How To Run An
Inbound Marketing CAMPAIGN ..................
N
.................
CONTENTS PREFACE........................................................................3 SETTING YOUR GOALS & TARGET AUDIENCE...........4 CREATING THE CONTENT & CONVERSION PATH......7 PROMOTING YOUR OFFER.........................................15 SHARING THE INTEL....................................................31 TRACKING & OPTIMIZING...........................................34
2
PREFACE HubSpot regularly runs events across Europe to find out what the biggest marketing challenges are in various regions. We spent some time in Stockholm in Sweden, and discovered that marketers are particularly interested in how to run an inbound campaign from start to finish. This ebook will guide you through each stage of an effective campaign, and includes some examples of brilliant inbound marketing from companies in the Nordic region. An inbound marketing campaign is a special kind of marketing push, which is driven primarily by content. It aligns all of your marketing channels (blog, social media, email) and all of your content around a single goal and message. Typically, campaigns run for a shorter, more concentrated period of 4-6 weeks and have a clear end goal. You’ll want to run a campaign on a specific topic and for a specific reason. The idea here is that you’re shining a spotlight on one aspect of what you do, so it should be specific, time-boxed and measurable. Here are a few good reasons to run a campaign: • Your goal is to generate traffic, leads, and customers • You are launching a new product or service • You want to establish expertise on a particular subject (and rank well for it in search) • You are trying to persuade or change public opinion Now, let’s get started with that inbound marketing campaign.
3
>
CHAPTER 1: SETTING YOUR GOALS & TARGET AUDIENCE Before we get into the details of how to run a campaign, think about what your goals and targets are.
What is the goal for your campaign? Is it traffic, leads, customers, or all three? Goals should also be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. For example: Generate [number] leads focused on [topic/product] by [date] Our template for setting those all-important SMART goals should come in useful here. To ensure your campaign is optimized to make the most impact on your objectives you need to map out your content to the marketing funnel (find out how to do that in this article). Content topics need to resonate with your buyer personas and solve for their challenges.
What is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Without knowing who your ideal customers are -- their backgrounds, goals, challenges and how your product or service will benefit them -- it’s very difficult to create content (or in fact, an effective
4
overall marketing strategy) to attract more of those types of people to your business. Without understanding your ideal customers inside and out -- and integrating that research across your entire marketing funnel -- you risk stifling the growth of your business. Buyer personas are at the heart of a successful inbound marketing campaign, and all of your campaign activities should revolve around your target persona. But what does a persona look like? To illustrate, let’s consider HubSpot’s primary persona -- Marketing Mary.
5
Marketing Mary has been developed through extensive research of our most profitable customers, i.e. those who find the most value from our product, repeat buy and refer to all their friends. They have similar goals and challenges, which our product helps them to solve. We build our product around solving her challenges, helping her achieve her goals and making her life easier. Because we know her so well, we have a ton of content that also helps her solve other challenges she has before she ever sees our product. Through our content, we build trust and likability as a brand, and she sees us as a brand that helps her. In turn, this means that when she is ready to consider purchasing inbound marketing software, we are likely to be her first port of call.
TOP TIP: Not sure where you should start when creating your buyer personas? Check out the HubSpot MakeMyPersona tool to give you a head start.
MAKE MY BUYER PERSONA ONLINE
6
CHAPTER 2: CREATING THE CONTENT & CONVERSION PATH Once you understand your buyer persona and her challenges, it’s now time to create content that helps you accomplish your goal. For the purpose of this ebook, let’s assume your goal is lead generation. Therefore, to make this campaign successful, you need to create content that your target persona will find valuable enough to download in exchange for her contact details. The content could take many formats; an ebook, a webinar, a report, templates, or even a visual presentation. Experiment with different content formats to see what works for your audience. The main thing to remember is that it must be perceived as valuable enough that your persona is willing to “pay” for it with her personal information.
Researching the Topic. If you’ve done a good job of developing your buyer personas in the previous step, you should already have some ideas of content you can create to help solve your persona’s challenges. However, knowing what they’re searching for online is the first step to getting found. You should perform some keyword research to uncover both the head-terms (broad) and long-tail keywords that they use to find information and then optimize your content and website for those keywords in order to attract the right people at the right time. Here’s a blog post to help you with your keyword research.
7
Below you’ll see an example of how keywords align with content offers for a brand that is trying to attract a persona in the finance industry. Note the mix of content formats in the column on the right.
Check out this blog post for more ideas on how to come up with great persona-driven content topics. Persona-driven content in the Nordics is still at the very early phases of adoption. By understanding and implementing this now, you’re going to be streets ahead of your
8
competition. Even the industry leaders in the Nordics are only starting to figure this out; Karl Flitness of Descom, who has made the Top 100 content marketing influencers list had this to say: “(Our) challenge is transforming casual business blogging into goal-oriented content marketing – considering keywords, segments, CTAs and targets.”
Creating the Conversion Path. Once you have your content created, you need to gate it behind a form on a landing page so you can capture your lead’s details when they download it. At HubSpot, our average landing page conversion rate is about 55% (which is extraordinary), but we’ve achieved it through years of testing. We can now say with full certainty what works for our audience, but you should test your landing pages to see what works best with yours, too. On the next page, we present an example of a high-performing landing page.
TOP TIP: Need help with your landing pages? You’ll love this guide. Check it out!
GET THIS LANDING PAGE GUIDE
9
Headline: As the first landing page element your visitors will likely see first when they ‘land’ on your page, having a clear and concise headline is critical. Use your headline to sum up your offer as clearly as possible.
Hidden Navigation: To reduce friction on your landing page’s bounce rate, and increase the chances that your visitors will stay on your page, hide any top and side navigation bars from that page.
10
Context: Below your main headline, consider using a subheader to provide a little bit of information about the benefits of your offer. This is also called your landing page’s value proposition.
Value: In many cases, your subheader and context won’t be quite enough to motivate your visitor to make a purchase or download your offer. Use the rest of the text on your landing page to clearly and simply explain the value of your offer.
Image: 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. If there’s anything these stats teach us, it’s that it’s always wise to include a relevant image on your landing page. Try to match your landing page image with the offer.
Lead-Capture Form: Your lead-capture form is the place your page visitors will supply information in exchange for your offer. It’s also what converts those visitors into precious sales leads. As a best practice, only ask for information you need from your leads that allows you to effectively follow-up with and/or qualify them.
Privacy Policy Link: Include a link to your business’ privacy policy on your landing page or directly within your lead-capture form to give your visitors peace of mind.
Submit Button: At the bottom of your lead-capture form should be a submission button. This button is the actual call-to-action button on your landing page. Be sure this button employs specific action words, so your visitors clearly understand what they have to do to obtain the offer you’re presenting.
11
Social Sharing Buttons/Links: Enable visitors to easily share your landing pages with their connections by including social media sharing links or buttons. Let’s take a look at a good example of a company that has created content with its key persona in mind, as well as succeeded in creating a great landing page to gate the content.
Best in Class. Digia is a Finnish software company that sells high-end tech solutions to enterprise companies and their C-level execs. Together with its inbound marketing agency, Advance B2B, Digia has managed to bring its lead generation efforts to the next level in terms of both volume and quality. It has succeeded in doing this by taking two critical steps: 1. Spending time defining their personas 2. Creating great content that speaks to those personas. One ebook that encompasses both of these things is their “Datasta kilpailuetu� (From Data to Competitive Advantage) ebook. This particular ebook was created with its CxO persona in mind.
12
An attractive landing page gates this ebook. This landing page succeeds in highlighting the value of the content. Below you can see how they have followed HubSpot’s guidelines and the results that had on their lead flow:
13
The Results. Historically, C-level individuals have been a challenging audience to reach. However, with the right content, offer and promotion, Digia has proved there are ways to do it effectively. The ebook landing page saw a conversion rate of almost 55% from their email marketing (typical conversion rates for Digia are around 30%). On top of the increase in leads converting on the landing page, the quality of those leads was also significantly improved. 70% of the leads generated were exactly the right buyer persona and perfect fit (right size companies, right buyers, right timing), which is rare -- especially within huge corporations and the public sector. Of course, having the landing page live on your site is one thing, but it won’t attract traffic by itself. The content needs to be promoted, which we will cover in the next chapter.
14
CHAPTER 3: PROMOTE YOUR OFFER With your offer and landing page in hand, it’s time to start driving traffic to it. Promotion of your offer is a critical part of our campaign, and it’s something that should be thought about from the beginning. Too often, it’s easy to forget about the promotion until you’ve finished creating you content when in fact you should be considering your promotion options before putting pen to paper. When it comes to promoting an offer, standard options include: - Email - Blog posts with CTAs - Social Of course, there is a plethora of other options, and during your buyer persona research exercise, you’ll have identified the channels your target personas are most active in. Let’s look at email first.
Email. In research conducted last year, 94 percent of Nordic marketers revealed that they planned to increase or maintain their email marketing budget. 57 percent said they believed email is core to their business. This suggests that, compared to global statistics, Nordic marketers are forward-thinking when it comes to email. Email is, in fact, still one of the most powerful tactics in every marketer’s toolkit.
15
The first thing you need is a list of contacts who might be interested in your offer. The you need to write your email. When you craft your email think most heavily about your subject line, that’s the first decision point for your recipients. Avoid statements like “Free ebook!” or “Download this whitepaper.” Instead, focus on what your ebook solves for them, for example: “[Topic] Tips for 2015” or “Learn how to [topic] in 3 steps”. Below is the anatomy of a high-performing email:
16
So what makes this email so good? 1. The email is personalized, and addresses recipients by their first name. 2. An eye-catching image and CTA relevant to the offer featured in the email. 3. At an early stage, the email makes it clear what challenge the offer is addressing. 4. The email includes a “forward on” link. 5. The email signature in this example gives the email a more personable, human feel. 6. The email includes social sharing buttons. Let’s take a look at how one marketing agency is doing a great job of using email to promote their offers, and what you can learn from how they do it.
Best in Class. Structsales is a sales consultancy based in Sweden, which prides itself in effectively aligning sales & marketing. A few years ago, the team at Structsales recognized that they needed to position their company as a thought leader, as they’re helping clients to solve the complexities of sales & marketing alignment. They turned to inbound marketing to help them to build trust and help others to be successful. First, they implemented inbound marketing for Structsales itself and then used the KPIs to show clients that it works.
17
Structsales uses email for the following:
1. For newsletters: these grow in terms of subscriber numbers every month. 2. To drive traffic to its blog: popular posts are linked to from within the newsletter. 3. Within workflows: An automated email is triggered every time anyone downloads content from their site. For example, in the previous chapter, Digia sent an email to everyone who completed the form, and in nurturing its leads towards being sales ready. Below you can see how they have followed many of HubSpot’s core guidelines and the results that had on their traffic and click-through rates:
18
The Results. Email has become a strong channel in terms of generating traffic to the Structsales website. Traffic from email is increasing each quarter (increased 270% from Q4 2014 to Q1 2015 alone!), particularly since starting to use automation in emails. Some of these emails attract open rates of almost 70% and a click-through rates of almost 30%. Typical campaign email sends return an open rate of 25%-35% and click-through rate of over 15%, which are above average (you can benchmark your email stats using this blog post). The inbound marketing story for Structsales has been one that embodies complete success. Traffic to the website is typically increasing by around 25% per quarter. Leads are also increasing, with lead numbers in Q4 2014 alone increasing by 104%.
Blog post with CTAs. Email is good for alerting your existing contacts about your offer, but what about attracting new ones? This is where blog posts are particularly effective. The goal of the blog is to attract people interested in the subject matter of your offer. New 2015 data suggests that companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that publish between 0-4 monthly posts, and about 4.5X more leads. Furthermore, marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to see positive ROI. If you’re just starting out, start by posting 1-2 blogs per week. Based on our 2015 data, this could increase your traffic by 50%, and as much as double your number of leads.
19
The key is to write the blog post on a topic similar to the topic of your offer and then link to your landing page for a deeper dive. For example, to help promote this ebook, I’ll write a blog post on “3 Great Tips for Planning your First Inbound Marketing Campaign”. I will also write a few guest posts for some relevant blogs in the Nordic region to help promote the offer further. Calls-to-action (CTAs) linking to your offer landing page (which were initially mentioned earlier in this chapter), are very important. They should feature at the end of each blog post you create as part of your campaign. A CTA is an image or line of text that prompts website visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a “call” to take an “action.” The action you want people to take could be anything: download an ebook, sign up for a webinar, get a coupon, or attend an event. A CTA can be placed anywhere in your marketing, and not just at the end of a blog post -- on your website, in an ebook, or in an email. We covered a bunch of different CTAs you can experiment with in this blog post.
Best in Class. Palomacorento is a consulting company that focuses on helping companies raise their psychological capital. The company has been implementing its inbound marketing strategy with the help of its agency, Sales Communications, for less than a year. Sales Communications has coached the team at Palomacorento towards creating the right pieces of content in terms of blog posts and ebooks. From the outset, the ultimate goal was to increase website conversion rates.
20
The Palomacorento blog sits at the heart of the company’s inbound marketing success. The blog has fed social media growth and helped to transform its social media presence into a place of engagement and interaction. In addition to this, lead generation has improved so drastically that the Palomacorento team cannot cope with the volume of leads they are now attracting. Key to Palomacorento’s success has been a clear definition of its buyer personas early on. With a clear understanding of who its audience is, the team at Palomacorento has been able to create content that speaks to its audience. Content spans what digitalization means in the workplace, issues of self-confidence, good leadership, customer experiences, and productivity. Like all good inbound marketers, Palomacorento used the blog content to help generate leads. How? By using relevant CTAs at the end of blog posts with links to a landing page where visitors can download longer-form content -- such as relevant ebooks. Check out how they do this on the next page.
ESSENTIAL READING: How to get 100,000 readers for your blog: This guide will teach you how to optimize your blog and scale its reach.
I WANT TO GROW MY BLOG!
21
The Results. With blogging at the heart of Palomacorento’s inbound marketing strategy, and as mentioned earlier, lead flow has surpassed all initial targets. Website traffic has doubled, and the website conversion rate is now over 5% (having increased over double from 2%), which is a clear indicator of success -- especially when you consider that the company was not generating ANY leads last year. Imagine going from practically zero leads per month to over 300 within a month. The graphs on the next page are evidence that inbound marketing has transformed Palomacorento as a company.
22
Social Media. Social media is an essential part of every inbound marketing campaign, and it can be especially so in the Nordic region, given how social the Nordic population is. Did you know that Denmark, Norway and Sweden account for almost 7% European LinkedIn adoption? When it comes to Twitter, Sweden accounts for one of the top ten countries GLOBALLY in terms of Twitter usage per capita. Furthermore, 53 percent of Nordic marketers believe that social marketing is core to their business. 74 percent believe that social is a critical enabler of products/services their business provides. 43 percent have a dedicated social team.
23
The question is, how should social media be used as part of an inbound marketing campaign? Below is an example of how we promoted the 2014 State of Inbound report on Twitter. Notice how we pulled an interesting stat from the ebook content to gain the attention of our audience.
24
You should always accompany your Tweets by an image, as this increases engagement. You can even experiment with video, as we’ve done in this particular Tweet promoting an ebook:
The bottom line is that social media is a core part of inbound marketing. Without it, getting content noticed, shared and discussed is challenging, to say the least. Success everything you need to put together a successful social media marketing strategy in this free kit.
25
Best in Class: Palomacorento There are two really good examples we can look to for inspiration. Consider the Palomacorento example in the previous section. In this section, we will discuss how they use Facebook to drive traffic back to their website using blog content.
26
The Results. Once Palomacorento’s blog posts are published, they are shared via Palomacorento’s social media channels. Facebook, in particular, is performing very well for the company -- see images on previous page. What’s interesting here is that the company is using both business pages as well as the company’s founder’s (Ilona Rauhala) personal profile on Facebook to distribute content, rather than just relying on the business’s Facebook page. This is a smart strategy, especially as the company’s founder is well-known and already had a network of interested people built up. The sources report below paints a clear picture of social media success.
27
Best in Class: Odfjell Well Services Another great example comes from Odfjell Well Services, a global supplier of well services. Odfjell Well Services started its inbound marketing journey in late 2014 with the help of its marketing agency, Markedspartner. It’s the perfect example of how a company can generate lots of success in a short space of time with the right tactics. Odfjell Well Services launched The Well Blog back in April. You might think that such a niche company would struggle to establish an effective and engaged presence on social media. Odfjell Well Services proves this isn’t so.
The Results. After six weeks, traffic to the company’s website and blog has increased sixfold. Traffic is growing week-on-week, and conversion rates are promising. The traffic source that has seen one of the strongest growths has been social media, with visits from social media increasing from zero to 2,500+ visits. LinkedIn and Facebook have been the main sources. What’s more is that even though the following is quite low given the “early days” nature of the profiles, followers are quite engaged, with drilling professionals discussing the content of the blog posts on these platforms.
28
LinkedIn page follower growth since Odfjell launched The Well Blog In particular, LinkedIn groups are proving extremely useful for generating engagement. Odfjell Well Service employees actively share content from The Well Blog in relevant LinkedIn groups (such as those specifically for people in the drilling industry). Furthermore, people outside of Odfjell are finding the company’s content so good that they are sharing it in professional groups on LinkedIn, without any prompts from the company (see next page). Group postings generate lots of comments and conversation for Odjfell. This is an indicator that the company is really succeeding in creating content that really resonates with its audience, and this comes from a clear definition of buyer personas.
29
30
CHAPTER 4: SHARING THE INTEL Did you know that according to a Corporate Executive Board study, 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative? As marketers, we need play our part in changing this statistic and turn that negative into a positive. Typically, sales reps expect to get information such as First name, Last name, Company name, and Phone number from marketing. It’s a tough sell when this information is all you have, and you have no context as to whether the prospect is a good fit for your product or not. If they’re lucky, sales will get some additional intel -- like industry and revenue -- which is normally gained through purchased lists, with many list vendors selling the same lists to your competition.
31
Thanks to inbound marketing software like HubSpot, marketers now have access to far more information than name, email, and phone numbers - see image above. This extra information can be used to further nurture leads through the funnel so that when sales do call them they are warmed up, ready to talk, and most importantly, willing to talk. In turn, sales are more likely to close more good customers, contributing further to the growth of the company. At the end of the day, the more good information sales have about a lead, the better the conversation they can have from the outset. We know that having more contextual data to share with sales can help them close more customers. But what about lead nurturing, how can we get to a place where we can hand call-ready leads over to sales, meaning that they can close even more sales? Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. At the heart of lead nurturing is email. Rather than using email as a means to communicate operational updates, email should be used to deliver useful and valuable information. Let’s take an example. If someone downloads an ebook on the topic of social media marketing, a smart approach is to send an email following up with more relevant content -- content you know the recipient will be interested in. This content could be anything from social media templates to more advanced social media guides. This might sound like a lot of work, but remember this can all be done with minimal resources using marketing automation, something 65% of Nordic marketers planned to invest in last year.
32
What is Marketing Automation? The HubSpot software uses “workflows” to define rules for content sharing via email. In simple terms, it means that we can say that if a prospect downloads content related to the topic X, they will enter into a workflow that means that the prospect will receive content related to the topic they’re interested in over a defined period of time. This means that you can continue engaging with your prospects, and nurture your leads with relevant content. The workflow below shows a workflow for leads approaching the middle of the funnel and who are being nurtured towards a free trial. Once the lead is qualified (and not before) for this workflow, they enter into it and two days later receive an email inviting them for a free trial.
For more tips on how to use email in your lead nurturing, here are some ideas.
33
CHAPTER 5: TRACKING & OPTIMIZING Measuring your inbound marketing is an essential part of your campaign. Yes, it is part of your campaign execution, and not something you do afterwards. The beauty of regularly measuring and analyzing your marketing is that it takes the guesswork out of what to do next. Rather than making blind decisions about whether to continue with a particular program or focus on one channel more than another, your analytics can give you the insight you need to make that decision intelligently. One of the advantages of internet marketing is that the web makes it very easy to measure just about every little tactic. There are tons of tools – both free and paid – at your disposal, and there is absolutely no excuse not to measure every part of your inbound marketing funnel, from top-of-the-funnel marketing activities like SEO, blogging, and social media, to middle-of-the-funnel ones like email marketing and lead nurturing. Furthermore, analytics can help you justify to your manager and your company’s top executive that the time and effort you’re putting into various marketing channels is delivering results. But what exactly should you be measuring? Let’s take a look at that.
34
1. A high-level overview of your total contacts, leads, MQLs, and customers -- broken down by persona, if possible.
Screenshot taken from the HubSpot dashboard
35
2. Which sources brought the most traffic, leads and customers to your specific campaign landing page.
36
3. What were the open, click-through rates for your emails.
37
4. And how much revenue has the campaign generated?
38
For the 48% of marketers who aren’t tracking sales from their campaigns, a lot of them don’t because they can’t, not because they don’t know they should. HubSpot integrates with lots of different CRMs so whatever you’re tracking in your CRM can be integrated to be shown with HubSpot. 5. Ideally, you’ll be able to see a snapshot of how each campaign has performed in terms of views, new contacts, and new customers.
For more information and tips on how to measure your inbound marketing, check out this guide which will teach you how to report on your inbound marketing campaigns. Measuring all of these elements will ensure that you’re armed with information and learnings you can use to optimize your marketing. If there’s a particular source that’s performing well, you should work towards getting maximum benefit from it. If you have
39
poor email open rates, you should look into how your emails are written and look into how you can improve them. If some of your landing pages are converting well, you should look into why they are converting so well, and apply that learning to other landing pages. There are some of elements of your campaign you should always keep striving to improve. Three measurable elements include:
Your landing pages: test different elements of your landing pages such as copy, images, forms, and CTA placements. For more ideas and examples of how to optimize your landing pages, you can check out our guide on how to optimize landing pages to generate more leads.
Your website’s conversion path: experiment with different elements of your website, such as design, navigation, image placement. We have a whole guide on conversion rate optimization, which you can download right here.
Your email: how can you optimize your open rate and click through rate? How should you approach maximizing conversions from email? Our guide on optimizing your email for conversions will steer you in the right directions.
40
NEED MORE HELP TO GET STARTED? BOOK A FREE INBOUND MARKETING ASSESSMENT WITH ONE OF OUR NORDIC INBOUND MARKETING SPECIALISTS TODAY
BOOK NOW
41