This is a question most sales departments scream down the hall to their marketing brethren. “We need leads now!” is also not uncommon.
But good marketing takes time.
Have you ever had anyone rush through a story? Didn’t make much sense, did it? It’s the same thing with your marketing. There’s a narrative there, a story that’s being told to your customers and prospects. You want that story told in the best way possible. Nothing superfluous.
You see, your marketing department or agency can’t just whip something up out of thin air. They know to be effective they need an organized campaign. Something strategic rather than tactical.
Understanding Your Customer
Building a campaign around a customer type and need is the best way to start.
What does that customer want or need that you sell?
How do you solve their problem?
When you clearly define their problem and how you solve it, you can begin creating content to educate them. You also want to understand how your customers consume information.
Where are their watering holes?
What events do they attend?
Where do they hang out online?
We can get more in-depth with this, but what you’re doing here is building a buyer persona. In other words, a personification of your customer where you cover their goals, challenges, and the other points listed above.
This takes about 4 weeks. Between creating surveys and interviewing current and potential customers, then compiling the information.
Creating Your Campaign and Offer
To organize your campaign, you’ll need to establish a goal. Let’s say you want to collect leads. The easiest way to collect leads online is to create a compelling piece of content and offer it for free – like an eBook.This ebook can be on how to solve your customer’s biggest problem.
Next, you’ll want to create a landing page where your prospects have to enter their name and email address to get a copy of the ebook. Keep in mind, writing the ebook takes about 2 weeks.
Now, we have a marketing asset. But how is anyone going to find it? You have to promote it.
Promoting Your Offer
To promote your amazing piece of content, you’ll need to create some blog posts to share on social media that link to the landing page. You’re also going to need to create some social ads and some paid search ads.
But to create the blog posts, you’re going to need to do a little keyword research. So this is going to take some time as well. You’ll also have to write them. After all, you want quality craftsmanship.
This process takes about two weeks. But since you started at the same time as the ebook, you should make good time here.
You’ll also want some referral traffic, which is some exposure from other blogs and social media outlets. To get their attention, you’ll need to write social media posts and reach out to industry influencers to share your blog post. Remember, it takes time. They’re busy writing about your competition. Just continue to stay in contact.
To create social ads, you’re going to need to write those as well. And we’re going to have to create some snazzy graphics too. The same process will need to be followed for paid search ads as well. More writing. More designing.
All of this takes about 4 weeks.
Now that you’re ready to launch, here we go…
What to Expect After Launch
You’ll see a trickle here and a trickle there. It’s not instant. The platforms you’re advertising on take time to approve your ads. It also takes time to access their full audience. And you’re also waiting on the other blogs to publish the guest posts and/or backlink to your blog posts.
After launch, you’re now at week 2 and the leads are starting to roll in. Although these are top-of-the-funnel leads, the sales department is happy. They can begin nurturing directly by reaching out via email to see if the customer has any further questions.
This sounds easy enough, right? Not so fast. Let’s look at the breakdown here.
- Customer research to create buyer persona- 4 weeks
- ebook writing – 2 weeks
- Blog post and social media posts – 2 weeks
- Social ads and paid search ads – 2 weeks
- Full campaign launch on social media and search engines – 2 weeks
As you can see, there’s a ton of work involved in creating a campaign, developing an offer, and getting it off the ground. The time you take to produce quality, helpful content that solves your audience’s problem is well worth it when you start to generate more leads and sales. Keep that in mind when marketing your products/services. Rushing may produce quick content but will lead to dwindling sales.