by
David Kirkpatrick, Manager of Editorial Content
CHALLENGE
One of the many benefits of digital marketing is that everything is able to be tracked, and marketers are able to take as broad or narrow of a view toward the incoming data as they desire.
However, a problem can arise when all the big numbers, such as metrics for each inbound channel platform, are viewed from a high level. From up there, it can be difficult to see traction and growth for specific efforts.
Erin Wasson, Vice President of Marketing, UrbanBound, a B2B relocation management software company, realized that while the company was engaged in inbound marketing, it wasn't really "getting as much traction" as it could from its efforts.
The solution was to begin focusing on individual campaigns instead of the overall inbound channel. Wasson said the team placed emphasis on this shift by creating a new strategy for the number of leads and contacts attributed to each effort.
"The reason why we are really starting to be campaign-focused is we're getting more bang for our buck," she explained. "It's keeping our team much more focused."
Read on to learn more about the process the team at UrbanBound used to stay focused on campaigns in inbound marketing.
CAMPAIGN
This effort covers an inbound content campaign focused on relocating interns. Both Wasson and Aria Solar, Inbound Marketing Coordinator, UrbanBound, were involved in this campaign.
Step #1. Create content
Solar said the first stage of the effort was to create several different types of content, including:
The messaging for all of these different content pieces came from the team speaking with Sales to learn about UrbanBound's customer pain points and questions the sales team has been fielding.
Wasson explained the reason for all of these different types of content.
"I think everybody digests information differently," she said. "I think some people love going through e-books. Some people just want to sit down for an hour and a cup of coffee and watch a webinar. Some people want to click really fast through a SlideShare."
Step #2. Find the right social media platform for your audience
The team used automation software to track leads its website. For example, when someone downloads a guide or registers for a webinar, the team knows the path that visitor took to make that touch point.
Solar said since UrbanBound's prospects tend to be in the human resources mobility space,
LinkedIn is a more important social media platform for the team to find their audience rather than Facebook or Twitter.
UrbanBound frequently posts webinars, such as one on the "Forgotten Benefits" of relocation, and blog posts about the hiring process on its LinkedIn page.
Wasson also explained that the team tracks and is active on HR association groups on LinkedIn, and she added that they are active with both national and different regional groups.
Step #3. Promote the effort via social media
Although LinkedIn is the most important social media platform for finding its audience, UrbanBound is active on a wider range of social platforms for promoting its content and efforts.
Solar mentioned Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn among the platforms the team uses, but she added that, once again, LinkedIn relocation groups were the focus for reaching UrbanBound's HR audience. Facebook and Twitter, she added, were better for reaching UrbanBound's tech audience.
Wasson offered advice to B2B marketers to be deliberate regarding social media.
"I think it's really important, especially for B2B, to be very aware of the associations that would really like your content. So whatever industry you're in, whoever your audience is, be really active in those associations," she said.
Step #4. Get Sales involved
The team got Sales involved in each campaign from the beginning by asking about customer questions and pain points before creating all the different content pieces and using that information to inform the messaging in the content.
Once the content was created for the intern relocation campaign and after said campaign was launched, the team went back to Sales and let that team know what was available for use.
Wasson stated, "Where I've seen some marketers fail is, they write all this great content, then they forget to then push that back and disseminate it to the sales team."
She added that the team created a spreadsheet for Sales that shows all of the content for the campaign, including links to the e-book, infographics, blog posts and other content pieces.
"I think it's really having that open-minded communication between Marketing and Sales to then close the loop on it because, like I said, a lot of people will do all this work and then forget to go back and say, 'OK sales team, here's the 30 million things that we're doing,'" Wasson said.
RESULTS
By taking an inbound content marketing approach and tracking metrics across individual campaigns, the team is seeing positive results, including:
- 37% increase in blog traffic
- 35% increase in leads
- 102% increase in Marketing-qualified leads
- 66% increase in interactions (when someone reconverts and submits multiple forms)
Wasson added that working so closely with Sales to "delight" UrbanBound's customers was another positive result.
"I think a lot of the times people do all this content strictly for lead gen, but it's just as important that your customers really want all this information as well," Wasson added. "I think it's also working with your account managers to make sure, 'OK, we made all this content. You might want to send this over to some of your clients as well.'"
Solar explained that tracking everything was another major takeaway from the campaign-driven inbound approach that UrbanBound adopted.
"I've been on teams before in the past where they were putting out content, and [they] don't really know who is clicking it, don't really know what's working. You're just pushing it out in the air and hoping someone grabs on to it," she said.
Solar added that some other key takeaways from this campaign were "learning from your past campaigns and then applying that to your future ones to really get the most traction, really understanding what your buyers and customer want, and then giving them more of that."
Creative Samples
- Blog post
- E-book
- SlideShare
- LinkedIn
Source
UrbanBoundRelated Resources
Inbound Marketing: 15 tactics to help you earn attention organicallyContent Marketing: Consulting firm nets 388% more leads with 4-step strategyInbound Marketing: Content is everything in search and socialContent Marketing: Your questions on B2B online lead gen, metrics, content from SMEs and more
