Marketing campaigns are strategic efforts aimed at delivering and amplifying your message to a targeted audience. Crafting the right message for the right audience involves considering multiple factors.
Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Many marketing campaigns overlook this essential step or work off assumptions. However, well-developed buyer personas are based on real data, interviews, research, and thoughtful consideration. While you may intuitively know who your target audience is, it's crucial to communicate this to your team.
When developing buyer personas, it’s important to:
- Conduct thorough research to understand who your ideal customers are.
- Who will be most positively impacted by your offerings?
- Who will be the easiest to work with?
- Who has the highest likelihood of converting to a customer and later becoming an advocate?
Creating Buyer Persona Profiles
Once you’ve identified these personas, build comprehensive profiles around them, addressing details like:
- Where do they work?
- What positions do they hold?
- What are their main pain points?
- Where do they seek help or information?
- What types of questions do they ask?
- How do they communicate and prefer to be communicated with?
Put these profiles on paper (or in digital form), complete with a profile picture, background information, and a detailed description. Make them as vivid as possible to bring the personas to life.
Ensure these profiles are easily accessible to everyone on your team, both in-house and contracted, so that all efforts align with the personas and their specific needs.
Mapping Marketing Efforts to Personas
Tailor your marketing campaigns to each persona, ensuring the message resonates with the intended audience. For example:
- A 10% off coupon might require minimal messaging and appeal broadly to all personas—this is fine.
- However, an offer to consult CEOs on bootstrapping their startup’s online presence won’t resonate with a marketing manager at an established corporation.
Likewise, tone and language matter. Phrases like “Dude” and “Crazy Cool” may be effective for selling candy bars, but they won’t appeal to business professionals seeking services.
While you may already intuitively understand the importance of persona alignment, formalizing and mapping these buyer personas ensures that your marketing always delivers the right message to the right customer type.
Buyer’s Journey
Note: The buyer's journey as a concept is rooted in traditional sales and marketing psychology, particularly consumer behavior and B2B decision-making frameworks. It draws inspiration from:
- The AIDA model (Attention → Interest → Desire → Action), developed in the late 19th century.
- The Purchase Funnel, popularized in the 1960s–70s.
- B2B buying cycle models from the 1980s and 1990s that focused on solution awareness, vendor comparison, and decision criteria.
You might be familiar with this concept as “the funnel.” At the top of the funnel, members receive broad, open-ended messaging. If they engage, they move to the middle of the funnel, where they’ve shown some interest and your marketing efforts become more targeted. If they convert in the middle, they move to the bottom of the funnel, where they’re ready to buy, and you’re ready to sell.
However, HubSpot reinvented the traditional funnel by adopting and improving upon the buyer’s journey model in the early 2010s. The Buyer’s Journey fits much better because it focuses on the actual journey customers take through your "funnel" and includes an after-service/delight stage, rather than just dropping them out the bottom.
I continue to use this version in my sales and marketing consultations because it’s linear and can easily integrate sales, marketing, and post-purchase stages. This allows me to map pipelines to each stage, offering a complete view of the marketing and sales process.
If you’ve recently taken HubSpot Inbound courses, you might not recognize this model, it isn’t the flywheel we use today. As illustrated in the diagram, the version I use is linear and incorporates sales, operations, and after-service pipelines, making it ideal for consulting on the relationship between sales and marketing. The stages in this journey include:
1. Awareness
At this stage, the buyer becomes aware of a need, question, or problem. They may not yet be able to clearly define it and are still in the problem discovery phase, so they’re not yet ready to discuss potential solutions.
2. Consideration
The buyer understands their problem and starts researching potential solutions. They’re not ready to buy and may still be unsure about which solution is best for their needs.
3. Decision
The buyer is actively searching for providers or products that can solve their chosen problem. They’re now in the decision-making phase and are considering specific options.
4. Delight
The buyer has made a purchase and is now ready to become an advocate for your product or service, often sharing their positive experience with others.
This journey can be customized to fit your specific product or service. These stages work well for most scenarios, but for certain industries—like online content creators—an “Audience Journey” might be more fitting. For example:
- Unaware: People who don’t know you exist or aren’t aware that live streaming in your niche could interest them.
- Aware/Curious: They’ve discovered you and are intrigued but haven’t yet committed.
- New Viewer: They’re watching your content for the first time, whether it’s a live stream or a VOD (video on demand).
- Loyal Viewer: They return regularly and engage with your content.
- Donor: They contribute by tipping or donating to support you.
- Subscriber: They’ve committed to a recurring paid subscription.
In this scenario, there are several points of conversion: new viewer, donor, and subscriber. The ideal “customer” isn’t necessarily solving a problem (except perhaps boredom), but is seeking entertainment. You can monetize through donations and subscriptions, and leverage your large viewer base for sponsorships. However, unlike traditional marketing, your content is the message, and your audience sees all of it—whether it's on social media or video platforms, everyone experiences the same messaging.
HubSpot’s Flywheel Model
In 2018, at the annual INBOUND conference, HubSpot revolutionized the marketing approach once again by introducing the Flywheel Model. The core idea: your past customers are your strongest advocates and growth drivers. This model centers around customer success, recognizing that long-term success comes from building strong, ongoing relationships with customers.
The Flywheel Model emphasizes:
- Customer success teams
- Customer success products, like HubSpot’s Service Hub
- Holistic organizational growth rather than just focusing on acquisition
What sets the flywheel apart is that it spins. Unlike traditional linear models, the flywheel builds momentum, with each stage feeding into the next. This cyclical process propels growth. The key stages in the flywheel are:
- Attract: Capture the attention of the right people.
- Engage: Build meaningful relationships with those people.
- Delight: Ensure the success of your customers, turning them into advocates.
At the center of the flywheel is Growth, which serves as the axis and the central anchor point that drives everything forward.
While the Flywheel Model doesn't diverge drastically from the original Buyer’s Journey, it adds a dynamic element of continuous engagement. The awareness, consideration, and decision stages from the Buyer’s Journey still exist within these flywheel stages, but the focus shifts from a linear progression to an ongoing, momentum-building cycle.
What is a Marketing Campaign?
A marketing campaign is essentially an organized effort designed to achieve a specific marketing goal. This involves defining the goal, building assets (such as content, advertisements, etc.) that align with that goal, and developing a distribution strategy to get the message in front of your target audience.
However, there’s a key element that differentiates professional marketing campaigns: analytics tracking. The process boils down to developing a hypothesis, rolling it out, tracking the results, and refining the campaign based on those insights. This cycle of testing, monitoring, and optimizing is crucial to the success of any campaign.
Campaigns vary in duration and scope:
- Some campaigns run continuously and evolve over time.
- Others may be monthly, seasonal, or even one-off events.
- Campaigns can target specific buyer personas at particular stages of their journey or can be broad and target all personas at any stage.
Ultimately, the goal of any campaign is to drive measurable results while constantly optimizing for better performance.
Building a Great Marketing Campaign
A great marketing campaign is born at the intersection of your buyer personas and the stages of the buyer’s journey. This requires careful thought and understanding. For example, if CEO Bob Smith is in the awareness stage and is realizing that he needs automated solutions to empower his sales team without increasing overhead, you don’t want to immediately sell him a solution. Instead, you want to offer him valuable content that educates and defines the issue at hand.
In Bob’s case, content like an article, video, infographic, or even a case study—designed specifically for CEOs like him—should clearly explain the challenges of “outdated sales practices” and provide insights into how companies can upgrade their sales systems. The goal here isn’t to sell, but to help Bob define his problem. This will naturally lead him toward considering solutions, but more importantly, it positions you as a trusted authority, not a pushy salesperson.
Building on the Bob Example
Because Bob is in the awareness stage, you’re not trying to sell him on a solution just yet. That would likely scare him off. Instead, you're guiding him through understanding his own challenge, which creates value for him. This makes Bob more inclined to engage with your content and perceive your company as helpful and knowledgeable.
It’s important to avoid heavy technical jargon when crafting this message. Bob is a CEO—he’s a high-level decision-maker, more focused on the big picture than on technical details. If your message is too complicated or requires too much of his time or energy, he’ll tune it out. Similarly, avoid being too informal in your tone. You don’t want to offend his intelligence or position by coming across as unprofessional.
Bob likely spends most of his day in meetings or dealing with his inbox. He probably needs a break more than he needs another sales pitch. While you can’t offer him a vacation, you can make his experience with your content easy, warm, and efficient. The key is to reduce the mental load on Bob and offer him an actionable path forward. A polite and helpful video he can watch in the background while checking his spreadsheets might be exactly what he needs. Alternatively, a clear, colorful infographic that’s easy to digest can be an excellent way to present the information without overwhelming him.
What Stages Should Your Marketing Campaign Cover?
The stages your marketing campaign covers depend on your campaign goals.
- A full-funnel campaign (also called an "end-to-end campaign") will cover every stage of the buyer’s journey. These campaigns are ideal for long-term engagement and nurturing leads through each step, from awareness to conversion and beyond.
- A targeted campaign, on the other hand, focuses on specific stages of the journey, tailoring the message to meet particular buyer persona needs. These campaigns are perfect for optimizing conversions and addressing specific pain points within a given stage.
Example:
- A full-funnel campaign might involve educational content at the awareness stage, case studies during consideration, and personalized offers for decision-making.
- A targeted campaign might focus only on the decision stage, delivering a compelling offer or incentive to persuade the prospect to convert.
What assets should you include Your Campaigns?
The assets you include in your campaign depend on your buyer personas and what mediums resonate with them. It’s essential to understand how your ideal customer consumes information to determine which content types will be most effective.
For instance:
- If your ideal customer isn’t the type to watch a video, investing significant time and resources into creating a high-quality video may not be the best choice.
- Similarly, if your audience finds infographics too simplistic or not valuable, creating detailed, visually designed infographics could be a wasted effort.
- If your target personas dislike reading long blog posts, but you focus all your energy on written content, the campaign won’t connect with your audience.
At a certain point, the value of the information you provide will matter more than the delivery medium. However, aligning the right content with the right persona is a more effective strategy and can only be achieved by truly understanding your ideal customer’s preferences and behaviors.
Aside from content-based assets (such as blog posts, videos, case studies, and infographics), other campaign components should work seamlessly together:
- Emails
- Ads
- Calls to Action (CTAs)
- Forms
- Social Media Posts
- Events
- Landing Pages
These assets should have consistent design, similar messaging, and aligned goals across the campaign to ensure a cohesive experience for your audience.
Campaign Tracking
HubSpot offers powerful campaign tracking tools that allow you to consolidate and track nearly every aspect of your campaign in one place. If you don’t have access to these features, Google Analytics can be used to set up a robust tracking system, though it requires some technical know-how.
Tracking your campaigns is crucial for understanding their impact, both in total and at the individual asset level. This helps you identify what’s working and what isn’t. The core principle of campaign management is: Monitor the hypothesis, repeat success, tweak failure.
Tracking conversions alone isn’t enough. You also need to understand how many potential customers interacted with your campaign, where they dropped off, and why. By analyzing each element of your campaign, you can make micro-adjustments to optimize performance.
A marketing campaign should be treated as a living, breathing organism. You can’t just set it and forget it. You need to use contextual and behavioral tracking to gauge effectiveness across all your assets. This data will not only help improve current campaigns but also inform the development of future ones.
Final Thoughts
Developing effective marketing campaigns becomes much easier once you have a clear understanding of your ideal customer and the journey they take from being unaware of your brand to becoming your biggest advocate. If you take any given buyer persona and map it to the stages in your buyer’s journey, the messaging often becomes self-evident.
Consider hiring a Buyer Persona Developer if you need a more refined understanding of your audience. They will rely on your insights and data to create comprehensive personas for your brand. A budget-friendly buyer persona project might leverage your existing knowledge and analytics, but a more thorough approach—while more expensive—includes interviews with stakeholders, various departments, and current or past customers.
Note: Never drag a potential customer into a buyer persona interview; this can give off the wrong impression.
You can use the standard buyer’s journey model, taking the flywheel into consideration, or develop a custom one that better suits your needs. The current models work well and are widely applicable.
Lastly, always track your efforts, aiming for as much granularity as possible. Marketing is more science than art—it’s behavioral science. The key to successful marketing campaigns is understanding who can benefit from your product, where they spend their time, how they consume information, and how to meet them in those spaces.