When it comes to inbound marketing, some things remain the same no matter what. For example, we always have to write blog posts, share content, take care of SEO, and e-mail our prospects regularly to keep things moving. Apart from the obvious, inbound marketing additionally requires from us to articulate and schedule campaigns on the same patterns.
Conventional marketing strategies have always been campaign-oriented: Think of your message—promote it—send e-mail/make calls—check the results—start a new campaign from scratch.
The duration of the campaign doesn’t really matter. Nevertheless, they should always start from scratch. In the case of inbound marketing, campaigns are also important but they are done in a different way.
Below, you’ll see the ways of designing, developing, implementing, and optimizing an inbound marketing campaign for the best results.
Inbound Campaign Designing
Most inbound marketers agree that a certain range of time works best for your inbound campaigns. They should be ideally anywhere between 1-3 months as anything less or more than that, is a bit pointless.
Once you set the right time, begin to work with all individual elements. The first step is your message. Ask yourself these questions: What is the content of my message? Who is going be my target audience? The thing here is to avoid falling in the trap of making your message sound like an ad/promotion. This won’t work for most people. Instead, offer some valuable info and make it educational first.
Next, you’ll have to find your target audience. Have you already found it or do you need to reach it through third parties? If, for example, your e-mail prospects are enough, that’s a good starting basis. If not, seeking another third party in touch with this audience could be useful. Start by seeking out potential partners with the common audience group you wish to reach. These may be companies, bloggers, influencers, social media groups, online communities, etc. It is important here to already have the key details of your campaign prepared to better reach that target audience.
Next, plan your offer. You should be able to offer something valuable to your target audience. That could be, for example, a mini e-book, a webinar, an audio/podcast, etc. Your ideal approach should involve a combination of the above ways to offer multiple offers to your prospects at the same time.
On a final basis, you should start setting all the individual elements of your campaign e.g. your website updates, your landing pages, the content, the graphics, etc.
Set a schedule and a deadline before your official campaign launches, working in these elements separately so you can jumpstart your campaign with ease.
Inbound Campaign Developing
Here is the fun: develop all these individual elements of your campaign and make sure the complement each other ideally and are consistent. For example, the graphics and copy or templates should be consistent on every campaign element. In case you are offering a video, you’ll have to write it, shoot it, produce it, edit it, and then check it. A similar pattern applies to your content strategy.
Inbound Marketing Implementing
Once you have considered all individual elements of your campaign, you’ll now have to implement it. E-mails, for example, have to be sent on a regular basis, banners should be flashing online in certain pages, your content needs to be created, shared and advertised, video links should be included, etc.
Inbound Campaign Optimization
Once your campaign is active, you’ll now have to keep an eye on your performance, both on a daily and weekly basis. The purpose of checking out your performance on a regular basis is for identifying what works and performing the necessary adjustments to make your campaign successful.
In particular, you’ll have to estimate and set achievable targets on your performance aspects, such as traffic, leads, the volume of sales, and revenues for a specific time period. Some additional yet useful indicators are the performance of the program itself, clicks on e-mail links, number of visitors that get to a landing page, CTA button clicks, etc. These should be the base of your success, provided they really deliver.In case they don’t try to make the necessary adjustments to fix them. Adequate changes should be enough to fix the problem in just a few days.
As you can see, some things are similar to conventional marketing. It’s just the individual steps and execution that is done in a different way. In case you are new to inbound marketing campaigns, hiring a professional or marketing team for guidance should be useful.
