I have consulted with over 300 businesses of all shapes and sizes during my time as an Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot.  I’ve consulted websites that have lots of traffic and only want to increase conversion rates and websites that have just launched and are in desperate need of traffic and customers to stay in business.  I’ve consulted with really beautiful websites that have a hard time generating traffic and  horrendous websites that get crazy amounts of traffic.  From companies selling protein assays to leather guitar cases to Canada Goose jackets to futuristic massage chairs to online college courses, I’ve worked with a lot of different businesses.

No matter the businesses, my goals are the same:

• Help customers achieve their goals
• Help customers solve their marketing challenges
• Help customers become successful with Inbound Marketing

I want to share with you how I accomplish all of these goals, with all of these businesses, with an approach that you can start utilizing today.

Good Inbound Marketing is executed with what I call Inbound Marketing Campaigns.

The structure to an Inbound Marketing Campaign is simple:

1. Develop a targeted offer to generate new email contacts
2. Advertise the offer on your website with a Call to Action linking to a Landing Page
3. Automate a series of follow up emails using Lead Nurturing
4. Market the offer to existing customers using Email Marketing
5. Attract new visitors to the offer with blogging
6. Use social media to promote the offer and associated blog posts
7. Measure every element with analytics

Visually, the structure looks something like this:

Inbound Marketing Campaigns, when executed on a consistent basis, can seriously transform your business.  HubSpot has been executing inbound marketing campaigns for nearly 6 years.  The results?

• 40,000 new leads per month
• 2,000,000+ page views per month
• 55,000+ blog subscribers
• 7,000+ customers

Simply put, this is how you execute Inbound Marketing.

Let’s examine a HubSpot Inbound Marketing Campaign with the Guide to Internet Marketing eBook.

1.  Develop a targeted offer to generate new email contacts

The first step to developing any Inbound Marketing Campaign is a targeted offer.  The offer is a piece of content, service or incentive that entices website traffic to become a lead or customer and is the crux to online business success.   Invest your time in creating a great offer before doing anything else with inbound marketing.  This will ensure that you are giving yourself the best chance to convert site traffic before fueling  it with content marketing.

For example, HubSpot developed a targeted offer that would resonate well with our primary audience.  Our audience, at it’s very roots, desire to grow their business with internet marketing and would be interested in an eBook telling them how to do so.  The Essential Step-By-Step Guide to Internet Marketing is a great piece of content that delivers actionable information.  A perfect centerpiece for this Inbound Marketing Campaign.

 2.  Advertise Offer on Website with a Call to Action Linking to a Landing Page

The call to action button and landing page associated are two elements used to advertise the offer on your website.  The call to action button should tell your site visitors what you’re offering on your landing page.  You’re landing page should clearly describe what you are offering and why it is valuable.

HubSpot advertised the Guide to Internet Marketing on our website with the below call to action button linking to a landing pgae.  The call to action button includes a visual image of the guide with a contrasting orange button to download now.  Clicking this button sends a visitor to the landing page to download the guide.  The landing page is optimized with keywords in an attention grabbing headline, “The Essential Step-By-Step Guide To Internet Marketing” and several bullet points describing why the guide is valuable.  Both the call to action and landing page are prime examples of optimized collateral.

3.  Setup a Series of Follow Up Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead Nurturing is best described as a series of timed emails that are sent to a visitor after they have filled out the form to get your offer.  Effective lead nurturing emails are designed to get leads to convert into prospects and customers.

HubSpot realizes that a visitor downloading the Guide to Internet Marketing eBook is probably not ready to purchase a HubSpot subscription.  So we send a series of targeted emails offering other incentives like Free Inbound Marketing Assessments and Free Trial subscriptions of our software.  These emails help move leads closer to a purchase.

4.  Market Offer To Existing Customers with Email

The most logical audience to promote your new offer is to your existing contacts with email marketing.   Ultimately you will want to segment your contact lists and message each list slightly differently.  For example, you may have a list of prospects that have gone cold that you want to warm up.  Or you may have a list of trade show leads that you want to re-engage with.  You will write ad copy of the emails promoting the landing page slightly differently to each list.  Whatever your audience, keep the end goal of providing useful and relevant information to your audience.

HubSpot, for instance, sent this email to users whom have previously downloaded this guide in the past, but have not become a customer.  The new offer being promoted is a revamped edition of the original guide.  Instead of blasting every contact in their database, Hubspot only emailed users who would be most interested in downloading the updated version.  Emailing the offer to your leads to reconvert on a 2nd form on your site to provide you more information and indicate that they are ready for a sales call.

5. Attract Visitors and Leads Through Blogging

Business blogging is one of the most efficient ways of driving more traffic and (if done right) leads and sells to a website.  The continual publishing of useful, relevant, interesting, and sharable content that utilizes targeted keyword phrases will help any website rank better in search engines while harnessing more traffic.  Advertising targeted offers through call to action buttons on the blog will help turn that newly acquired traffic into leads and sales.

HubSpot runs one of the best Inbound Marketing blogs on the internet today.  The time invested in good business blogging is evident in the quality of content that is continually published on the blog.  This particular blog post below was written to attract visitors to download the new guide.  The use of “internet marketing” in the title of the blog post as well as call to action buttons on the top and bottom of the blog post encourages readers to not only gain value from the content of 25 eye-popping statistics but to also download the full guide to learn more.

5. Promote Through Social Media

It is not enough to make a new offer in the hopes that people will just find it.  The offer must be promoted on social media and niche community forums.  Each community requires different tactics to be successful, but at the core of all promotion, just being present is the first step.   Sharing targeted offers on social media helps to encourage others to share the content with their communities, creating a viral effect that drives more traffic and leads directly back to your business.    Tell the world about the new offer by promoting it on your social platforms.

HubSpot is very active on most social media platforms with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+  being the focus.

6. Measure Every Element with Analytics

Every element of an Inbound Marketing campaign can be measured and improved upon.  Here are some common areas to measure:

• Call to action – Measure click through and submission rates
• Landing Page – Measure Views to Submission to get conversion rates
• Lead Nurturing - Measure traffic, reconversions and sales generated
• Email Marketing – Measure perfromance and engagement with open rates, click through rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes and marked as spam.
• Blog – Measure page views, inbound links, keywords ranking in organic search and driving traffic and conversion assists.
• Social Media – Measure views, re-posts, comments and traffic/leads directly attributed to the social promotion.

Generating more traffic, leads and customers isn’t easy.  But as the old saying goes, anything worth achieving takes hard work, dedication and a game plan.

Follow in the steps of HubSpot and execute Inbound Marketing Campaigns as your game plan to success.