I love the word backwards. The Free Dictionary offers as one definition of this word:
(adv) in reverse order, back to front, in the opposite way from usual.
Backwards is a great description for inbound marketing. It reverses the order of traditional advertising and is the opposite way from the usual. With inbound marketing the customers seek us out rather than the opposite. Inbound turns the marketing model on its head and shakes qualified leads out from the pockets.
Inbound marketing campaign development is also done backwards. We start from the end and work our way forward. Doing it this way is critical to maintaining consistency in a campaign and achieving high CTRs and conversion rates.
Here is a six step checklist for building an inbound marketing campaign backwards:
What this doesn’t mean: closing your eyes, leaning back in your chair and conjuring a blurry image. Actually document it. Write it down. Draw it out with detail. Make educated guesses when necessary. Include all the applicable offers for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Understand where the offer is located in the buyer's journey.
There are excellent free tools for diagramming such things. We like Draw.io.
Answer these questions:
Then write out exactly how the conversion offer benefits your buyer persona at the appointed stage of the buyer’s journey. The offer must have a compelling benefit to your buyer persona at his or her stage in the buyer’s journey. If you can’t figure this out then you need to re-think the offer altogether.
One of our most popular offers is an ebook entitled “Three Fatal but Common Mistakes in Hispanic Marketing.” It is an awareness level offer targeted toward a buyer persona that is exclusively the owner of an SMB. The benefits of this offer to our buyer persona is summed up like this:
By reading our free ebook you will save money and have more success in the quickly growing US Hispanic marketing by avoiding the three most common mistakes.
The benefits of this offer are clear and compelling to our buyer persona:
Now that we know what the offer benefits are then it is time to take a step forward.
The Thank You Page is the page that the newly converted lead sees immediately after filling out the form.
The Thank You Email is sent immediately (or almost immediately) once the form is submitted.
Both should lead the user to the next step that you want them to take. This includes:
Eventually, we are going to come back to the thank you page in order to add conversion codes for the various paid traffic builders that we may use.
In step two we wrote the benefits of our offer. Let’s get those benefits onto a landing page.
State the benefits using an active voice in a concise and easy to read manner. Use header tags and bullet points to make the landing page easy to read. Follow on-page SEO best practices.
There are many philosophies regarding landing page design. No matter the details of the design it should include the following:
The CTA should be the shortest iteration of the benefit. Five words or less is an ideal length.
The copy should be action oriented, beginning with a word like download or register.
From a design perspective the CTA should visually striking and large enough to be noticed but not too large so as to overshadow everything on the pages where it appears.
Quality traffic comes from many sources.
In the long term, your inbound marketing campaign should be progressively building organic search traffic. In the short term there are ways to drive more directly purchased traffic, such as Adwords, Bing, paid social media and native advertising.
When writing copy for these channels remain consistent with the CTA, the landing page and the offer: state the benefits!
No matter what channels that you choose to drive traffic it is critical that we are measuring traffic and conversions for each of these channels. We use two tools: UTM codes and conversion tracking.
UTM codes are bits of text that are appended to the end of a link that tells our analytics tool (like Google Analytics and HubSpot) information about from where the visitor that clicks on the link originated.
Here is a link (or URL) with UTM codes:
http://marketing.bridgesstrategies.com/three-fatal-mistakes-in-hispanic-marketing?utm_campaign=Hispanic%20Advertising&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin
This may look to you like an unintelligible mess, but don’t worry, you will easily understand it.
A URL (or link) with UTM codes consists of three parts:
The base URL is everything before the question mark.
So, in our example the base URL is http://marketing.bridgesstrategies.com/three-fatal-mistakes-in-hispanic-marketing
After the question mark are three UTM parameters with their respective values. These parameters are:
There are other UTM parameters that you can set, like utm_term to return the specific keyword in the case of search engine marketing; and, utm_content which is generally used to determine within which content the link is located.
It is best practice to always include utm_source, utm_medium and utm_source on all links.
When using paid traffic sources such as search engine marketing (like Google’s Adwords & Microsoft’s Bing Ads), paid social media (like Facebook & Twitter) or digital display, it is best practice to include conversion tracking on the campaign.
Setting up conversion tracking is easy. You simply include a snippet of code for each service on the Thank You Page and then assign that conversion to the campaign within the service.
