Campaign launch is always an exciting day, isn’t it? You’ve spent months tossing around creative ideas for your inbound marketing campaign, generating content, setting up your automation workflows and testing the processes. Finally, it’s the day to hit the big red launch button and let your inbound marketing campaign go viral (and hit your quarterly conversion targets all in one day)!
Well, unfortunately inbound marketing results hardly ever come that easily and a marketer’s job doesn’t end with the campaign launch. In fact, this is when the interesting part really begins: it’s time to optimise your content and campaign (full disclosure: we’re a bunch of spreadsheet hugging data geeks). Here are our tips to improve your inbound marketing campaign performance.
#1: Collect meaningful inbound marketing campaign data
In the digital space, you have access to vast amounts of data about your inbound marketing campaign. The problem is that campaign data is often gathered and measured through various different tools and it can be tricky to determine which information to get from where.
While it all depends a little bit on how your campaign is set up and what tools you have at your disposal, we here at Bc find the following tools and marketing metrics:
- Linkedin campaign manager: to measure click-through rate (CTR), engagement and cost per click (CPC).
- Google Analytics: to get insights about how many new visitors were attracted to your website through your inbound campaign asset and to understand how visitors behave on your website (e.g. are they bouncing right off or are they digging deeper into your content?).
- Marketing automation tool: to gather data on things like call to action (CTA) performance, or the social media channels driving the most traffic to your campaign and contact churn. The level of detail you have access to can vary greatly depending on what marketing automation tool you’re using and whether it’s fully integrated with your website.
- Conversion optimisation tool: to get detailed information about the performance of your landing page. Conversion optimisation tools can tell you exactly what section of your landing page is getting the most eyeballs.
#2: Interpret the performance of your inbound marketing campaign
Once you have gathered all relevant data for your inbound marketing campaign you can start with the interpretation. Make sure not just to look for isolated extremes: it’s much more meaningful to put a number of different data sets into context.
For instance, your LinkedIn Sponsored Update seems to generate lots of interest. You’re getting heaps of clicks and people are engaging with the updates: but for some reason there’s a huge drop off on your landing page and your form fill-ins are way below expectations.
Take a look at your data from your conversion optimisation tool to see what people are clicking on and where the majority of eyeballs are going.
Is your CTA in the right position? Do visitors need to scroll to see all the form fields they need to fill in? Tweaking these elements can have a huge impact on your conversion rate.
#3: Apply incremental changes to your campaign assets
So, you have done the hard data interpretation and your fingers are itching to tweak your campaign, change CTA’s, button colours and email subject lines all at once? Hold your horses!
This is the time for you to take a deep breath, make a cup of tea and think carefully about how you want to apply your insights strategically to your inbound marketing campaign.
Only ever make one change at a time to your campaign assets. Yes, we know that this is the more time-consuming approach to campaign tweaking, but it’s also the only reliable way to find out what changes had the biggest impact on your conversion rate.
Repeating this process over the entire length of your campaign will ensure that you’re getting the best possible results.
#4: Document your learnings
Yes, we hear you: documentation is not really the most exciting part of a marketer’s job.But it’s vital to foster a culture of ongoing learning and enabling you to make informed decisions about how your organisation should invest their marketing dollars. Most importantly, the documentation process will give you a great starting point to plan your next inbound marketing campaign.
