In my never-ending quest to help you develop better inbound programmes, I was trying to find a simpler graphic to explain the elements that make up a straightforward inbound campaign. There are lots of diagrams that show the process from Awareness – Consideration – Decision and from strangers – visitors – leads etc. but nothing that showed the specific elements you need to build a campaign.
In the end I created my own, so in the absence of something online, here’s mine:
Elements of a simple Inbound Campaign
The Landing Page
Right at the heart of this is the Landing Page. The principle here is that you put your premium content behind a landing page to capture email addresses. This helps you build up a database or list of contacts who are interested in you and your content. From there you can further segment, nurture then, hopefully, convert your contacts.
There are arguments that you don’t gate your content, but Inbound demands the mighty email address so you can carry on the marketing conversation, in the absence of a sales conversation. Think of this as someone handing over a business card to you, treat it with respect and don’t abuse the privilege.
The Landing Page comprises a number of elements – The Landing Page itself (remember no other links on the page), a form (the simpler the better – First Name and email address will suffice), and a Thank You page where you download the content after filling in the form.
Premium Content
Let me first try to state what Premium Content is not:
Blogs
News Items
Price Lists
Product Brochures
Premium Content is all about content that customers will find useful and helpful and are prepared to hand over their email address to obtain. It might be a white paper, 10 top tips… etc. Webinars are a great way to engage with new customers so you can think of Webinars as premium content.
Linkedin Ads
About the only paid ads we use these days is Linkedin. The reason is simple – with Linkedin you are able to target more accurately the sorts of customers you want to attract. You can target countries, industries, interests, job title and many more, and you know that the recipient is likely to be the right type of contact. It’s also not as expensive as other methods.
The same caveats apply – you have to have content that’s worth it. If it’s just another puff piece, or company news or a new product release, it will have zero impact. This is why people complain that paid ads don’t work – it’s normally because your content is not interesting enough.