The Agile Marketer’s Guide

1. Strategize Collaboratively Before Execution

Map Out Clear Goals & KPIs

Defining measurable goals and KPIs ensures every aspect of your campaign is aligned and purposeful. If you’re launching a new line of electrical connectors targeted at manufacturers, your goal may be to generate 150 quote requests within the campaign’s first 90 days. A reasonable KPI could be a 10% conversion rate for visitors on the request quote landing page.

Involve Stakeholders Early On

Bringing key players into early discussions helps you uncover helpful insights, secure buy-in and avoid misalignment down the road. For instance, your sales team may be able to share a common pain point that helps shape the campaign’s messaging. Your operations team can make sure promises made in the campaign are fully supported from that operational standpoint.

Sales organizations that prioritize alignment with marketing are nearly three times more likely to exceed new customer acquisition targets.²

Clearly Define Your Target Audience

A CRM holds a wealth of data about your existing contacts, from demographic details to behavioral insights. By analyzing this data, you can create hyper-focused audience segments that align with your campaign goals. From this data, you can also identify which audience segments are most likely to convert and drive revenue, targeting these high-value groups first. 

2. Establish Clear Processes

Centralize Project Management

Every marketing campaign involves numerous tasks, from creating assets to coordinating approvals. Keeping these tasks organized in one project management tool gives your team visibility into a project’s progress at all times, as well any action items on their plate. Pinning the campaign brief at the top of the project management tool or within task descriptions helps keep key objectives front and center.

Break Large Projects Into Manageable Chunks

Consider the development of a campaign where the focus is an industry report. Rather than creating one task for “Creating Industry Report,” break it down into subtasks like “Develop a Detailed Outline,” and “Conduct Interviews With Internal Experts.” This approach helps teams better prioritize tasks and delegate as needed to keep marketing campaign timelines moving and on track.

Streamline the Approval Process

We’ve already alluded to how collaborating with stakeholders at the outset of your marketing campaign supports a smoother approval process; but it’s also about how the process is structured. Use your project management tool to assign approval tasks with specific deadlines and automated reminders that keep everyone on track. Centralizing this feedback in one platform helps to avoid scattered emails or messaging threads that can further complicate the revision process.

3. Put Automation and AI To Work

Simplify Workflows

Automating tasks like campaign follow-ups supports consistent, timely communication with less work.

Say a B2B SaaS company is introducing a free trial of its project management software. By setting up an automated email workflow, the company can automatically trigger a follow-up email based on how a recipient interacts with the initial email:

•  If a recipient clicks on the free trial email but doesn’t sign up, they’ll receive a follow-up email a week later with a video that shows how the software streamlines workflows and saves time.
• If the recipient signs up for the free trial, they’ll instantly receive a welcome email with a getting-started guide and links to onboarding resources.

This behavior-based automation delivers a personalized user experience while enabling teams to efficiently scale their campaigns.

63% of marketing leaders use automation in their email marketing efforts.¹

Accelerate Ideation & Creation

AI-powered tools can help you generate and repurpose marketing campaign assets in less time. 
Take HubSpot’s Context Remix tool as an example. With this AI-driven tool, you can transform existing content into various formats, amplifying your campaign’s reach and effectiveness.

Consider the case of a MedTech company that created a report around top trends in medical technology helping advance patient care. Once the report is developed, they can use AI to summarize each chapter of the report into standalone, optimized blog posts. AI can also extract key statistics from the report to create an infographic and generate a series of LinkedIn posts. It’s a win-win: your team builds out a full suite of assets faster, accelerating the campaign launch while maintaining consistent messaging.

72% of marketing leaders trust AI to optimize their marketing efforts with some human oversight.³

Tap Into Insights With AI-Powered Analytics

AI tools can also help marketers efficiently analyze past campaign data to uncover insights to inform and optimize future efforts.

Let’s circle back to the connector manufacturer that released a new line of high-durability connectors. Analytics may indicate that animated ads showing connectors enduring harsh conditions had the highest click-through rate. You can use those insights to bolster the initial campaign’s performance, as well as optimize ad creative for future campaigns.

Through analytics, you can also uncover the optimal send days/times for emails and behavior patterns by segment—all of which help you map out and execute on campaigns faster, with better results.

As a client onboarding platform provider, Setuply had a vision for a first-of-its-kind conference— one that would bring together thought leaders across the onboarding community to connect, learn and innovate. They brought this vision for Onboarding World to Kuno Creative, and things took off from there.

After early Onboarding World discussions with the Setuply team, we put together a comprehensive brief to outline the campaign’s key aspects, from messaging and target audience to success metrics and a timeline of deliverables. Once approved, a series of tasks happened in tandem—landing page creation, logo designs, email segmentation lists and custom properties in their HubSpot portal to support automation—building and sustaining momentum at every step.

Over the course of several months, we developed an event-centric series of blogs, social posts and emails to deliver event communications, from guest speaker videos to key session teasers. The strategic messaging established at the outset of the campaign helped expedite these efforts, as well as the creation of paid media that further expanded the campaign’s reach.

As a result of these combined efforts, there were 315 form submissions for the event, an average conversion rate of 12.5%.

Campaign efforts didn’t stop when the registrations came in, though. Once individuals registered, they were enrolled in a series of pre-event and day-of nurturing emails to help them prepare for and take advantage of all the opportunities Setuply offered throughout Onboarding World. Planning for and automating these emails supported timely communication with attendees without last-minute legwork.

The inaugural Onboarding World event was such a success that Setuply has committed to another year, with a framework already in place to support and drive its continued growth.

SOURCES
1. https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
2. https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/trends/sales-and-marketing-alignment
3. https://business.adobe.com/resources/reports/state-of-marketing-automation.html