Create cost-effective agile marketing campaigns (12 steps)

Start from your numbers, not your tactics

If you know what you are aiming to achieve, you have probably written a marketing plan to get you there. That plan should tell you the enquiries and leads you need each month, at your average or estimated lead-to-order conversion rate, to hit your sales target.

Understanding the shape of your demand generation waterfall is what minimises waste. It tells you where the campaign should concentrate: on targeting, on creating demand, or on converting it.

This is where most campaigns come unstuck. HubSpot found that 74% of the companies not exceeding their revenue goals did not know how they were performing against their visitor, lead and sales opportunity metrics. If you cannot see the waterfall, you cannot tell which part of it is leaking.

Once you know your metrics and your conversion targets, create the campaign roadmap in advance, alongside the marketing plan. Work out what content each campaign needs so you can plan the resource to make it.

Agility is the ability to move within days

Planned campaigns give you time to build properly. Agility is the separate ability to move quickly when something changes.

The best campaigns are often the ones created to respond to something happening around us. At one company I worked at we sold remote working communication solutions, so an impromptu train strike was an opportunity to promote the benefits of working remotely. Getting that message to the audience within a few days tested the agility of the process and our ability to pull resource together quickly.

Write content once, use it everywhere

Whether you are writing an email, posting on social, building a campaign landing page, working on SEO or planning an event, the content is what decides the result.

Write it so it can be used across every channel with small tweaks. Consider minimum viable content rather than aiming for content perfection: repurposing and MVC are what make the return on a content investment worthwhile.

Automate what you can, and leave it always on

Where possible, build campaigns so they are automated and always on. With automation tools running in the background you can focus on your day job knowing the campaign is still creating leads. Many of the starter packages are excellent and free:

• Schedule social posts across every platform at once with tools such as Postfity, DlvrIt or Hootsuite.
• Run automated email campaigns with tools such as MailChimp or MailJet.

Once your Google and Bing advertising campaigns are set up correctly and performing, they become always-on too.

Video helps here as well. Always-on videos on YouTube or Vimeo can explain your company, products and services and support the sales process directly. A video shot on a phone often produces something perfectly acceptable to prospects, and can come across as more personal, genuine and sincere than a corporately produced alternative. That helps build trust.

The 12 steps

1. Pick one priority

Identify a single business awareness or sales priority to focus on. Give the campaign a clear name and a theme that runs through everything you build and say in support of it.

2. Define what success is

Total sales, volumes, the number of new clients, growth of existing customers. Be specific.

3. Work back up the funnel

From your target figures, work back up through the sales and marketing demand generation funnel to the number of opportunities, marketing leads and enquiries you need.

4. Name the audience

Detail the priority markets, customers and decision makers your success will come from.

5. Map the journey

Consider the journey your audience takes, from discovery through exploration and evaluation to purchase, and make sure the campaign addresses the steps that matter most.

6. Choose the channels

Detail how you will reach that audience efficiently, and what each channel contributes to the campaign’s overall target. Channels include:

• LinkedIn InMails
• Telemarketing
• Social media, organic and paid
• Advertising, search and display
• Letters and direct mail
• Radio and television
• Press relations
• Trade or consumer shows
• Events and sponsorship
• Seminars and webinars
• Newsletters, your own or someone else’s

7. Build the content

Develop the messaging and content that will travel through those channels and compel action step by step. That might include:

• Clear, compelling website and campaign landing pages.
• Supporting brochures and flyers, printed or digital.
• Infographics, videos, eGuides, whitepapers, research papers and fact sheets.
• A quality blog with images and links, internal, external and inbound. See our SEO hints and tips.
• Emails and social posts extracted from that blog. Set up automated email nurtures for anyone who engages with a call to action, and research hashtag trends before you post.

8. Be clear about the ask

Define what you will say and offer to encourage engagement, and be explicit about the action you want. Build calls to action that invite a further step:

• Download our free eGuide
• Check your strategies now
• Watch our explanatory video
• Download our free infographic
• Register for our newsletter
• Register for a free trial
• Free assessment
• Use our pain or ROI calculator

Our own example: after an online marketing health assessment, the participant receives a personal report. The whole process is automated.

9. Expect most people not to be ready

Most people who engage will not be ready to buy. Your calls to action exist to capture that interest so it can be nurtured respectfully.

10. Consider an offer

A promotion can accelerate progress through the journey and bring a purchase forward.

11. Measure, tweak, optimise

Take a test-frequently, fail-fast approach: modify, optimise or drop elements until the campaign has the right ingredients. Once it is optimised and automated, you can leave it running. Make sure you can measure the campaign’s impact separately from your other marketing.

12. Find the 20% that does the work

When you review the build, identify the 20% of activity giving you 80% of the results and concentrate there. That is where depth and differentiation come from.

The benefit of digital is not only the transparency that tools such as Google Analytics provide, but the ability to start or pause with a click. Have enough leads, hit pause. Need more leads, switch back on or turn up the investment. Make sure your process lets you move through all twelve steps quickly.

Where to go next

If you want more on generating results from demand generation, read 5 tips to improve demand generation results and How to choose the right channels of communication.

If you would like help building a campaign that works this way, get in touch. Engagements are scoped by outcome, not by hours.

Sources

• HubSpot: research on companies’ knowledge of their visitor, lead and sales opportunity metrics