Launching a Digital Marketing Campaign with Hubspot & Asana

Shane Gring

01 May 2020
0 Comments

How to Use Hubspot & Asana to Launch a Digital Marketing Campaign

Building a digital marketing campaign isn’t rocket science—but it feels like it. What you need is a plan. A good one, in fact, because there’s nothing worse than watching your efforts to launch explode on ignition when you flip the switch. That’s why we’re here. Consider us your digital marketing rocket scientists. We’ve mapped out a sure fire plan to get your campaign up and running without the frustration, confusion, or lost hours spent staring into the void of your computer screen waiting for answers. 

 

Let’s set the stage. In February 2020, our client engaged us with a request to develop their first HubSpot-based campaign for their individual wellness certification product. It’s a straight-forward offering, an affordable building industry accreditation to help aspiring architects, engineers, and design professionals add a human health and wellness skill set to their resumes. 

 

Historically, the client used a patchwork of marketing software, digital tools, and spreadsheets to manage their outreach. This gave us the perfect opportunity to migrate everything to a single digital solution. Here’s how we used HubSpot and Asana to launch a digital marketing campaign that worked.

Overview

Client

Team 

Technology

For project management, Asana proved to be an effective tool to manage responsibilities day-to-day and easily adapt our schedule as deadlines or priorities shifted. 

To help you, utilize our free Asana digital marketing campaign template

1. Choose Your Audience

To manage our scope, we worked with our client to select four initial audiences:

  • Professionals
  • Students
  • Architects
  • Engineers

We first selected our most broad groups, general professionals and students. Then, after market research and early data from our clients, determine the most primed audiences for our message were architects and engineers.

2. Perform Keyword Search

Keyword research is a pivotal part of any digital marketing strategy, especially in regards to SEO and pay-per-click advertising. The primary goal of keyword research is discovering what words or phrases our target audience uses to find the product or service we wish to promote on our landing pages.

Utilizing tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest, we were able to learn a great deal about not only how our existing customers seek out our client’s products, but how new customers might potentially be introduced to them while searching for similar products.

By viewing the query performance report in Google Search Console, we were able to create a “seed list” of phrases we know customers already used to access our client’s landing pages via  search engines. Inserting some of these queries into the tools listed above uncovered a plethora of additional keyword suggestions for us to consider.

In addition to populating a list of hundreds of new keywords, these tools also provide important data to help us narrow down our list and pinpoint the best phrases:

  • Search volume
  • Level of competition
  • Average cost per click
  • Year-to-date seasonal trendline

 

Keyword research for our digital ads

Screenshot from Google Keyword Planner

We chose to limit our audience groups to about 10 to 20 keywords each. For this campaign that was the sweet spot -- making it easy to sprinkle various important phrases into our landing page copy, and won’t inflate the budget for our Google Ads. 

Generally, the best keywords to choose have decent search volume, lower competition, an affordable cost per click, and match contextually with the product and content we’re promoting. Of course, keep in mind that every single keyword cannot check every single box when it comes to the metrics above.

 

 💡 INSIGHT: Striking a Balance Between Brand and New Customers

When considering which keywords to focus on -- especially in niche industries -- it’s important to think outside the usual range of terms that your team regularly defaults to. This is because you want to capture new customers, not just people who already know about your company. Sometimes, new customers may be unfamiliar with the jargon or specialized phrases industry insiders use. As a result, it is helpful to view your company as an outsider, and imagine what a person would type into Google who does not have the vocabulary of an industry specialist.

3. Map Out the Strategy

To help our team visualize the different audience types, degrees of customer knowledge, and entry points we used Creately, a free workflow tool, to map our various user journeys.  The lessons we took away were distinguishing between “unknown” and “known” customers based on their profile in Hubspot, and then, assembling unique messaging for each. With each audience type, we built small campaigns, including targeted ads, landing pages, and tailored “why” articles to encourage them purchase, or  to sign up for the “offer”. And then, based on their interaction, we’d move them into a generalized email drip campaign to make the sale. 

Strategy for our advertising campaign

Screenshot from Creately-based workflow mapping

4. Write Copy that Resonates

With our landing pages, we took a simple, stripped down approach to the copy. Thinking of our audiences, their needs, and the space in which they lived, we crafted catchy, concise headlines and a succinct call to action. To avoid the long, drawn out pitch, we looked at their immediate needs and the product’s immediate value. After the initial headline and offer, we gave readers the opportunity to convert—before the fold—to avoid information overload. If they needed more details, we broke down six specific highlights from the product lower on the page, discussing how it met their needs, why it was a great value, what it would do for them, and more. Not enough information? That’s okay. We let the community speak for itself through strong testimonial quotes. From there, we detailed the promotional offer again and highlighted the bonus of our client offering a percentage donation of the purchase fee to a preselected charity. 

 

Digital marketing campaign landing page

Screenshot from the "General Professional" landing page. 

 

The articles we produced served a top-of-funnel function. We wanted to grab potential leads and speak to them in their language. We positioned our client as a thought leader in the wellness space, answering questions tailored to our specific audience segments. The goal wasn’t just to rank organically, but to also frame the product in a way that explained what it was, how it worked, why it was beneficial, and ways it could help. The goal of the copy was to remain conversational yet authoritative, drawing readers in with a familiar narrative and engaging them in a language they understood. The articles weren’t solely focused on the sale, but rather introducing them to the client and welcoming them into the campaign. To move them deeper into the funnel, we offered access to exclusive materials when they shared their emails. 

5. Build the Offer

In the parlance of HubSpot, our campaign was built to convert “subscribers” to “leads” to “customers”, but a secondary target is to build our email list. So in our funnel, we introduced an “offer” to move unknown customers to “subscribers” with the exchange of a valuable resource for their email.

 

Call to Action for our campaign Screen Shot 2020-05-06 at 11.48.20 AM

Screenshot of the two part pitch at the bottom of the articles, Screenshot of the "Offer" webpage

 

To achieve this, we worked with our client to repackage 7+ hours of recently exam study webinars into polished resources that were only available within the ecosystem of our campaign. With this we had our “carrot” to tailor ad messaging and provide movement within our landing pages and articles.

6. Find a Theme & Customize it

To accelerate our build, we chose to purchase templates in Hubspot’s “Asset Marketplace”. For a few bucks, we got access to  robust files that got us to about 80% and then, we adjusted styles and module locations for a finished product. Pretty simple and easy, especially if your designer has a bit of coding experience.

For our landing page, we used: Inbound Pixels 

For the blog: Awwal

And then, we bought some supplemental models to create our “offer” page.

7. Serve Email "Drip" Campaigns

All of our top of the funnel audiences drove to a generalized drip campaign. We utilized HubSpot’s email editor to assemble emails to make our “pitch” over a period of 7 to 30 days. 

  • Email 1: Provides a link to the “offer” of the free resources
  • Email 2: Outline stories fellow credential holders to demonstrate peer validation
  • Email 3: Showcase how the product creates opportunities for growth and business 
  • Email 4: Details the steps to completing the purchase process

All four of these emails were focused exclusively on conversion, presented from different angles.

Resources email - Step 1

The First "Resource" email in the drip campaign. 

 

Utilizing Hubspot’s Workflow Automation, with each email we tracked each user interaction that then dictated the next step in the process, including changing their “customer lifecycle” status in Hubspot, or determining timeframe of when the next communication would arrive (24 hours or 7 days.)

Marketing automation with Hubspot

Screenshot of click-by-click mapping within HubSpot's "Workflows" tool for the email drip campaign. 

8. Establish a Campaign Budget

Sometimes our client has an exact budget they need to stick to. But other times, there may only be a vague idea of how much to spend on each campaign and how to distribute that budget among paid channels. Luckily, we have the data and tools necessary to help choose a budget that is large enough to make an impact and reach our goals, but not so big that the campaign becomes unprofitable.

 

Choosing a Budget for Google Ads

After we added all the keywords for each audience, the Plan Overview tab of Keyword Planner outlines a suggested budget for our paid search campaign. In addition to a monthly budget ($1,100), this report provides valuable information like return on ad spend, average cost per click, and how many conversions we can expect. 

*Note: In order for the tool to accurately predict our figures, we needed an average conversion rate, as well as a value for each conversion. In this case, we were able to leverage the Conversion Report in Google Analytics to figure out the current conversion rate for existing ad campaigns. The price for our client’s product during this specific campaign is $299 -- although calculating this requires an average if you are selling products or services of variable value

Digital marketing campaign budget data

Screenshot of click-by-click mapping within HubSpot's "Workflows" tool for the email drip campaign. 

 

Choosing a Budget for Social Ads (Facebook & LinkedIn)

On the social channels we utilized, there isn’t an equivalent to the budget suggestion report provided with the Keyword Planner. Instead, the backend of these channels’ ad interfaces supplied other metrics, such as the estimated number of impressions and clicks we can expect from each ad. So by exploring different audience attributes and dollar amounts we settled on $500 per ad group, totalling in $2,000 per month

After completing all the work needed to prepare, it’s time to launch the digital marketing campaign. This task involves logging into the accounts of each website: Google Ads, Facebook and LinkedIn. Since we already have ad accounts in each of these channels, we simply created a new campaign in each. Before running gungho into the interface and creating ads all willy-nilly, our team had to ensure we had every single campaign asset planned, built out, and okayed for final approval:

  • Landing pages published and optimized for conversions
  • Copy for each ad, organized by campaign group, social/search network
  • Audience lists compiled and organized in each social and search network
  • Analytics and tracking onsite
    1. Hubspot tracking code
    2. Google Analytics
    3. Facebook Pixel
    4. LinkedIn tracking code
  • List of keywords to initiate ads in search (Google Ads only)
  • Images for each social ad, in the correct size dimensions

To keep all these assets organized, we housed each one in its own tab within a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Doing so allowed for easy identification, approval, and prevented “document fatigue.” With this spreadsheet open, we methodically chose each targeted audience, inserted the correct ad copy, and uploaded the corresponding image. Lastly, we saved everything as a draft until ready to launch.

9. Tie All Assets to a Campaign

The “Campaigns” tool in HubSpot allows you to tag related marketing assets and content, so you can easily measure the effectiveness of your collective marketing efforts. This feature allows you to see all your landing pages, blog articles, CTAs, ads, etc in one screen and display overall performance with charts. It’s proving to be a powerful tool for our client to demonstrate our effectiveness. 

Hubspot also allows you to align your chosen keywords to specific landing pages or blog posts. This means you can track how many impressions and clicks each keyword receives for the page to which it is aligned, which gives you a good idea which topics are most popular among each audience.

10. Track Performance with a Custom Dashboard

Launching a digital marketing campaign and calling it a day won’t get you very far. The most important part of any campaign is measuring performance against KPIs and goals. Otherwise, there is no way to know whether customers found our client’s product from organic search, or whether they clicked on an ad -- and if so, which one?

To track our progress, we built out a customized dashboard in Hubspot. At a glance, we are able to see exactly where we are against our goal, and which ad channels are contributing what. The most important charts we decided on for the dashboard include:

  • Analysis: a blank text-based block where we can write about interesting trends, analyse performance or call out specific metrics each week
  • Total Contacts Vs. Monthly Goal: after establishing a monthly goal, we are able to track how the last 30 days’ performance measures against it
  • Engagement Metrics: a chart that outlines bounce rate, time on site, and avg. pages organized by source, as well as by the website overall. These allow us to see how “sticky” our content is, and if customers are actually reading it or just arriving on the page and immediately leaving.
  • Social and Search Ad Performance: Trending data displaying last 30 days of impressions and clicks for Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. This allows us to easily see how each platform is performing against the others
  • Total New Contacts: Trended data to see how many users are filling out our forms, as well as the top performing pages 

Digital marketing performance dashboard - Hubspot

Screenshot of the campaigns dashboard in HubSpot. 

There You Have It, Our 10 Step Process for Launching Any Digital Marketing Campaign

 That’s the nuts and bolts of our digital marketing campaign. Check back for future updates, documentation, and performance metrics as we continue to track and expand our client’s efforts. 

 

At this point, we could probably use all kinds of cliches about “reaching the stars” or making a platform that’s “out of this world,” but we’ll spare you the word play. If you want something that works, meets your digital marketing needs, and is scalable for future efforts, then you’ve come to the right place. To help you get started, be sure to click below to access our free Asana template for Hubspot campaigns. If you have any questions, contact us. We’re here to help.

 

Next Steps: Stay Tuned!

Over the next few weeks, stay tuned for detailed documentation on the success of the campaign. We’ll be sure to include adjustments, performance metrics, and updated recommendations!

Additionally, we’ll be replicating the campaign for additional audiences (ie real estate, interior design) and will add those metrics!

 

 🛠 Download Your Free Asana Template for Hubspot Digital Marketing Campaigns

Build your own digital marketing campaign with our 40+ item project management template. Simply import it into your Asana project and follow the tasks. Even if you don't have Asana, the spreadsheet is still a great utility for keeping digital campaigns organized!

 

Download Asana Template

Let's Chat!

Interested in learning more, or working with FXN Studio?

Shane Gring

Shane Gring is a mission-based creative seeking to even the odds for future generations by building technology, bringing people together and taking action.

Subscribe for tips