The Yellowstep Team By The Yellowstep Team • August 22, 2014

Five best practices to increase the ROI of your inbound marketing campaigns

positiveTraditional marketing campaigns are becoming a thing of the past. We are now able to reach out to our audience via channels such as blogging, social media, email and pay per clicks; with access to in-depth analytics tools it is getting easier for businesses to roll out and analyse their campaigns as they go. 

But, there is one common factor that links the traditional marketing campaigns to inbound marketing campaigns, and that is that there is still a risk of your tools, channels and results being disconnected. This can result in your results being difficult to read and your lead feeling detached. 

Not all of your campaigns will look the same or be of the same value, you will have different campaigns for different goals and different offers. Hubspot recommends these 5 best practices to doing inbound campaigns the right way.

Know your audience

Any campaign you're running should be based on your audience's needs. By targeting your campaign at a specific persona, it's more likely to be a success.

Keep your buyer persona in mind, find out what their problems are and how you will be able to solve them. Ensure that the solution to their problem is at the centre of your campaign.

Find out where your buyer persona spends most of their time online. Although it's important that your campaign is fully integrated across all marketing channels, you should also be focusing on the channels that you know your target audience will be using the most. 

Identify your offer 

Inbound campaigns align all of your marketing channels with your offer in the centre. This offer could be an ebook, whitepaper, case study or even requesting a demo/quote. Deciding which offer your campaign is going to surround all depends on your buyer persona and what stage they are at in the buyer's journey.

You will need to think like the buyer and create content that they need and will interest them, not just something you want to create. Make sure that your offer adds value to their time online and that by downloading it, they will learn something new. 

Create the conversion path 

Although you may be giving your premium content to your prospect for free, you'll be getting something from them in return such as a name, email address and job title.

The two key elements in your campaign conversation paths are your calls to action and landing pages. Your call to action is a way of attracting visitors to your offer and needs to be clear and concise as well as attention grabbing. A landing page is where the exchange of information for the content happens, your landing page needs to match the offer stated on your call to action to avoid confusion. 

Create the promotion path  

You now know who your offer is for, what it is and how to deliver it, but how will it get found? You will need to attract and promote people to your offer through using inbound marketing tactics.

Promote your offer on social media, link to your offer in your blogs and if your offer is further down the marketing funnel, be sure to include it in your email marketing workflow. 

Mix and match the channels you use to promote, so you can measure the best way that your prospects will find your offer.

Review and repeat

This best practice is self-explanatory. Don't just review your campaign at the end, continuously analyse and review your click-through and conversion rate. If something isn't going so well, ask yourself why, and change it.