Spending your 9-5 in the office as a digital marketer can be a ‘many hat’ job. It can feel like you’re being pulled in a billion directions. Checking stats from Social Media, reviewing website conversion points for audience insight and thinking forward to the next stage of growth and revenue development for your website is all in a day’s work. It feels like you are chasing your tail 90% of the time on the marketing circuit, and creating a sense of clear and distinguishable purpose can be tough!
It’s the multipotentialite’s dream job - the perfect blend of words and numbers - but now’s when I make a confession and tell you that HubSpot wasn’t my best friend to begin with. I was pretty sure that I was doing an awesome job without all this tech, until I had the "A-Ha" moment and realised I could do the same job within the campaign tool and stop double handling my data sets! Why not build a campaign in HubSpot to have somewhere simple to draw from?
Why build HubSpot campaigns?
“What gets measured, gets managed.”
- Peter Drucker
Marketing in the digital age is all about how much you can measure. It’s like instant gratification checking your live data, which gives you the ability to pivot your initiatives. As a fellow HubSpot user, you will have been blown away by FEATURES! It can feel a little overwhelming, and to be honest, it takes a team of dedicated users to make the most of all of them. The thing is, HubSpot were clever enough to factor that into their design. They made a special dashboard - just for tracking the progress of your campaign efforts - so you can easily review the features most relevant to your activity.
How do I set up my campaigns?
Now’s where you officially decide what you’re likely to care most about when measuring and assigning your campaigns: is it activity or revenue?
Activity campaigns
Short term promotional campaigns often have different goal parameters to revenue campaigns. An Activity campaign might include:
- a competition
- a short term special
- a limited time product offer
- recruitment for your business
Revenue campaigns
A revenue based campaign tends to run a longer time frame - almost constantly, or in shorter bursts depending on where you are spending your marketing budget at any given time.
We’ve set up our revenue campaigns for each service that we are offering. You could include:
- core product lines
- core services you offer
- building subscribers to your blog
Setting campaign goals
Setting goals will be different for each style of campaign, and we find it easier to work backwards. If you want 25 customers, and industry standard is 5% conversion from contacts to customers, then you’ll need 500 contacts. If you then measure industry standard to 5% click through from visitors to contacts, then you’ll need to attract 10,000 visitors to that campaign.
This is a helpful metric when you can assess where your traffic is coming from and what method of communication is offering the best ROI for your efforts.
See here that the blog is generating a lot of traffic, though the CTA's aren't performing as well as when we dug further into some of our social traffic. We also thought our Call to Action data was a little off, and found that the slide in CTA's weren't getting the proper attribution. These things happen.
HubSpot have kindly had fellow inbound marketers develop a set of campaign recipes you can use to get the ball rolling if you need some examples.
How many campaigns should I run at once?
That’s entirely up to the style of your business and your output. You can run activity and revenue campaigns simultaneously as well as several campaigns at once. Either style of campaign would use similar components: landing pages, calls to action, blog posts and supporting social media, tracked URL’s. The difference is in how you approach the set up as a user to know what to include.
TIP: Make sure you are clear on what campaigns should be named as this can’t be edited later. Decide on a naming convention upfront so it’s easy to understand across your team what the campaign is about.
What to include in each of my campaigns?
The campaign tool will step you through what to include from an all inclusive standing point. What you include will be a direct reflection of what your strategy is for the initiative.
Looking to make existing customers aware of a new product or service that might interest them? Set up a campaign that includes emails, a blog post highlighting further information and a landing page for conversion to a sale or more information. You might only need that much information for some campaigns, where other campaigns (more likely revenue based) will include every campaign element.
Now it’s time for some real life context. A campaign we recently ran in regards to our website creation service was set up with specific goals to be run over a 4 month increased awareness campaign of the service.
We set up:
- our goals,
- keywords,
- a landing page to a new offer we developed to build contacts,
- sent 8 emails,
- created 9 CTA’s and placed them in both emails, blog posts and around the site,
- contributed 7 blog posts in line with the theme,
- assigned a site page**
- and crafted 46 social messages in support of the content.
**This is only applicable if you built your site within HubSpot
The campaign isn’t over yet and we are tracking our inbound marketing efforts and pivoting our messaging in line with meeting our goals, and the remaining initiatives to roll out.
The Campaign Tool is just one aspect of the HubSpot suite that makes inbound marketing so easy to implement. If you are lucky enough to be a marketer building campaigns in the HubSpot environment, turn around and give your boss a mega high five today!
Now go on and get busy building out your own campaigns in HubSpot. IF you need a "think tool" to get you started on collating your content assets and effort, grab a copy of the Content Canvas, a great and easy to use strategy framework below.
