You’ve read all about inbound marketing. You have purchased a marketing information system such as HubSpot. Now you need to create an inbound marketing campaign that is going to make you a hero with your sales team.
For many businesses this is where things start to go wrong. They try to develop complex campaigns targeting different audiences without getting the basics right. By not following the rule, “Keep it simple, stupid”, they waste time and resources don’t meet their business objectives, generate leads and ultimately hit sales targets.
Today we are outlining our three phase approach to creating a successful inbound marketing campaign, which, if you follow, could help you start to fill your sales funnel with well qualified sales leads that are easy for your sales team to convert into customers.
Phase 1 - Strategy and Planning
For any inbound marketing campaign to achieve results there needs to be a clear strategy and plan. By using market intelligence you should be able to formulate a plan which will deliver results so there here are some of the questions that need to be answered in your campaign plan.
Who do you want to target? – If you have applied the inbound methodology then you will have already outlined the personas you want to target. By limiting your campaign to just one persona any content that you create for the campaign is going to be more relevant and is more likely to be responded to.
What are your objectives for the campaign? – Without objectives how do you know how successful your inbound campaign has been? By setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, Realistic and timely) objectives for each campaign you are able to measure success, as well as give focus for your team.
What type of content are you going to develop? – You know who you are targeting and what you want to achieve so you need to decide how you want to get your message across in the inbound campaign. Selecting the right content is very important – you will have some understanding of your persona behaviours and using this information you need to create the right content.
How are you going to get your target persona to engage with your content? – Your content needs to be seen and engaged with. It is worth looking back at previous campaigns to see what has been successful and how this could be improved for this inbound campaign. Your inbound campaign could include pay per click advertising, lead gen forms, email marketing, marketing automation, social media posts or just well optimised content – whatever you decide it needs to work for the target persona.
How will you know if your inbound campaign has been a success? – With systems such as HubSpot you can create campaign dashboards that are integrated with your sales process. They display results all in one place and can include email engagement rates, web statistics, form fills through to the leads generated and finally sales. This attribution also allows you to monitor the campaign and adjust it as necessary to improve performance. Not every business has access to systems such as HubSpot so setting up clear reporting of results gives a snapshot which can be used by all your teams.
Phase 2 – Executing your inbound campaign
Because an inbound campaign aims to move prospects along a sales funnel to qualify them before they engage with your sales team using marketing automation can help improve results greatly.
With off the shelf systems you can automate marketing activity so that you achieve the highest possible performance from activities. This can include posting relevant content at the right time, delivering messages based on user interaction with social posts or delivering a type of content because of the device they are using. How you use this automation will depend on your target persona but can swiftly move prospects along a sales funnel.
Phase 3 - Campaign Evaluation
Marketeers should always be learning from what they have done. The information that can be gained from a well executed inbound marketing campaign can be used to improve performance with an active campaign and also in future campaigns.
If you would like to speak to one of our consultants about how we can help you plan a successful inbound marketing campaign or would just like to chat through your own ideas complete the contact form and we will get back to you.
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