A campaign is an overall marketing message that is delivered over a specific period of time in order to drive and focus audience attention on your topic. Think of a campaign as a 30,000 foot perspective on a particular aspect of your business.
Campaigns are comprised of many various elements, all building towards one specific desired result. For instance, a campaign might be implemented to acquire 5,000 new subscriptions to your newsletter. Or it might be focused on converting submissions to customers over a set period of time. You might begin a campaign to target a specialized niche in your audience demographic.
What Goes Into an Inbound Marketing Campaign?
If you are using marketing automation software such as HubSpot, you will find workflows and prompts guiding you to include all the elements of inbound marketing campaigns. Most of our campaigns follow the general flow below:
- Determine the audience for this campaign
- Set goals for the campaign:
- SMART goals
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
- SMART goals
- Determine keyword targets for campaign
- Create offers, calls-to-action, landing pages and thank you pages associated with campaign
- Plan and build automation and nurturing workflows
- Kick off campaign with targeted emails based on lists and segmentation
- Write a series of blog posts around the campaign topic
- Write a series of connected social media posts around the campaign topic to drive traffic to the website and offers
- Analyze for keyword optimization in all components of campaign
- Optimize campaign with paid search if appropriate
- Track the URL’s
- Report analytic data at close of campaign
What a campaign is NOT
It’s equally important to know what a campaign is not.
A campaign is not broadcast to everyone you’ve ever put on your email list or thought about doing business with. It is a targeted message, and needs to have targeted recipients and goals.
Why do we use campaigns?
Campaigns are useful to organize your inbound marketing efforts. They coordinate carefully with your overall business objectives and editorial calendar, and they give your sales and marketing teams a “rallying point.”
The most compelling reason to use a campaign, however, is to accurately gauge your target audience’s reaction to the message you have crafted for them. With a campaign in place you will know within a short period of time whether your message resonates, and with marketing automation such as HubSpot you will be able to tie the hard data to your specific campaign. This helps you prove the ROI on your marketing efforts to your reluctant boss and guide your next inbound marketing efforts.
Learn about the elements of an effective inbound marketing campaign with this simple checklist. It will help you organize your thoughts and make sure your campaign is a targeted tool to drive lead generation and traffic to your website. We use this checklist every time we kick off a new campaign.
