Stuck in a rut trying to generate more traffic to your website? Need to get more of the right prospects for your sales team? Here’s how a quick-win campaign approach can get you started.
Most organisations we work with want to get more people to visit their website, and convert visitors into leads they can win business from. It’s hard to do because getting more traffic and more leads can take time and requires addressing a number of complex issues. Which is why starting small, finding some quick wins and working in an agile way is often a better way to crack an otherwise tough nut. This approach is what we mean by a “quick-win campaign”. It’s a simple way to get started quickly.
There are three main goals of a quick-win campaign. The most important is to test and practice the basic principles of inbound marketing. The second is to increase your in-bound leads. The third is to use what you learn to take your next steps, based on actual data and experience.
A quick-win campaign starts by first thinking about the problems you can help clients solve, and finding content that can be repurposed quickly into assets your clients will want to use. You should then identify the right channels to promote content and deploy a suite of assets that draws potential clients into your business. The campaign then measures results to help you prioritise action that will have a longer-term impact. Here’s how you do it in practice.
5-steps to getting started with building out quick-win campaigns
1. Consider your clients and what they’re looking for
Any campaign, however quick, needs to start by considering which client type you’re trying to reach and what they will be looking for. This is the target client persona for the campaign. And for a quick-win campaign, you should only focus on one.
If you don’t already have them develop a buyer persona. It will help you understand the kinds of questions your clients want answering and the problems they’re trying to solve. Your content should focus on the questions and challenges they have. This often means moving beyond the features of your service, focusing on very simple benefits and turning those benefits into questions. Ask yourself – is this something someone would reasonably search for?
For more about personas check out this blog: a 4-step guide to creating buyer personas that work
Checklist:
- Identify your target persona
- Create a list of questions persona might ask
- Create a list of challenges persona is trying to solve, in relation to the products and services you offer.
2. Audit Existing Content for Opportunities
Your next step is to audit existing content to find assets that you can use in the campaign. These assets will help your target persona address their challenges or answer questions. An asset includes any highly valuable content that you uses in your marketing or sales process. Think about the tools your sales team use, existing marketing collateral, and the content already on your website.
What you’re looking for are “offers” – things that you can use as the basis for generating more leads. Offers are something your target audience will provide their personal or professional information to gain access to – checklists, how to guides, product comparisons, free trials. For a quick-win campaign, this means you should see if you can turn a presentation into a checklist, a product brochure into a how-to guide, a blog post into a questionnaire.
Checklist:
- Audit content using your client personas and their questions as filters.
- Find content that can be turned into blog posts related to questions your clients are trying to solve.
- Find content that can be turned into assets your personas will find valuable and therefore be prepared to exchange their details for.
3. Build a Promotion Plan
Conduct a quick analysis of the marketing and distribution channels you can use to promote your content to target clients. You should consider a variety of channels which should ideally include social media and email.
If you don’t have access to the right audience on social media or an email list with a few hundred subscribers, you may want to consider paid-for channels, including sponsored social media updates and pay per click advertising on Google.
Once you understand the “opportunities” for promoting your content online to your target clients you can start to create a plan for promoting your quick win campaign content and generating leads through these channels.
Checklist:
- For the social media channels you manage do you have access to an audience that represents your target buyer persona?
- Do you have an email list that you can use to promote content? For example newsletter subscribers.
- Do you own or engage with any communities online? This could be a popular blog, a large following on a site like Quora, or a LinkedIn group.
- Identify any gaps in your promotion approach that will need to be filled by sponsored content or pay per click advertising.
4. Launch Your Quick Win Campaign
Next, you’ll need to create the pages and emails for the campaign. The pages allow you to promote and share content in exchange for a client’s email address and other details. The emails then promote further content and offers that develop a visitor into a prospective client.
Get these 6 components in place:
- Blog post/s that relate to your persona’s questions. The page should contain a call to action link or button that promotes your content offer, and links to the landing page where you’ll capture client information and promote the offer.
- A landing page, linked to from the “call to action” button on your blog, and promotint your downloadable content offer. The page should have a form that captures client information, along with a clear explanation of what the offer is and how it will benefit the client. This should link to the “thank you page” below.
- A thank you page that contains a link to the content offer. And perhaps a suggestion of what your visitor might do or download next.
- An e-mail that reshares the offer.
- A kickback e-mail that you send to a visitor a few days after the initial download promoting your next offer, checking into see how they’re getting on with the offer, or if relevant an offer of direct support from your team – perhaps a free demo or consultation meeting.
- Social promotion images that relate to the messages and content you’re sharing.
Stitching all of this together is made easier if you have a marketing automation platform like Hubspot, Active Campaign or Marketo. But all is not lost if you don’t have a marketing automation system try using LeadIn, a plugin that works with WordPress and other CMS providers to capture email addresses, and Unbounce for landing pages.
Before launching, you should consider how new leads will be routed to your sales team and how you can track these leads as they go through the buying journey.
5. Measure the Results
Use the quick-win approach to measure that has worked for you. Look at your visits, leads, conversion rate, and if possible, customers generated from the campaign. This process will also help you understand which metrics really matter to you and what you can look out for next.
Good luck!
The most important part of doing this is doing this. It won’t be perfect, but it’s the only way to move forward. Yes, a quick-win campaign may solve an immediate need to generating leads for your business, but more importantly, it’s a way to test if the approach you use is delivering what you need so that you can consider a longer-term strategy and learn how to make things better. It also gets you into the habit of the fundamentals of successful inbound marketing, and that’s a decent step in the right direction.
