How-To Master the HubSpot Campaigns Tool

If you're familiar with HubSpot, you're also familiar with their ability to execute professional, effective, and engaging inbound marketing campaigns.

They just get it.

In fact, they get a lot of things, which is why they developed and implemented the Campaigns tool.

By providing marketers like you and I with the ability to create and carry out a cohesive marketing campaign in an all-in-one dashboard, we can now harness the power of their secret sauce to meet and exceed our goals.

Serving as the nucleus for all of your campaign assets, the Campaigns tool not only helps marketers gauge the performance of the individual pieces of a campaign but it helps them to visualize new ways to better execute certain distribution outlets.

It's organized, it's number-based, and it's serves as a way to connect the pieces. 

Wondering why I'm still talking and not teaching? Me too. Let's get started.

How to Create a New Campaign:

To get started, select the Campaigns option from the Content drop down menu and select the "Create a new campaign" button on the top right:

From here you'll be prompted to fill out a name for the campaign, a start and end date, your projected budget, and some optional (yet highly recommended) goals:

• You'll want to select a name that is specific and easily recognizable, especially if you have multiple team members contributing to the content. 

• Be realistic with your start date and end date. Putting a frame around your efforts make it easy for you to measure the success of your campaign over the allotted period of time. 

• By including your projected budget, you will then have a number to reference back to after the campaign closes. This number will come in handy when calculating the ROI of your campaign.

• While the goals are listed as optional, there is no better way to track your success than to input some initial SMART goals. 

  • SMART = Smart, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely

  • SMART goal: Get 10,000 new visits and 100 new contacts by July 1, 2014 as a result of the new campaign content.

  • Not a SMART goal: Triple website traffic and gain a few more contacts by sometime this summer. 

When you're all set you'll be brought to your campaign dashboard which will look something like this:

This is where all of your campaign elements will live and update. You'll have access to metrics like visits, contacts, and customers for landing pages and views, CTA clicks, and CTA conversions for blog posts. Additionally, you'll notice that your goals are displayed in the top bar to make it easy to see where you stand. 

With a campaign in place, it's time to create the content. We're talking offers, blogs, landing pages, emails, calls-to-action, the whole bit. As you create each aspect of the campaign, you'll notice that under the Options tab in all of the Content tools there will be a Campaign drop-down menu:

Be sure to use this menu to select the appropriate campaign before you go live with anything.

4 Benefits of the Campaign Tool: 

All-in-One View

Above all, this tool provides users with the best visibility in terms of what they are doing and how it's performing. 

In fact, the ability to monitor everything in one dashboard makes managing a campaign or multiple campaigns easier than ever. With one click busy marketers have access to the information that they need to determine effectiveness, assign tasks, and inform efforts.

Knowing Where You Stand

Having the ability to visualize your progress in terms of the goals that you put in place serves as the perfect motivator. 

If you see your numbers are down and you campaign is coming to a close, you can adjust your efforts based off the individual performance of each piece of the campaign. Social messages aren't getting clicks? Revamp your approach.

The right adjustment to the right channel at the right time can make all the difference. 

Easy Collaboration

When it comes to carrying out an effective marketing campaign, communication is critical. This tool makes it easy to ensure that your social media marketing manager, your email marketer, and your blogger are all on the same page. 

If you're working on the campaign solo, having the ability to attach a campaign to all of your content helps with personal organization as well. 

Simplified Reporting

The campaign dashboard provides users with both high level and detailed metrics. Rather than hoping from one content tool to the next to round up the final numbers, the tool combines everything that matters most under the umbrella of the overall goals.