For content marketing that hits your targets, a successful campaign requires prep to align goals, expectations and strategies. Working with a dispersed team or external support? What you do before project kick-off can extend the value that your resources can provide, not to mention save billable time for the actual campaign.
This article offers strategic guidance from start to finish to help you smoothly execute your next marketing campaign and achieve maximum results.
First, set your campaign objectives
It’s helpful to have a game plan to maximize your time with your resources. Before you even start working on deliverables, it’s a good idea to know what you hope to accomplish. We recommend:
- Defining specific goals for your content marketing or campaign
What do you hope to achieve with your campaign? Many of our clients set goals of increased brand awareness, lead generation, or thought leadership. Some tangible ways these objectives can manifest include increased website traffic, improved SEO rankings, demo requests, etc. - Set measurable KPIs
You’ll need to establish some metrics to gauge success. We suggest tracking lead volume, traffic growth, engagement rates, conversion rates, etc. HubSpot shares some of the top KPIs that B2B marketers can use to track their campaigns.
Your goals define what you want to achieve, while the KPIs provide how you’ll measure progress. By setting these objectives, you’ll ensure everyone is aligned on what success looks like.
Next up? Understanding important details about your target audience
Did you know that according to research, 74% of companies find content marketing effective in boosting lead generation? We’d bet our bottom dollar that these companies know exactly who their audience is. A successful campaign will depend on having a firm grasp of your target audience before you start strategizing and drafting copy.
There are three tools to gather information that will help your campaign and content marketing be more effective:
- Buyer personas
A buyer persona defines your ideal customers, their pain points, decision-making processes and content preferences. Use these to segment your audience to tailor content (for example, are you trying to reach decision-makers or end-users?).
- Customer journeys
Do you know how your target audience moves through their decision-making process? Where do they interact with content? You can set your campaign up for success by identifying what stage of the funnel it is activating and what conversion is expected to make it a success.
- Your campaign goals and KPIs
Define what you hope to achieve with your marketing team to help tailor the campaign strategy to meet those goals. The extra insight will strengthen your deliverables.
If you don’t have buyer personas or defined customer journeys, this is an excellent opportunity to develop these assets — your current and future campaigns will thank you! Not only will you gain clarity on your prospects, but future projects will also benefit from a deeper understanding of your buyer.
Third, use clear brand guidelines and messaging
What’s one of the most essential parts of any content marketing campaign? Messaging that is consistent with everything else your company puts into its marketing and sales materials. Reminder: Make sure your team is working from the same resources, especially if multiple versions are floating around!
- Align to your brand’s voice and tone
Editorial guidelines ensure consistent messaging across all content (e.g., is your tone formal, conversational, authoritative, etc.). This resource should define how you want your brand to be perceived (e.g., trustworthy, innovative, user-friendly, etc.).
- Use messaging to articulate your unique value proposition (UVP)
A value proposition is a clear statement explaining how a product or service solves a problem, delivers specific benefits, and is better than competitors’ offerings. Make sure your campaign reflects what makes your product unique and why customers choose you over others.
- Follow branding and visual guidelines
Use approved branding assets, including logos, fonts, and color schemes, to maintain consistency across content.
Executing campaigns that match your brand is a must. If you lack the resources mentioned above or need help getting your brand back on track, an agency partner can be a valuable partner to help you tackle this task.
Agree on communication, collaboration and workflow
Once you’ve gathered the brand materials, it’s helpful to set expectations for how you and everyone else working on it will complete the project.
- Establish responsibilities
Identify who will manage each stage and deliverable. Collaborate on a preferred communication flow, whether through regular check-ins, status meetings, Slack channel messages or other methods.
Working with an agency? We recommend familiarizing your entire team with the agency team but always dedicate one person from your team to run point on a specific project to ensure smoother communications.
- Define approval processes and feedback loops
Once you establish each person’s role, work together to create a process that works for everyone. If you use an agency, they can help you design a flow to keep your campaign on track and set expectations for how drafts will be reviewed, feedback will be given, and timelines will be adhered to.
Reminder: If your project needs to undergo a risk, compliance or legal review build this time into your plan and share any best practices or legal guides with relevant contributors.
- Enable access to collaborative tools
Get everyone on the same page with platform access, including tools you plan to use for project management, content sharing and tracking progress (e.g., Asana, Trello, Google Docs). Aligning everyone on process — and ensuring they can access what they need — goes a very long way toward helping you achieve deadlines and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Spending a little time establishing how you will communicate will contribute to a much smoother collaborative process.
Encourage successful collaboration throughout the marketing campaign
Once you get the logistical stuff out of the way, the work on the campaign (aka the fun stuff) begins! Remember, collaboration should be dynamic. Be open to providing regular feedback to optimize content. Encourage ongoing feedback and iteration. (If working with an agency, be honest about what you’re happy with and what needs improvement). Things may evolve as you progress on your campaign. It’s okay to scale and evolve content strategies; things change. At the end of the day, a successful marketing campaign thrives on trust, transparency and collaboration.
Finally, measure and monitor campaign performance
A few steps back you set your KPIs and goals — now you get to see how you’re doing! Hopefully, before you even started working on the collateral, you defined the key metrics you’re using to track the success of the content initiative. It can be helpful to set expectations for how often you will report (or expect reports) on progress (e.g., monthly or quarterly). Work with your collaborators to establish a feedback loop based on performance, enabling adjustments to strategy over time — this may have changed since you set the initial expectations.
Prepping the right way is the start of the recipe for a successful marketing campaign
Properly preparing for a marketing campaign can make all the difference between content that achieves goals or a quarter (or two) of chaos and disappointing results. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all you need to do before you even get started, a marketing agency partner can help ease the workload and offer strategic support where you need it most throughout your entire campaign.
Searching for the perfect agency partner to tackle your next campaign with? Let us know! We’re here to help.