Here are 4 steps to create and launch digital content marketing that increase lead conversion, including a projected budget and timeline.
Every business, no matter how big or small, needs to communicate its offering and value to its intended buyer. Unless lucky enough to keep the sales pipeline full strictly from referrals and word of mouth, a marketing and sales plan is required to get customers.
Enter: digital content marketing campaigns.
Digital content marketing promotes specific "lead magnets" or "offers" that increase awareness, pique your target audience's interest, and move them forward in the decision-making process. Use the following example outline to begin mapping out your digital marketing strategy and budget.
Table of Contents
Steps to Create Digital Content Marketing Campaigns
- Identify the Purpose and Buyer's Journey Stage
- Create the Digital Marketing Assets
- Promote to Drive People to the Landing Page
- Track and Measure How Many People Convert
Budget and Timelines
1. Identify the Purpose and Buyer's Journey Stage
The first step in creating digital content is to outline where it fits into the business's growth plan and the prospect's buyer journey. Before investing time in creating anything, map out if this is a stand-alone campaign or if it should be part of a series of information that guides the buyer from awareness through consideration to decision.
- Purpose: What are the desired outcomes of investing time and resources into this digital content marketing campaign?
- Buyers' Journey Stage: Buyers flow through 3 main stages as they move through the decision-making process: each requires a slightly different type of offer and message to move the target audience forward. What stage is this offer for?
- Awareness: i.e., the sales pipeline is drying up.
- Consideration: i.e., explore various strategies for getting more sales leads (hire new salespeople, join associations, go to conferences or tradeshows, outsource lead gen, improve digital marketing, etc.)
- Decision: i.e., chose to implement digital marketing for lead generation and now need to decide how to move forward to get the work done.
- Tangible Offer
- What are you offering? (ebook, video, blog articles, newsletters, social connection, discounts, coupons, consultations, meetings, phone calls, in-person events, webinars, digital events, service, or products)
- What action do you want your target audience to take? (download, watch, read, learn, sign up, subscribe, schedule, meet, call, donate, give, join, attend, reserve, start, and buy now)
- What value will your target audience get from taking action? (learn something new, participate, engage, go, join, give, save, reduce, increase, inspire, motivate, cleanse, interact, achieve, find, improve, excel, get, help)
2. Create the Digital Content Marketing Assets
Nothing happens until the content is created! Once the purpose of the digital content is identified, the marketing team can determine how to get the information in front of the target audience.
Not all campaigns are created equal, so the investment and asset development level may vary from campaign to campaign. One landing page might warrant a thank you page and a 12-step automated email workflow; another may only require an inline thank you message.
Here is a list of the digital marketing assets required to launch a campaign that generates traffic and leads. What assets are needed to meet your campaign objectives?
The Foundation
- The Offer: The offer is what users get when they engage in the digital marketing campaign. The offer can vary greatly, from a simple consultation meeting to a more robust ebook or guide.
- Landing Page: The web page, form, or other domain link your target audience visits to learn more about your offer and take action.
- Thank You Page: The message, web page, or other domain link the users get redirected to after they take action.
- Automated Follow-Up Email: One follow-up email after the user takes action.
- Social Media Calendar: A series of posts scheduled over time to inform social followers about the offer.
- Email Marketing Calendar: A series of dedicated and inline email marketing promotions scheduled over weeks, months, or years!
- Call-to-Actions: Pop-ups and embedded CTA's on key website pages and blog articles.
Advanced
- Email Follow-Up Workflow: Automated series of X number of topically-related emails delivered after users take action.
- Sales Email Sequences: An automated sequence of customizable email templates sellers can schedule for one-to-one target prospecting.
- Co-Marketing Package: Plug-and-play digital content marketing assets for co-marketing partners to simplify and encourage co-promotion.
- Payments: Collect payments for courses, events, services, etc.
- Paid Ads: Paid ads are a whole other ball game, but if they're on the agenda, assets must be created for text and graphics.
3. Promote to Drive People to the Campaign Landing Page
The digital content assets won't get views and conversions by themselves. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as, "If you build it, he will come." In today's world of information overload, creating quality content and sharing it as far and wide as possible is more important than ever. Here are the actions you can take to get people to your content offer landing page.
The Foundation
- SEO: Optimize all assets for search engine optimization best practices
- Social Media: 5-10 posts that link directly to the offer landing page scheduled over a specified period.
- Email Marketing: 1-2 dedicated email promos and inline promotions as appropriate over a specified period.
- Calls-to-Action: Showcase the offer on various web pages, blog articles, and other appropriate content and social profiles.
Advanced
- Co-Marketing: Collaborate with a partner that shares your target audience but does not compete. Two companies promoting are better than one.
- Automated Email Workflows: X number of post-conversion emails to continue nurturing and moving buyers forward in decision-making.
- Sales Sequences: Sellers send target prospects directly to the landing page during one-to-one meetings.
- Paid Ads: Create and manage paid ad campaigns that direct people to the landing page.
4. Track and Measure How Many People Convert
The whole purpose of putting time and money into marketing is to get a return on investment. It's essential to have the capability and capacity to regularly review "the numbers" and evaluate what's working and not working and what steps to take next. If an action isn't getting results, improve it or stop doing it. If an action is getting great results, do more of it!
- Analytics: Ensure all tracking mechanisms are activated across various digital marketing assets. (Different tools have different reporting capabilities, and companies have different tracking processes.)
- Contact and Company Views: Create contact and company views of all engaged prospects for continual review or lead scoring.
- Dashboards: Create dashboards to highlight the most critical KPIs.
- Retrospectives: Schedule regular "retrospectives" to review progress and outcomes.
- Ongoing Improvement: Identify areas for improvement and adjust the course.
The Cost
Digital Content Marketing with Landing Page
Developing the campaign assets is a creative process, and no two marketing teams will do it exactly the same. On top of that, no two companies need exactly the same assets.
That said, we've been doing this for a long time, track our time meticulously, and constantly strive for greater efficiency and productivity. Based on our experience, here's a projected budget for doing the foundational aspects of digital content marketing:
Main Objectives
- Identify the Purpose and Buyer's Journey Stage
- Create the Digital Marketing Campaign Assets
- Promote to Drive People to the Campaign Landing Page
- Track and Measure How Many People Convert
Deliverables
- Landing Page: The web page, form, or other domain link your target audience visits to learn more about your offer and take action.
- Thank You Page: The message, web page, or other domain link the users get redirected to after they take action.
- Automated Follow-Up Email: One follow-up email after the user takes action.
- SEO: Optimize all assets for search engine optimization best practices
- Social Media: 5-10 posts that link directly to the offer landing page scheduled over a specified period.
- Email Marketing: 1-2 dedicated email promos and inline promotions as appropriate over a specified period.
- Calls-to-Action: Showcase the offer on various web pages, blog articles, and other appropriate content and social profiles.
- Analytics: Ensure all tracking mechanisms are activated across digital marketing assets.
- Contact and Company Views: Create contact and company views of all engaged prospects for continual review or lead scoring.
- Dashboards: Create dashboards to highlight the most critical KPIs.
- Retrospectives: Two review meetings post-launch to review progress and results.
Example Price from an outsourced marketing agency:
$6,500 - $8,500 per campaign
*NOTE: The price does NOT include the cost to develop the content offer. There is too much variation between, for example, an ebook, webinar, event, etc. Other marketing assets, such as promotional videos, also require separate consideration.
A rule of thumb is to spend as much time promoting the offer as it took to create it. The more robust a content offer is, the more time and resources should be spent trying to get it in front of the right people.
Before beginning the digital marketing campaign, consider the time and budget commitment and the outcomes required to get a positive ROI on the project.
Fundamental Digital Marketing Plan
Digital content marketing requires a framework to launch various promotional strategies. You can only do social media if you have social profiles, and you can only do email marketing if your email-sending domain is authenticated. Fun technical things must be in place to launch a new campaign successfully.
Getting the Fundamental Digital Marketing Plan underway first is important to support the engagement and outcomes of unique digital marketing campaigns.
Example: The basic marketing framework most companies should consider includes:
- Weekly email newsletters
- Two or more social posts per week
- Two or more new blog articles each month.
- Strategic planning and analytical review
- Sales and marketing technology management
- Website development
- CRM and contact data
Example price from an outsourced marketing agency:
$6,500-$12,500 per month
Companies are like people: no two are exactly the same. That means every company's plan will be unique - as it should be! Otherwise, what would differentiate one company from another?
A monthly investment of $ 6,500 or more with a savvy outsourced marketing agency can set the framework for success - they should be able to accomplish enough each month to impact outcomes positively. The most significant benefit of an agency vs. an internal hire is that, for the same price or less, an agency offers all or most of the technical skills required to run sales and marketing.
Whether you are using in internal team or outsourced partner, if you commit to consistently providing value and information to your target audience, you'll get better outcomes from specific digital marketing campaigns you want to promote.
Speed to ROI
How long will it take to get results? Realistically, a digital marketing campaign timeline looks something like this:
- Month 1: Create the campaign assets
- Month 2: Launch campaign promotion
- Month 3+: See results
To be effective, marketing teams and business leaders must map out the digital marketing campaigns they want to do in advance to ensure there is enough time to create the assets and promote them before any hard deadlines that might be in place. The off-the-cuff, "let's launch this campaign in 2 weeks!" is tough to pull off, stressful, and doesn't usually yield the best outcomes.
To drive more aggressive outcomes, you can invest in creating more than one campaign at a time to have a steady flow of campaigns that guide prospects along the buyers' journey.
How to Get Started
1. Content Audit
The first step to launching digital content marketing is to audit your current content to know what you have to work with and where the informational gaps are.
2. Content Calendar
Next, map out a content calendar and set deadlines for what digital content you want to do and when they should launch. For example, you may do Topic A in Q1: Month 1 is the awareness content, Month 2 is the consideration content, and Month 3 is the decision content.
If you wanted to move faster, you could launch all three content offers for Topic A in one month vs. spreading it over three months. The speed of launch comes down to budget and resources.
3. Build and Launch
We covered that quite extensively above!
Finding Resources to Help
If your team is already swamped, you may need to consider hiring or outsourcing to fill the gaps. Here are a few resources to help you make a good hire:
- How to Effectively Onboard a New Marketing Hire or Agency
- Qualifications to Look for When Hiring a Marketing Leader
- The Ultimate Guide to Hiring an Inbound Agency
- 7 Things to Expect from Any Outsourced Marketing Agency You Hire
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