Read This Before You Launch Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

So, it’s time to start your first Inbound Marketing campaign. It’s just a matter of creating content, then letting people download a content offer in exchange for their details, right? 

Well, not really. Yes, a content offer might result in submissions and downloads, but how many qualified leads do you get? And how would you measure the results? 

Before you start creating your campaign, take 30 minutes and answer these 4 questions: 

1) What Is The Objective Of Your Campaign?

In HubSpot, we create campaigns that encompasses the entire set of landing pages, forms, emails, CTAs and more. Campaigns would have one end goal to work towards.

What’s YOUR goal?

Is it to generate new leads? Or to nurture existing leads? Or increase lead engagement through a webinar?

We recommend to organize your campaigns by your marketing objectives. Contacts obtained through these campaigns can then be segmented further.

For example, having one campaign do both lead generation and lead nurturing would mean that the leads you get through this campaign would be self-contained within this campaign, and using them for a different campaign would be tough.

If you have one campaign that focuses on lead generation, you can use the results from that campaign as a starting point for countless other campaigns. 

2) Who Is The Target Audience?

A common problem we hear from clients: “We get leads, but not qualified ones!”

When this happens, we realise the content offer wasn’t optimized to attract the correct target audience. This happens for B2B companies, who end up getting multiple submissions from students who are just looking for free information.

So, make sure you figure out the Buyer Persona you’re targeting, because that will affect how you structure every step of your campaign; from the information on the landing page, to the content offer, to the number of and the writing of emails in the lead nurturing process.

3) How Is Your Lead Nurturing Workflow Structured?

How are you planning to execute this campaign?

Ideally, Inbound Marketing campaigns should end with a Sales Qualified Lead, When planning your lead nurturing workflows, ensure your sales and marketing teams are aligned.

Do you want the workflow to progressively nurture the lead over a long period of time, or do you want to immediately qualify them through a Bottom-Of-The-Funnel offer? Do you want the last email in the automated workflow to end with an offer of a phone call from a sales person?

It is best to draw out the workflow so that you can make sure that it is comprehensive (and so you can explain it to others who don’t understand how it works!). 

4) What Is The Campaign Timeline?

Some campaigns are very time-specific. An offer that is a ‘Best of 2017’-type, for example, would only be popular till mid-2018, for example. You don’t want to keep promoting it on your home page till 2019.

An event, too, has a specific end-date, which means that your campaign timeline will shift forward to accommodate this. Make sure you know the timeline for your campaign before starting.

These questions (and their corresponding answers) will affect your campaign goals and results, and should be answered before you start.

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