The inbound design campaign

So, you’re charged up to start up your inbound design strategy—and that’s great! You’re ready to start ramping things up and seeing results. And inbound design will do that for you—if you use the right framework.

Let’s take a step back to review the definition of inbound design:

Inbound design is a process for driving business growth by creating valuable experiences that deliver specific information to specific people at specific times for specific purposes.

So, if that’s what inbound design is, it follows that an inbound design campaign is a defined process that helps you “do” inbound design. This process can be applied to all areas of your business—including marketing, sales, and product. This works regardless of whether you’re trying to market a new product, optimize your sales process, or keep users longer get users hooked on your app. Using the inbound design campaign framework, you can test the effectiveness your marketing messaging and communication methods, the persuasiveness of your sales messaging, and the stickiness of your product experience. Essentially, you should think of this framework as a sort of “master sauce” for your campaigns, that you can tailor to just about any situation.

This step-by-step framework will help you connect business goals to your inbound design and make sure your campaign ultimately delivers results.

Step 1: Define your campaign growth goal

Let’s face it: marketing is fun. It can be exhilarating to dive head first into a new campaign and start getting your hands dirty. But sometimes you can get so excited to jump into the “fun” part—writing copy, designing graphics, sending emails—that you lose track of what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Or, if you’re designing a product, you fall into the trap of adding more features and functions that don’t align with your target market. This leads to business efforts that are expensive, waste valuable resources, and perform poorly. It’s a loser any way you slice it.

So, to keep yourself (and your team, if you have one) on task, you should develop a SMART growth goal for your campaign. Your goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

The concept of SMART goals is well-known, but it isn’t enough to write out any old SMART goal. To get the most out of your goal, you should make sure that your SMART goal takes into account:

• Your business’ growth objective

What is your campaign’s purpose? Make sure this is related to a goal that will directly generate growth, such as generating leads, customers, or increasing retention.

• The campaign timeframe
  How quickly do you want to achieve your campaign goal? Don’t be overly ambitious—your timeframe should be realistic given your campaign goal and budget.
• The campaign budget
  How much money do you have to spend? Your budget should be in line with your campaign goal and timeline. If your goal is large or your timeline is aggressive, you’ll probably need a budget to match.

If you get your goal right, you’ll be on your way to building a good foundation for your campaign.

Step 2: Select the audience for the campaign

Once you decide on an objective, you’ll need to figure out whom you’ll target. No matter what your selling, how attractive your product, or how vital your service, it will not appeal to everyone. You need to choose a specific market segment.

So, what does the ideal customer for your product or service look like? Are your best new parents or empty-nesters? Are your users new college grads on a budget or independently-wealthy seniors? Are some market segments more profitable than others? If you don’t know, this is a good time to segment your customer base (or your prospective market if you don’t have customers yet) and estimate the lifetime customer value for each segment. You should be able to justify how engaging your campaign segment will drive business growth.

Step 3: Determine the desired action of the campaign

Once you have defined your growth marketing campaign goal and selected your audience, you need to decide what action you want that audience to take that will further your campaign goal. This action is something that you should be able to tie back directly to your campaign goal that will have a direct impact on your business’ growth. Some common actions are getting website visitors to download an offer or getting known leads to try a new product or sign up for a free consultation.

After you determine the desired campaign action, you need to decide how you will track it. Do you know what metric is most directly tied to this action? Do you have access to the necessary systems and data? Will you need to use tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot to set up your goals? Make sure to involve your team in these decisions. A successful campaign depends on everyone understanding what your desired campaign action is and how you will measure your results. Here are a couple of tips:

• Tie your campaign “desired action” back to the customer funnel. Your goal should be to move the prospect from one stage of the funnel to another. Eventually you’ll want to create a series of campaigns that nurture all of your prospects further down the funnel.
• Don’t let your campaign be a dead end. Determine what comes next after an action is taken to create a seamless experience for the prospect or customer.

Step 4: Conduct research to better understand your audience

Now it’s time to spring into research mode. What do you know about your audience? Do you understand your prospects’ goals and pain points? Do you know how they think about their problems? Do you know kind of content they consume? Do you know how to reach them? Do you know what will motivate them to act? Do you know what drives them down the road to purchase?

These are crucial questions you’ll need to answer in two documents:  a buyer persona and a customer journey.

Let’s start with the buyer persona first.

A buyer persona describes your target audience’s wants, needs, goals, habits, and pain points. This defines who you’ll be targeting with your campaign. Knowing these details will help you develop a campaign that resonates with your best prospective customers.

It can be a bit daunting to try to find out everything about your target audience, but you can likely pull together a lot of useful information quickly. Some ways to find fodder for your buyer personas are to interview your survey your current prospects and customers, talk to your sales and customer service teams (and others who regularly interact with customers), and comb through your internal data (like your CRM, website analytics, and marketing automation software). When you collect all of this data, you’ll need to write it down, so your entire team is on the same page.

Once you’ve got your buyer persona, you’ll need to create a customer journey.

A customer journey details how your buyer persona makes a purchase decision. Purchases, especially those that involve a considerable investment in time or money, are usually made after significant research and evaluation. In these situations, there are three stages that a prospect goes through: the Awareness Stage, the Consideration Stage, and the Decision Stage. Your prospect will have different questions at each stage of the customer journey that they’ll be looking to answer. You’ll want to create content that addresses the different questions in each stage.

In the Awareness Stage, the prospect is experiencing symptoms of a problem, but doesn’t know what the underlying problem is. A typical prospect might begin by searching on Google. Some key questions an Awareness Stage prospect will ask are:

• How do I fix this problem?
• What types of problems cause the symptoms I’m experiencing?
• How do I know if I have a certain problem?

In the Consideration Stage, the prospect has identified the underlying problem and is investigating a set of possible solutions. In this stage, a prospect might ask questions like:

• What are possible solutions to the problem?
• What is the difference between this solution and other solutions?
• How do I know that this specific solution is best for me?

In the Decision Stage, the prospect has determined a single solution to the problem and is looking for a vendor to provide it. Key questions a prospect will ask in the Decision Stage are:

• Which vendors offer solutions that solve my problem?
• How do I know that a particular vendor is the best supplier for me?

Together the buyer persona and the customer journey form the foundation of your marketing campaign. Creating both your buyer persona and the customer journey will ensure that you have messaging that will resonate with him or her throughout the purchase process—and beyond.

If the goal of your campaign is demand generation, you’ll want to have an additional asset, a lead scoring system. Lead scoring is exactly what it sounds like—it’s a systematic way of scoring the leads that are generated through your campaign. It won’t surprise you to hear that not every lead that you produce should be passed on to your sales team. Lead scoring lets you segment your leads by a set of criteria to determine where they are in their buying process and how interested they are in your product or service. This helps ensure that the leads you’re passing on to sales are actually ready to have a sales conversation. You can read more about lead scoring in [name of blog post: Demand generation and growth marketing.

The upshot is: Make sure you have you know the target audience for your campaign and how you can craft effective campaign messaging.  

Step 5: Craft the campaign message/theme

In the last step, you collected a lot of information about your target market and created buyer personas and customer journeys. Now it’s time to put that knowledge to use to develop messaging that will resonate with a particular persona at a specific point in the with a specific need.

You need to determine how your desired customer action aligns with the buyer persona and customer journey you defined. So, given the goal of your SMART campaign goal (that you outlined in Step 1), your target market and buyer persona (that you defined in Steps 2 and 4) and your desired customer action (that you defined in Step 3), you need to decide where your campaign action falls in the customer journey (that you outlined in Step 4). Is this something your persona would do at the beginning of the purchase process (in the Awareness stage), somewhere in the middle (during the Consideration stage), or at the end (at the Decision stage)?

For example, if you’re looking to download a content offer or subscribe to a blog, this is an action that would likely fall toward the beginning of the journey, but if you’re looking to drive to sign up for a free consultation, this is an action that would occur toward the end of the customer journey.

Ask yourself what questions or pain points they have at this point, and how the action you’re asking them to take helps answer or alleviate them. Your messaging needs to directly address what’s in it for them. The best messaging will connect to your personas on an emotional level.

Here’s what you’ll want to do to draft effective messaging for your campaign:

• Review your buyer persona and customer journey. Ask yourself where the action you want your target audience to take fits into the customer journey.
• Analyze past content to see what tends to motivate your target audience to take action. What can you learn about the content they engage with? Does a particular topic resonate well? Does this imply a particular pain point that they might have?
• Develop relevant and effective messaging that resonates with the target audience. Using the observations from the previous step, draft several versions of campaign themes. Spend some time at this—it’s more difficult than you think. Then take your preliminary list and do a quick test. You can create online or social ads and seeing which messaging gets the most engagement or conduct a quick survey. The goal is to get some idea of how well your message resonates. Use the winner in your final messaging.

Step 6: Determine how to deliver the campaign message

There are lots of ways to get your campaign message across. You could communicate to your target market through social media, blogging, email, video, online advertising, direct mail, print media, billboards—the sky’s pretty much the limit! But chances are, not all of these methods will be appropriate for your market.

You’ll want to meet your audience where they are and communicate with them the way they like (and expect) to be reached. Use your persona as your guide—during your research, you learned about what types of media they consume and where they live online and offline. Depending on your campaign goal, some methods might be more appropriate than others.

Some of the most popular methods include:

Marketing

• Content

When paired with growth marketing, content marketing can help businesses achieve great results. Content is any material that your prospects and customers engage with, and can include blog posts, eBooks and checklists, infographics, videos—really just about anything. This strategy is so powerful because it can be used throughout the funnel to push your leads to the next stage. Most prospects looking to make large, considered purchases will want to do some preliminary research before buying, and content is what companies can give them to educate them and nudge them to favor their products and services.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Whenever anyone has a question about anything, they turn to Google. And that’s what makes SEO so effective. All of your prospects and customers are using search to find answers to their questions—all you have to do is show them that you’ve got the resources they’re looking for. Of course, it’s not all that easy—there is a lot of competition on search, and for this strategy to work, you have to rank on the first page of the search results (and preferably in the top 3). It’ll take some time and effort to start generating traffic from relevant keywords. That said, if you have the time and resources to invest in it, SEO can be a great way to get in front of your target market.

• SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Depending on your market, SEM can be a useful strategy to drive additional traffic for your business. The thing about this tactic is that its success relies on how much you are willing to bid for relevant keywords. If your product or service is on the lower end, you won’t want to spend as much on keywords, and you’ll get outbid—so your ads will rarely show. You’ll need to work out the lifetime value of your customer first to determine if this is a viable strategy. SEM can require a considerable investment and a lot of time to master, so if you’re short on either, you may not want to rely on this as your sole means of generating visitors.

• Social media

Social media marketing can be an efficient way to spread the word about your products or services. Nowadays, nearly everyone is on at least one social media network, which makes a social media strategy a great way to reach out to your target market. Although you can tailor your social media messaging to any segment of the buyer’s journey, social media marketing is generally used to generate “top of the funnel” traffic. You’ll get access to people who don’t yet know who you are and sets you up to make a great first impression. With a variety of social media networks, you’ll likely find a venue where your target market already exists.

• Email

I’ll be honest—email is one of my favorite types of marketing campaigns because you can collect so much data about its effectiveness. Plus, you don’t have to rely on a third-party platform (like Facebook or AdWords. You own the entire network and you have much more control over the deliverability of your message. Email marketing is best used as a middle- and bottom-of the funnel strategy. You only want to email people who directly have a relationship with you, which means that they’re already part of your funnel. You should never buy lists and mass blast a ton of people (because nobody responds to spam emails). There’s a whole art and science to email, though, so if you want to make the most of this strategy,

• Events

Sometimes the best way to pitch your product is too speak to them directly. But it’s not as easy as setting up a table at your local conference or trade show and waiting for prospects to come up and speak to you! There’s a lot of planning that’s involved—before the event, during the event, and after the event is over. And to get the most out of your investment of time and money, you’ll definitely want to coordinate with your sales team to make sure they’re reaching the right prospects. And that’s only in-person events. For virtual events, like webinars and online conferences, there’s a whole other level of planning involved. That said, if you have a product or service that has dedicated events, or if you’re willing to spend time developing virtual events for your business, this strategy might work for you.

Sales

Your sales team give you a great way to communicate your campaign messaging. They have often gathered a lot of valuable information and developed relationships with your prospects during the qualification and sales process, so they’ll be in a good position to determine the right time to deliver the message. Plus, your message will be delivered by a “real person” so there will be a greater chance of engagement. Make sure your sales team knows what your campaign messaging is and has easy access to campaign materials. You’ll want to have a good tracking system in place to make the most of this strategy.

Product

Sometimes the best way to reach your target market is through your product. In-product messaging can provide your users with valuable information in the right place at just the right time. For example, communications about new features and special promotions can be much more effective when delivered in-product because you’re providing key information at just the point when your users are most likely to act. But beware of information overload—you don’t want to put everything out there at once! That will only confuse your users. Instead, provide the most valuable, actionable information upfront, but make it easy to access supplementary information. Testing is the best way to determine the right communications and placement.

You may want to use a combination of strategies in your campaign. Review your buyer personas and analyze the performance of your past marketing campaigns to see what strategies will work for your target audience.  

Step 7: Document the growth campaign objective

The next step in the process is to document your campaign objective: what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, and why. No matter how much work you put in, nothing can disrupt your marketing strategy like not getting your team on board with your plan. And really, you should not be running your growth marketing campaign in a vacuum; you should have involved your team in the process from the very beginning—setting the campaign goal. Even if you don’t have a team, documenting your growth campaign objective will help keep you focused on your plan and help you explain to others in your company—especially upper management—and help justify your work (and your job).

This is the template that I use to document my growth marketing campaign objectives:

The objective of [name of campaign] is to get [target audience] to take [desired action] that will result in [business objective]. To accomplish this, we will design a [type of campaign] to communicate [campaign message] that focuses on [specific pain point or need] in the [stage of the customer journey]. The success of this campaign will be measured by [metric].

Although you may prefer to use a different format, you’ll definitely want to cover all of the inserted campaign elements. This way, you can address any concerns that your team has about the campaign strategy or feasibility before taking action. Now is the time to address any kinks in your plan. Once you launch the campaign and start spending time and resources, campaigns can develop a forward momentum of their own, which can make it difficult, if not impossible, to make adjustments midstream.  

Step 8: Execute the campaign

We’ve spent a lot of time on strategy and planning thus far, and now it’s time to start creating your campaign assets.

Depending on the type of campaign that you’ve decided on and how you’ll be delivering your message, your campaign may have a number of components. For example, if you are running an email campaign, at a bare minimum, you’ll want to have an email (obviously), landing page, thank you page, and anything else you’ve promised to deliver, such as an eBook or worksheet. If you’re doing a content marketing campaign, you’ll want to have several social media messages and related blog posts lined up, a call-to-action, landing and thank you pages, your content offer, and a thank you email to deliver your offer. Many campaigns, like content and social campaigns, will benefit from promotion. Be sure to add a promotional plan to your campaign execution strategy.

Make sure that all of your campaign components deliver the marketing message that you outlined in Step 5. You’ll want to make sure that your campaign copy and visuals support your overall theme and fit together for a seamless experience. If you’re developing your campaign solo or with a small in-house team, this should be relatively easy to manage. If you’re working with an outside agency, make sure that they have all of your planning assets (buyer personas, customer journeys, lead scoring framework, etc.) and clearly understand your campaign objective and strategy.

Once you’ve developed all of your campaign assets, you’ll need to put them together, publish them, and test them. You’ll want to do a soft launch first—publish your blog post without promotion, send a test version of your email, etc.—to make sure all of the assets display and perform as expected. Pay close attention to anything that breaks the campaign experience—links that don’t open, images and copy that don’t display correctly, emails that “break” on certain devices or email clients, spacing in your blog posts or landing pages that looks off. Now is the time to get out your fine-tooth comb –you don’t want to give your audience any reason to disengage from your messaging. A minor issue with a link can disrupt your entire campaign.

You’re also going to want to check that your reporting works as expected. It would be terrible to spend lots of time and money putting together a campaign and not know if it’s performing! You want to make sure that you can track all of your campaign metrics from the very beginning (from the social media posts, emails, etc.) through the end of the campaign (leads generated, revenue generated, etc.) And absolutely, positively make sure that this tracks to your overall business goal. That’s why you developed the campaign in the first place.

Once you feel like you’re good to go, it’s time to cross your fingers and send your campaign off into the world!  

Step 9: Measure and analyze the campaign results

Remember those metrics we determined in Step 3 that would indicate whether your campaign was a success? It’s time to revisit them now.

Review your metrics using whatever method you decided to track them and see how your campaign is doing. Make sure to take a look at your metrics a couple hours, or a day or so after your campaign launches to make sure that everything is tracking as expected. With some types, like email campaigns, you’ll get results very quickly; others, like content campaigns, may take more time to collect data.

Depending on your campaign goal, you may have decided to track several tiers of metrics, such as primary metrics, which are directly tied to your campaign, and secondary metrics, which are indirectly attributable to your campaign. This is especially relevant if you are running a top-of-the-funnel or middle-of-the-funnel campaign. You’ll want to determine how effectively the leads generated through your campaign move down the funnel.

This step should be fairly straightforward. Because we tied our metrics to our overall campaign and business objectives, you’ll get a good idea of how well your campaign is delivering actual results.

Step 10: Optimize the inbound design campaign

We’ve been into the weeds of the campaign for a little while, now it’s time to take a step back and look at the whole picture.  Review all of the components of your campaign and see if there are any elements that are underperforming. Are you driving traffic to your website, but failing to capture interest with your content? Are people clicking on your calls-to-action on your website? Are prospects opening your emails, but dropping off on your landing pages? Once visitors get to your landing page, are they converting? Also look at your successes. Is anything performing better than expected?

As you learn more about ‘s working and what isn’t, you’ll likely discover several components you can improve. And the best way to make improvements is through experiments—rigorous testing will help you be efficient with your marketing resources and help you see results sooner than later.

But now is not the time to start changing your campaign assets haphazardly. You must be methodical in your testing approach—to develop a marketing hypothesis, create an experiment to test it, stick with the experiment long enough to get valid results, and only once it’s been proven or disproven move on to the next variation. This deliberate method will outperform any incoherent, “let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach.

The subject of testing deserves a longer discussion, but here are some key tips to keep in mind when you’ve started your experimentation phase:

• Always have a goal in mind for your experiments—You’ll want to keep in mind the overall goal that you set for your growth marketing campaign, but you’ll also want to track secondary goals, like improving the effectiveness of the campaign element you are testing.
• Develop a hypothesis for what you are trying to test—This is the framework I like to use for developing my hypotheses: IF [variable], THEN [result], BECAUSE [rationale]. With this method, I always know what I am testing, what I expect to see, and why.
• Determine how you will measure success—As with your growth marketing campaign, you’ll want to determine how you’ll measure the results of your experiments. If you can’t measure your results, you won’t know whether your experiment is successful or not.
• Develop a list of tests you want to run and prioritize them. You’ll want to list your tests in order of impact on your campaign, confidence (how confident are you that this experiment will be successful), and ease of implementation. This will ensure that you are always running your most relevant tests first.
• Determine when to stop testing—I typically run my tests until I reach statistical significance. But make sure that your sample is representative.
• Be prepared for some experiments to fail–As the saying goes, you can’t win ‘em all. But what you learn from your failures will set you up for future successes.

One quick caveat before you dive in: Running a growth campaign is a process—not quick ploy for instant success. This is not a “once a done” sort of thing, either. You should plan on doing a lot of trying and failing before hitting upon a strategy that works. And once you hit upon a winning strategy, you need to continuously improve on it to continue to reap results.

Success lies in being focused about your entire strategy. The worst thing you can do is to try a bunch of random strategies and not know why they failed, or why they succeeded. You want to gain insights from each campaign that can be applied to the next one. Following this plan will give you a framework to work with, to ensure that you’re in a position to learn from your mistakes. And that’s really the most important part—that will put you on the path to growth.