This article will show you how to prevent the common mistakes. You’ll learn how to build the right structure to deliver the right message to your potential customers and turn them into loyal customers.
Here are the 7 steps to get you started:
Step #1. Ideation, Research, and Goal Setting
According to SmartInsights:
“Creating brilliant ideas and developing them into unique and appealing content is what marketing campaigns have used to generate audiences for years, and that won’t be changing anytime soon.”
To build a great marketing campaign, you need the right idea that will appeal to your target audience. After all, in the end, the results you get from executing the right campaign will always beat that of a ‘clever’ campaign that doesn’t solve your customer’s problem. [source]
However, most businesses have no process in place to generate the right ideas for their marketing efforts.
The following are some of the factors that should be considered when generating the best ideas:
- Customer’s need: The ideal way to judge your marketing efforts is how your prospects and customers receive it. If they don't like it, then it's unlikely to achieve its aims.
If you’re promoting men’s outfit, for example, your customer’s need, apart from covering their nakedness, could be to appear beautiful. Do your ideas show them how your product will meet this need?
- Personnel: Having the right personnel will determine whether you’ll implement your ideas correctly or not.
- Budget: The budget available for marketing determines the number and scale of the ideas you create.
Also, a proper research exercise will give you the right information you need to make the best decisions for your marketing campaigns. Some of the elements you need to research into are:
- Customer pain points
- Customer demographics
- Market size
- Current trends
- Past marketing campaigns
- New opportunities
- Competitor analysis
With deep research into these elements, you’ll be able to make the best decisions on how to go forward with your marketing campaigns.
Of course, without a clear goal, you can’t measure results.
CoSchedule conducted a survey on digital marketers and found that 70% of marketers set goals and those who do so are 429% more likely to report success compared to those who didn’t. Likewise, 81% of marketers who set goals achieve them.
The basic approach is to set SMART goals and have a good plan that will help in achieving each aspect of the goal. This means your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
Some of the goals you can create for your marketing campaign are:
- Gain more leads
- Drive more sales
- Increase profits
- Getting new form signups
- Drive more referral traffic
- Drive more organic traffic
- Drive more social media traffic
- Increase brand awareness
- Getting more email subscribers
- Reach a new customer segment
- Enter a new market
For all these goals, you have to specify numbers and a deadline to determine success or failure.
Step #2. Determine Your Target Personas
Setting up a marketing campaign to appeal to everyone is a poor strategy. Because you’ll be wasting a lot of company resources (i.e., time and money). When you’re marketing a product or service, you want to target the ideal customers.
Every other customer doesn’t matter!
The truth is that you’re more likely to attract the right customers because you’ve tailored your message to them. That’s why having a buyer persona from the get-go is vital for your marketing.
The first step to determine your target personas is to state clearly the problems your product will solve. Who are those who need this solution most? Which group of people can you serve best?
According to a Cintell survey, companies that exceed lead and revenue goals were 2.2 times more likely to have and document personas than companies that miss these targets.
To make your persona effective, you have to treat each prospect like a human being and tailor your message to their specific needs. Some of the important details you need to have in your personas are:
- Name
- Age group
- Background
- Demographics
- Job and position
- Their major challenges
- Working hours (optional)
- Income
- Family status (optional)
- Location of residence
- Goals and challenges
Here’s a good example of a buyer persona that highlights a handful of the elements above:
The more detailed you buyer persona document is the better. You can have as many details as possible.
This will make your message more targeted. You can also have more than one buyer persona for your business as you can have more than one ideal customer for a product. Here’s another good example:
Note: The information you include in your ideal buyer persona could also be taken from your ideal customers in the past.
Dun & Bradstreet (formally NetProspex), a data management company, developed its website on its buyer personas. With this, they were able to achieve a 900% increase in visit duration and a 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue.
Step #3. Build and Test Your Campaign Landing Page
A landing page is vital to your marketing campaign. No matter the goals you’ve set to achieve, often times, it all begins with lead capture. Every other thing is secondary, including sales.
In a nutshell, the main aim of your landing page is usually to capture leads. Take a closer look at this landing page created with lead capture in mind:
Unfortunately, most businesses either neglect this ‘aim’ of lead generation. Instead, they try to get sales and loyal customers from a cold marketing campaign or landing page. It doesn’t work that way.
According to MarketingSherpa, 44% of clicks for B2B companies are directed to the business’ homepage, and not a special landing page. This is a waste of traffic.
To increase your conversion rate, one important step is to offer a lead magnet. It could be an ebook, a white paper, a free demo of your product, or a free trial. This can encourage your leads and you can follow up with them later to build trust and nudge them to buy your product.
This landing page is clean, relevant, persuasive, and offers a free whitepaper report as a lead magnet:
The best way to design and use a high-converting landing page in your marketing campaign is to keep these rule in mind:
i). Post a single offer: Having many offers on your page can be confusing to potential leads. Stick to one offer per page.
ii). Leave out the navigation: Having the navigation bar can distract your visitor and lead them to another page. Take them off. The CrazyEgg landing page has no navbar -- which is awesome.
iii). Avoid links from your page: Links can also lead visitors away from your landing page which leads to losing those leads.
iv). Make it mobile-optimized: Visitors on mobile should be able to view your landing page or you’ll lose an opportunity to gain more leads.
Split testing the elements of your landing page is necessary to get the best conversion possible. Split testing eliminates guesswork from your landing page.
Which landing page elements can you split test? Let’s see:
- The headline
- The presence or absence of background image
- The length of the landing page copy
- The content of the landing page copy
- The absence or presence of images
- The absence or presence of videos
GoCardless tested the call to action “Watch a demo” in comparison to “Request a demo” on their landing page.
“Watch a demo” had a 139% increase in conversion compared to “Request a demo.”
Step #4. Setting Up Goal Tracking
If the goal of your marketing campaign is to generate more website traffic, then the Pageviews and Unique Visitors could be an important and actionable metric to track.
However, if you have goals like the number of leads, ebook downloads, sales, etc. then the number of views could be a vanity metric.
Despite the importance of goal tracking, the State of pipeline marketing report shows that 34.1% of businesses don’t use any attribution model to measure performance.
So how do you measure the important metrics for your marketing campaign? One popular tool and platform you can use is Google Analytics. The tool allows you to track your goals in these 4 ways:
i). Destination: To set a destination goal, you have to enter a URL that shows your goal has been achieved.
For instance, a thank you or confirmation page after a visitor signs up with their email address is a destination URL that indicates a lead has been acquired. If you have a specific value for your lead, you can also add it here.
ii). Duration: This goal measures the time people spend on your website. You can either set a goal for when people spend, say 1 minute on your page or less for a given period of time.
One issue with this metric is that it's not always accurate. If a visitor only visits a single page, Google registers 00:00:00 as the time on page no matter how long they spent. It’s only accurate when the visitor visits another page.
iii). Pages/Screens per session: This is used to track engagement. You can set the number of pages that a user must view per session as a goal. For instance, if viewing 3 or 4 pages per session is the right level of engagement you’re looking for, you can set that as a goal.
iv). Event: This is used to track users interactions on your website. For instance, this could be signing up for a newsletter or downloading an ebook. It could also be used to track a referral page.
To create an event goal in Google Analytics, you have to set up the event tracking code on the page. To complete your event tracking, you have to set the category, action, label, and value.
After setting up your goals, you can track your performance in Google Analytics at conversions under goals.
Step #5. Distribution and Promo
There are countless channels to get your message across during marketing. The truth, however, is that you can’t use all these channels at once, or ever. Even if you have the resources. Because it would be a waste.
If you need extra hands on the right distribution channels, at Bloominari, our digital marketing agency based in San Diego, California, our marketing and automation experts can give you the best strategy to grow your leads and revenue.
Hint: Your ideal customer will dictate the channel you use to communicate and distribute your marketing content.
For instance, if you’re marketing a B2B product or service that will be used by business executives, managers, and startup founders, then LinkedIn will make more sense for your marketing than SnapChat.
However, if you’re selling a product like sneakers for teenagers and people in their twenties, then SnapChat, Instagram, and Facebook are channels you can get across to your ideal customers.
Promotional offers serve as incentives for leads and customers. According to Shopify, merchants with an active discount code are 8 times more likely to make a sale.
Step #6. Lead Nurturing
When you capture leads, your job is not done from a marketing point of view. Because leads don’t spend money on your business, only leads you can successfully turn to customers.
In fact, MarketingSherpa estimates that 73% of B2B leads are not sales-ready. Despite this, 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing campaigns.
To turn a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL), you need to nurture the lead. How do you go about it?
One way to nurture leads is through personalized email messages. With email automation software, you can send messages to your leads based on their behavior.
In a recent Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
Conclusion
Building a proper structure for your marketing campaign gives you the best chance for success amidst the tough competition for customers.
When you follow these guidelines, your campaign will be relevant, persuasive, and timely -- which, in turn, will motivate your ideal prospect to take that bold step and become customers.
