Running a Successful Marketing Campaign in HubSpot (Part 1): Strategizing

One of the biggest benefits to using HubSpot is the ability to track your return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns.

With it, you will be able to understand whether or not the money and effort you are putting into your campaigns are generating leads and revenue. 

In this three part blog series, we will go through how you can ultimately use the HubSpot campaign tool to plan, develop, implement, and report on your next campaign. 

This article specifically focuses on planning out your next campaign and preparing the assets you will need before you get your hands dirty in HubSpot.

The steps listed below are important when creating a campaign in HubSpot because they will help make sure you have prepared everything you will need once you are ready to put it all in HubSpot. This should eliminate any timing issues, lack of resources for creating the assets you need, and also understanding how to measure overall success for the campaign. 

Step 1: Decide what the campaign is for

Before diving into HubSpot, you need to understand why you are developing this campaign and who it is for. 

While this may seem like a “duh” element to think about, many people will jump into a campaign without fully understanding this. This can lead to unnecessary campaigns that waste your budget, don’t help achieve your overall goals, and end up cluttering your portal.

To start, look at which part of the marketing funnel you want to impact with your campaign. 

Are you looking to generate leads from a specific offer, or are you looking to nurture existing leads into becoming SQLs (sales qualified leads)? 

This will also help you understand the specific persona you are trying to target with this campaign.

You will also need to look at what kind of assets will this campaign include (forms, landing pages, designed ads, etc)? 

Based on what you are offering in the campaign, there might be a lot of work that goes into developing the assets needed. More on this later.

Once you get a better idea of who this campaign is for, and what kind of campaign this will be, you are ready to start determining what the goal is.

Step 2: Set your campaign goals

In order to track the success of this campaign, you will need to think about what your goals are for the campaign. You want to make sure you are setting SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely) goals. Here are some examples from HubSpot. 

When creating your goals, you want to think again about what part of the funnel you will be impacting and which goal makes sense. Your campaign goals can be about influenced revenue and closing deals, how many new contacts you gain from the campaign, or even how many visits you are getting to the site.

Preparing these goals before getting into HubSpot will allow you to easily start tracking once you are ready to set the campaign live. However, once in HubSpot, HubSpot makes it easy to input and track your goals. More to come on this in the next article. 

Step 3: Determine the campaign assets you will need

Once you identify the goals, you want to think about what assets you’ll need to create to be able to run your campaign before developing them in HubSpot. Identifying these assets beforehand will help you determine how much time you need to prepare for this campaign. 

Your assets may include any of the following:

• Emails (one-time blasts and/or nurturing sequences)
• Blog articles
• Landing pages
• Social Media Posts
• Call to Action
• Ads
• Workflows
• Downloadable Offers

You will also need to determine how you will be getting these assets and if you need help from another team. This could mean working with design in order to create a downloadable, or a paid ads team to make sure they have the budget and appropriate ads running.

Step 4: Plan out your content

Once you have determined which assets you will be developing for your campaign, it’s time to start creating the content. 

This could mean writing a blog post, creating the content for a landing page or email, or even just writing your social posts for the campaign. 

Another thing you will want to think about is how you can use HubSpot workflows in order to automatically communicate with contacts throughout the campaign.

For workflows, you will want to think about the following:

• What is the enrollment criteria?
• How many steps will there be in the workflow?
• What is an appropriate delay time between steps?
• What is the goal of the workflow in order to track the workflow’s conversion rate.

Once you have all of our content ready to go, the next step is to get everything into HubSpot.

Running a campaign example

So, what can all this look like in real life? Let’s run through an example.

Step 1: Decide what the campaign is for

Mark’s fishing equipment company is looking to generate more leads that come into the site from their blog posts about freshwater fishing. 

He wants to develop an ebook that he can feature on relevant blog posts diving deeper into freshwater fishing for those who are looking for more information. 

This will allow Mark to generate leads from the ebook, and help identify the visitors who are interested in freshwater fishing specifically. 

The blog posts are to help answer questions that visitors might have and are more top-of-the-funnel. From there, he is looking to attract visitors looking to take the next step to learn more and download an ebook. Mark has identified that the ebook will be for more middle-of-the-funnel contacts.

Step 2: Set your campaign goals

Mark has decided that in order for this campaign to be successful, by the end of the quarter, he will need to see 50 new contacts from the ebook.

Step 3: Determine the campaign assets you will need

In order to successfully run this campaign, Mark will need the following:

• ebook on freshwater fishing
• Call-to-action developed for the ebook in order to promote it on relevant blog posts
• Landing page with a form to download the ebook
• Thank you page for after the form has been submitted
• An email autoresponder once someone downloads the ebook
• 2 weeks worth of social posts on Facebook and Twitter

Step 4: Plan out your content

Now that Mark has identified the assets he will need, he must create the content. This includes outlining and writing the ebook, developing the language he will include in the landing page and thank you page, the content for the email new leads will receive, and the social posts that will be going out. 

Once all that is complete, Mark is finally ready to make his way to HubSpot!

Now we are ready to dive into HubSpot 

In order to run a successful campaign in HubSpot, there is a lot you must do before even logging into HubSpot to make sure you have everything you need.

Once you are ready to go, our next blog will discuss how you can utilize HubSpot’s campaign tool to run and track your campaign.