Launching an inbound marketing campaign soon? Here's a summarised checklist of the key initiatives required to develop a strong inbound campaign. Something I left out? Let me know. 🙂
It may seem like stating the obvious but this is important to make sure you know in detail about your customer profile.
What channels can reach them? What do they talk about? What do they share? What content do they engage in?
As part of your analysis, what can you learn from resources that you can access, such as your analytics? What content do they engage with? What do they say about the brand? What can you leverage for your campaign?
No matter what campaign you're running and whatever the company it is you're working for, you should always approach any campaign with goals and benchmarks. Otherwise, how do you know if you can deem a campaign successful? How can you improve next time?
A good framework to help with outlining goals for your campaign is using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-specific) goals. In addition, how you measure goals based on channel varies from website to paid ads.
To help formulate your campaign (s), seek inspiration from those companies that have nailed their inbound marketing campaigns. What did they do? What was their messaging? What channels did they leverage? How did their customers react? What was the good and bad?
Curate some of the best and 'not so good' campaigns and draw up learnings. Learning from other campaigns really does help.
Are you running an offer? Is this then reflected on your landing page? Don't underestimate the importance of a good offer and making it evident from initial source/medium (e.g. Ads) to then what they see on the landing page.
What happens with you get a signups? What happens next? What happens when a user doesn't convert right away? Can you win them back? There are lots of scenarios/journeys that could happen based on user behaviour.
Mapping out these journeys can help you ensure that you're ready for a flurry/volume of leads coming in, ready to be nurtured automatically to then convert into your ultimate goal.
I suggest doing a quick customer journey map or at the very least do flow maps to understand how triggers will work. This also helps with formulating messaging + ads knowing which stage leads/users are at in the journey.
Similar to the above (and should coincide/overlap), is mapping out your email automation journey. Setup nurturing emails for leads that sign up or download something. You can of course have multiple flows based on goals and of course flows will be different if a user just downloads a piece of content vs. signing up as a paid users.
If you're running at least 2+ flows, how do these flows differentiate? How can your first flow help nurture leads to go to a new landing page and convert to paying users or another desired goal?
Map these automations out. It's super important and really does make life easier before you do implementation.
This is important regardless if it's a short-term and long-term/evergreen campaign (or whether you want this page indexed or not). Doing a keyword analysis is great to work out which words or even questions get search volume that potential visitors will consider when they land onto your page.
Then the challenge comes down to prioritising your messaging based on your research. This is not an easy answer, but justifies the reasoning for split-testing landing pages based on messaging & CTA's.
I've mentioned this a couple of time above already and really do think it's super important to do. In fact, they're a lot of run to do actually.
A customer journey map can help illustrate a holistic view of all the touchpoints that can happen during a campaign. It then helps understand what potential leaks/gaps you may have in your funnel and encourage to use as much personalised messaging/content where it makes sense.
There's literally no point in running any campaign if you haven't setup goals/conversion tracking. Sometimes tracking can be tedious depending on the CMS you're using, but it's crucial that from end-to-end tracking is setup with goals. It seems like a no-brainer but have come across businesses not having goals setup.
Sometimes conversion tracking may be hard to setup if you're goal relies on a button trigger or pop-up after clicking a button. I recommend using GTM to do this although it's not always perfect (this is a good guide).
Naturally we use varying tools for specific needs including the likes of CRM or email automation tools. The good thing about these tools is they have tracking capabilities whether hard-coded or through platforms such as Google Tag Manager.
Make sure any tools you use for data collection fit within your analytics suite + connected with goals.
Nothing beats social proof to build trust and credibility for your brand. Whilst again this seems like a no-brainer, how are you displaying your social proof/trust/credibility indicators? What forms of media/content are you sharing? Definitely recommend with any landing page to include static reviews, customer video reviews, media logos, customer logos + more.
A lot of your traffic will be mobile and you need to keep the importance of mobile design > desktop. Not only does great content, messaging + offer so important for landing page conversions, but the speed of your site really does matter. I don't need to share the studies (there's plenty of them), it's obvious that no one likes slow websites. Optimise the speed of your site by checking Google PageSpeed Insights.
Another key factor in conjunction with the speed of mobile pages is design. I do unfortunately see a lot of awesome desktop landing pages but then have poor mobile responsiveness, particularly around headers + images & other media including video. Make sure these render properly before launching a campaign.
What forms are you going to use? Static or pop-ups? You may want to consider both :). A possible good strategy to consider is using static forms for your primary goal with then pop-ups for your secondary goal (e.g. where a user can download a piece of content). It doesn't make sense for every campaign, but it's a good strategy to capture paid traffic and nurture users who aren't ready to commit to your main offer.
This coincides with the social proof + trust indicators above. You need to show off your case studies + videos across various channels from your landing pages, email + ads. Make sure you're using them in a creative/engaging way and ensure they stand out on the landing page.
Whenever you're running campaigns, you need to make sure you're using UTM parameters again across all assets from your ads, landing page and email marketing. using UTM's can help you understand + measure which channels are performing best and understanding where leaks/drop-off's occur. That way you can fix these gaps quickly.
One of my favourite marketing tools I use often is Hotjar. I highly recommend installing Hotjar onto your website + landing pages for your campaign to watch recordings + heatmapping to see how people engage with your page. Again, can help you visually see improvements that you can make.
