March Madness & The Outline of a Championship Marketing Campaign

While 68 collegiate programs may be gearing up and going out for a win on the court this month, we’re going to give you one of our best marketing game plans that you should start implementing today if you find that your current marketing campaign is a bit lacking during crunch time, much like LeBron James.

Don’t let your marketing strategy come up short in the clutch. There’s nothing worse than an upset during the month of March out on the court, and even more so in regards to the success of your marketing strategies. A successful inbound marketing campaign requires a complete team effort.

And more often than not, it’s the most complete team cutting the net down come late March.

Let’s take a look at the key players:

The Coach

The coach is responsible for two things: the budget and the plan. Before you can even start to think about the execution of your marketing campaign, you have to first start with planning out the budget. Your budget will help determine who the “key players” in your marketing plan are, though your particular niche may also play a role in that as well.

Once you have a budget set in place, the plan can then start to come together.

This will be a complete team effort, involving the guards, forwards, and also the big man. While there may only be 5 players allowed on the basketball court, marketing fortunately allows for more than just 5 players on the court at all times. Now let’s take a look at the starting guards.

The Starting Guards

The guards on your marketing team are going to be those types of inbound marketing techniques that are going to help bring new and qualified leads to your site.

The star guard is the blog. Blogs can boost your traffic up to 55%, and 400% more indexed pages are produced just from blogging alone.

Blogs build trust, reliability, and they also help you sell your brand and product/service. A blog has got to be a major player in your championship marketing campaign, and can either make or break your whole plan.

Our other starting guard is the heart and soul of the team. Without it, the whole plan would run afoul with no purpose.

We’re talking about search engine optimization (SEO).

By identifying targeted keywords, you’ll be able to optimize your website in search engines so that people will be able to find you on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

If you don’t consider SEO, then you’re missing out on a lot of traffic. SEO is not only important in finding leads globally, but it is particularly important for finding leads locally as 20% of monthly Google searches are all for local businesses.

Our sleeper pick, or sixth-man off the bench if you will, is social media. Its importance is often overlooked, but make no mistake, it will play a significant role in any inbound marketing strategy.

Social media will not only help you build a following, but it will allow you to guide leads to your website. Having your company on Facebook and Twitter and posting regularly is sort of like drawing a path on a map to your blog or business website.

With nearly two-thirds of the United States internet users regularly checking on their social media sites, you have got to take advantage of this untapped – and free – resource.

Some substitute guards that you can swap in from time to time include:

• PPC (pay per click) campaigns
• Video marketing.

The Starting Forwards

The forwards of your championship marketing campaign are all about protecting the hard work that the guards have done. You now have people coming to your site with your blog or social media account; now it’s up to the forwards to support the reason why those leads came in the first place.

One proven way of doing this is by creating effective calls-to-action on your site. A call-to-action will tell your leads exactly what you want from them and what you expect for them to do.

A landing page has a similar purpose as a call-to-action, and the two actually often work hand in hand. Landing pages are the end result of clicking on a call-to-action. A visitor will be taken to a landing page to fill out contact information before receiving a free offer. It’s a win-win for both parties.

Landing pages are great for completing a sale or gathering lead information. This is particularly important, as your leads information can be entered into your CRM system and be used by the center to get a slam-dunk or, in marketing terms, a sale.

The Center

Every championship squad needs a big-man down low to help slam the ball home. Or in this case, convert leads into sales.

We already mentioned how CRM will play a role in your winning marketing campaign. Before you can get a slam-dunk, you need to practice well thought out lead nurturing techniques, many of which can be automated through your CRM or e-mail marketing software. E-mail marketing is another great way to further nurture leads and to then turn those leads into paying customers.

Post-Game Wrap-Up

After every game – or every few days, in this case – it’s important to sit down with the coach and look at your game play. Make full use of your analytical tools and measure the metrics, such as:

• Lead to customer stats.
• Traffic to leads stats.
• Cost per customer.
• Cost per lead.

These stats will help you vastly improve your game play and strengthen up every position on the court. Take a look at our eBook, “Free Marketing Analysis” for further tips on how to analyze your online marketing strategy and be this March’s Cinderella Story.

We’re rooting for you.

Need Help?

If developing an inbound marketing campaign is something you are interested in but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.