How to Earn More Leads for Your Credential Program’s Digital Marketing Campaign
Shane Gring
Helping certification networks gain certainty ? with storytelling, scalable technology, and business strategy.
Building a digital marketing campaign for your certification organization isn’t rocket science—but it feels like it sometimes. What you need is a plan.
A good one, in fact, because there’s nothing worse than watching your efforts explode on the launchpad. We’ve mapped out a surefire plan to get your certification marketing campaign up and running without the frustration, confusion, or lost hours through trial and error.?
Let’s set the stage: our certification client engaged us with a request to develop their first HubSpot-based campaign for a professional credential centered on health and well-being. It’s a clearly defined offering, an affordable building industry accreditation to help aspiring architects, engineers, and design professionals add human health and wellness skills to their resumes.?
Historically, the client used a patchwork of marketing software, digital tools, and spreadsheets to manage their outreach. This allowed us to migrate everything to a unified digital solution. Using HubSpot for marketing assets and deployment, and Asana for project management, we launched a digital marketing campaign that worked.
Project Overview
Client
Our 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 your team, grab our free Asana digital marketing campaign template .
1. Choose Your Audience
To manage our scope, we worked with our certification client to analyze four initial audiences:
We first selected our most broad groups, professionals and students. Then, after market research and early data from our clients, we determined 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 the target audience uses to find the certification and credentials we want to promote on our landing pages.
Utilizing tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest , we learned a great deal about how our existing customers seek out our certification client’s services, and how new customers might be introduced to them while searching for similar offerings.
By viewing the query performance report in Google Search Console, we created a “seed list” of phrases we knew customers were already using to access our client’s landing pages via search engines. Inserting some of these queries into the tools listed above uncovered additional keyword suggestions for us to consider.
In addition to populating a list of hundreds of new keywords, these tools also provided important data to help narrow down our list and pinpoint the best phrases to target:
We limited our audience groups to between 10 and 20 keywords each. For this campaign, that was the sweet spot. It made it easy to sprinkle various phrases into our landing page copy without inflating the budget for our Google Ads.?
Generally, the best keywords to choose have a mix of the following: decent search volume, lower competition, an affordable cost per click, and they match contextually with the content you’re promoting.?
Remember that every single keyword cannot check every box when it comes to the metrics above.
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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 and how you talk about it. Sometimes, new customers may be unfamiliar with the jargon or specialized phrases certification insiders use.?
As a result, it is helpful to view your company from an outside perspective and imagine what a person would type into Google if they didn’t 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 with targeted ads, tailored messaging, and single-intent landing pages. We also created tailored “why” articles to encourage audiences to purchase or sign up for the “offer” (in this case a free study guide for the credential test). Based on their interaction, we then moved them into an email drip campaign to nurture the lead and drive them to purchase.
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 succinct calls to action.?
To avoid the long, drawn-out pitch, we looked at their immediate needs and the credential’s immediate value. After the initial headline and offer, we gave people the opportunity to convert—above the fold—to avoid an information overload. If they needed more details, we broke down specific highlights of the credential lower on the page.?
We showcased how this professional designation met their needs, why it was a great value, what it would do for them, and more. Still 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.
The articles produced served as top-of-funnel content 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 also to frame the credential in such a way that explained what it was, how it worked, and why it was beneficial.?
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The goal of the copy was to remain conversational yet authoritative, drawing readers in with a familiar narrative and engaging them in a discourse that resonated. The articles weren’t focused on the sale, but rather on introducing them to the client and welcoming them into the community for healthier buildings. 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, the campaign was built to convert “subscribers” to “leads” to “customers”, but a secondary target was building our email list. In our funnel, we introduced an “offer” to move unknown customers to “subscribers” by exchanging a valuable resource for their contact information.
To achieve this, we worked with our client to repackage 7+ hours of recent 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 purchased templates in Hubspot’s “Asset Marketplace”. For a few bucks, we got access to robust files that got our design and development to about 80% complete. Then, we adjusted styles and module locations for a finished product that was consistent with our client’s brand positioning. It was 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 tailored drip campaign. We utilized HubSpot’s email editor to assemble emails to make our “pitch” over 30 days.?
All four emails were focused exclusively on conversion and presented from different angles.
Using Hubspot’s Workflow Automation, we tracked each email and user interaction to define the next steps in the process, including changing their “customer lifecycle” status in HubSpot and determining the timeframe for when the next communication would arrive (24 hours or 7 days.)
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.
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, totaling $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:
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, and 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:
There You Have It, Our 10-Step Process for Launching Any Digital Marketing Campaign
That’s the nuts and bolts of an average digital marketing campaign in the certification industry. This approach continued to serve our clients as a strong foundation for growing their lead pipeline and generating sales. Following the launch, we continued refining the approach and improved targeting and outreach.?
Overall, we’ve executed various awareness, lead-generation, event, and purchase campaigns with over 160,000,000 ad impressions served. The path-to-purchase funnel we helped our clients build drove more than 20,000 leads through these types of conversion campaigns.
At this point, we could probably use all kinds of cliches about “reaching the stars” or making a campaign that’s “out of this world,” but we’ll spare you the wordplay.
Best wishes on the build-out of your own campaign!