The internet is an awesome marketing tool. You can have instant global reach with your marketing efforts. But a lot of people know this, and that creates a lot of noise to cut through for customers. How do you reach the right people at the right time with the right kind of content? A thorough digital marketing plan is the foundation of success. Our partners at Hubspot have outlined the 12 Building Blocks of a Successful Campaign to get you started.
1) Personas
Everyone knows that you should build out detailed personas before starting a campaign so I won’t waste much time here. If you don’t know your target market and the key players within it intimately, you’re not going to have a good time! Work with your sales team, senior marketing members and anyone else with experience working with your industry’s customers (customer service reps, store managers, etc.) to build out a detailed profile around their background, job roles, goals and challenges so that you can better create content that will connect with them.
Tips:
- Interview experts within your company. This will help you build a general idea of who you are targeting and how your product/service connects with them.
- Reach out to current customers for short, 30 minute interviews. Have a list of questions worked out beforehand and spend more time talking about them and their job/company vs. your product/service. This is where you will be able to build out a more well-rounded profile of a qualified persona and how your company can successfully win business.
- Reach out to prospects that your sales team recently lost (if possible). Run them through the same interview as above but try to focus a bit more of your time at the end of the interview collecting information on why they decided against your company. This will help you build out a better understanding of major objections your sales team faces.
Takeaways:
The more time you spend on this single aspect of your campaign buildout, the more likely you are to succeed. While a number of the other items on this list might lend themselves to less prep time and energy to create, personas require more and can make or break your overall campaign.
2) Competitive Analysis
To paraphrase Sun Tzu, “Know yourself and your enemy and you shall win 1,000 battles.” In a time where nearly every prospect compares multiple options online before making a purchasing decision, you can’t afford to ignore what your competition is doing with their digital efforts.
By knowing the ins and outs of all public areas of a competition’s marketing from social media to blogging to offer creation and more, you can better understand who they are targeting with their marketing, what content they are focusing on and where they have found the most success. Once you know this, you can better understand how you can and should position yourself on these different mediums to stay one step ahead of everyone else.
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If you're thinking about inbound marketing as a solution, download our Inbound Marketing Campaign Checklist.
Then contact one of our knowledgeable account managers at Front Burner Marketing to get started on the road towards an effective digital marketing strategy.
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