Ask any demand gen marketer: Executing a great marketing campaign is not easy.
Coming up with an idea, getting buy-in from your team and managers, developing core and supporting assets… this all takes time, energy, and resources that can be in short supply.
Savvy marketers squeeze out as much value as possible from every campaign. We repurpose assets, approach the core concept from different angles and points of view, and provide new types of value for our audience over time.
At SnapApp, we expand and extend our campaigns by layering in interactive experiences alongside static content, enticing our audience to keep opening our emails and engaging with our content.
We talk a lot about interactivity around here, but we also believe firmly in the power of high quality, long-form content (like eBooks and white papers). There’s a time and a place for both, and great interactive content is often born from the research and concepts developed in a long-form asset.
Today, we’ll walk you through the four steps we take to combine the power of long-form content with interactivity to expand and extend every campaign.
1. Pick a (Compelling, Actionable) Theme
When we’re cooking up campaigns at SnapApp, we make sure to align on a core theme or concept. Keeping this Big Idea in mind helps us align each element in our campaign to ensure we meet our goals.
We ask ourselves the following questions:
- What’s our goal?
- Is this an engagement campaign? Thought leadership? A product launch?
- What is the problem we’re solving for our audience?
- What value are we providing to our audience?
- What is your core asset or theme?
- Where are our CTAs going?
Whether we’re sharing a product launch, thought leadership, or a feature/benefit of the SnapApp platform, we keep the problem we’re solving front and center.
Usually, our campaigns will revolve around a piece of long-form content like a white paper, and we’ll use that content to inspire and inform interactive experiences like assessments, quizzes, and calculators.
2. Set Up Lead Capture Opportunities
The next step in our campaign design is to set ourselves up for lead generation.
To reach the widest audience and increase our conversion opportunities, we use interactive content to diversify our content and calls-to-action. This helps us make sure we grab the attention of different prospects with unique buyer personas and stages in the buyer’s journey.
Here are some broad ideas for breaking your pillar content into additional assets:
- blog posts
- SlideShare presentations
- webinars
- assessments
- quizzes
- polls
- infographics
- tweets and Facebook posts
We love including interactive content not only because it creates more conversion opportunities across the life of our campaign, but also because it allows us to capture lead data beyond the lead form. With every survey, quiz, and assessment, we’re collecting answers to questions that help us score and nurture our leads.
3. Identify Calls-to-Action
Once we have our theme and assets lined up, we start to think about promotion and calls-to-action. Like most marketers, we take two approaches: targeted promotion to our in-house list and broad promotion to reach the wider pool of potential prospects.
Our broad promotion typically involves social and paid media. Here, we’re casting a wide net and don’t necessarily know who we’re reaching, so we make our calls-to-action as specific and compelling as possible.
We’ve found that interactive calls-to-action are more compelling than action-oriented CTAs due to the natural human desire to assess, compete, compare, and share. We see much higher click through rates with an interactive call to action like “See how you stack up!” or “Test Your Knowledge!” than we do for a CTA like “Get the Report.”
3. Increase Email Touchpoints
The second way we get our content in front of our audience is through targeted promotion. A report by Circle Research found that 42% of B2B marketers believe email marketing to be their most effective lead generation tactic, making a strong case for marketers to make better use of their email database.
So we email our database regularly – but that brings up the challenge of feeding our email programs with enough high quality content. Breaking our core campaign asset into multiple interactive “snacks” helps give us plenty of fodder for email.
In the calendar above, you can see how we were able to promote our Interactive Content and the Buyer’s Journey campaign to our email database six times in ten weeks. That’s a lot of conversion opportunities!
So there you go – that’s how we do it. Borrow these techniques to extend your marketing campaign from a 2-week blast around a single core asset to a 10 to 12-week, multi-asset interactive campaign!
See it in Action: Follow the Interactive Buyers Journey
This article was originally posted on the SnapApp blog.