As with everything Inbound, successful campaigns hinge on the methodology, namely customers should be presented with many content options across various channels and formats they choose to engage with. Therefore, campaigns need to be designed, built and implemented with the inbound marketing methodology in mind.
In simple terms the above mentioned activities should span across and integration cross your website, blog, social media channels (pro-active and organic social media amplification) email marketing, paid media and advertising. These should lead customers to gated landing pages to capture their details and allowing the business to reconnect and continue to communicate and aim towards starting a conversation, in order to nurture the user and gain their trust in order to win them over as a customer, on their terms and on their timeline.
Building a digital (inbound) marketing campaign should consider ideal target buyer personas as well as the timing of where precisely those buyer personas are at on their ideal buyers journey. In other words, campaign content needs to be tailored per buyer persona and tailored to meet the persona at any stage they choose on their buyer journey. A mistake is often made to dive right into marketing campaign production without prior growth goal setting. When production is not aligned specifically to goals, money spent is most often money wasted so strategy, implantation, content effectiveness and measuring campaign success are tied together in the goal setting function. The above assumes adequate tracking and measurement are firmly in place.
With buyer personas, buyer journey and growth goals firmly set in place, the last step is solidifying a cross-platform, cross-device, cross-channel inbound digital strategy and a robust and agile plan to implement that digital strategy and accomodate any ongoing changes.
Inbound marketing campaign are the vehicle that deliver the inbound strategy to target buyer personas.
When it comes to a Brand its' marketing campaign and the content served to customers to compel them to action, beauty is in the eye of the beholder but, outcomes are certainly controllable provided content is compelling, engaging and perfectly aligned to the customer experience.
However, what binds marketing content success and campaign execution, is context.
Gone are the days where generic context suits all buyers at any stage in their journey. To ensure they have maximum impact and take-up, inbound marketing campaigns must consider all stages in a buyers journey and must be tailored and aligned by leveraging relevant content, in order to achieve their purpose.
Inbound methodology removes the complexities of multi-channel marketing and creates a simple, customisable and streamlined approach to compelling campaign content creation and execution and across every stage in the marketing funnel.
Additionally it does this by leveraging the appropriate tactics relevant to marketing funnel (top, middle and bottom of the funnel) for example: Website and web page updates (as well as landing and thank you pages), blog and social media posting, pay-per-click and advertising (paid media), even email marketing, social messaging and company response to customer engagement.
In addition, a wonderful bi-product of effective setup, design and implementation of an inbound marketing campaign, is the impact on SEO - a tactic usually distracting marketing budget as a single expense item, that can be avoided yet over-delivered by an effective inbound strategy.
Technology
Wether you are new to inbound marketing or not, the secret in delivering inbound marketing lies in efficient and effective connectivity of all the moving parts. Therefor and in a digital-first world, the technology powering inbound campaigns is fundamental.
Whilst there are many technology solutions 'out there' and because we aim to produce world-class sales, customer service and marketing solutions, at Lupo Digital we have partnered with the worlds leader and founder of the inbound movement, HubSpot.
When it comes to the inbound methodology, past experience has demonstrated for us that Sales, Service and Marketing success platform alternatives usually result a significantly higher cost, slower speed-to-market and a 'time' liability.
People
With the right technology in place to deploy inbound marketing campaigns, the next priority are people (or teams) with the relevant knowledge, skills and experience to run and manage the campaigns, within the technology stack. As such, such content producing resources may include (and not limited t0) the following capability (in-house or otherwise):
In addition to content production, additional and dedicated resources are need to power the technology platform both for development, design and even coding, in some cases.
Inbound marketing campaigns and related resources rely on a control centre or mechanism with which to ensure campaigns and all their connected parts and protocols are being monitored and maintained to produce the intended results.
The system governing this control centre and ecosystem is a Content Marketing Strategy allied to a holistic Inbound Growth Strategy.
In a truly inbound digital world, the content marketing strategy lives inside a holistic content calendar and execution timeline to guide results.
Finally it must be said that the digital landscape and ecosystem surrounding inbound marketing campaigns, their execution and activation are forever changing and must therefore be agile and nimble and require fast and efficient revision and alignment to the overall digital growth strategy, on-demand.
The most cost-effective, future-forward and efficient options include: