promote your offer for at least 2 weeks. Do keep time differences in mind if you have a global audience. Also, considering the short lifespan of a tweet, you may want to set several updates a day for maximum timeline exposure.
The Reporting
When it’s all done and dusted, its time to review the results. You’ll want to look at the objectives you set up for your campaign and determine how well you achieved against the benchmarks or what didn’t quite work as well. Use this insight in your planning of your next campaign and test, test, test.
This inbound marketing campaign framework is a rinse and repeat process and should be applied to any new campaign you’re looking at setting up.
