A few years ago in university, a friend of mine said something to the effect of, “if you don’t know code in a few years, you’ll basically be illiterate”.
Okay, so he wasn’t exactly right and we made fun of him for it for a while, but looking back, he wasn’t far off. Code is the language of the future – one just needs to look at the number of programming and development job openings as proof. In today’s world, a Python isn’t a snake, Java doesn’t mean your morning coffee, and it turns out C++ isn’t the unnecessarily precise grade I received on my last final exam.
Though I know the slightest amount of HTML and CSS, I know how hard it can be to keep up as a marketer. I get lost doing anything beyond formatting a blog post (and I needed a ton of help for this one). Luckily, people have noticed, and the increasing number of marketing software solutions makes it easier and easier for us marketers to do some pretty phenomenal things, all without knowing how to code.
So I put this together for people like you and me: 5 outstanding marketing campaigns you can run without a developer.
Note: I’m using Wishpond for all of the tips featured in this article (for obvious reasons!), but any good marketing software platform should allow you to do at least a few of these things. If you’d like to follow along directly, don’t hesitate to hop onto a 14-day free trial of Wishpond.
Let’s go!
Create Landing Pages
Purpose:
Collect leads and inform customers
Pretty much every brand can use a landing page for… something, whether that’s collecting tips to market a future product to, or phone numbers you can pass to your sales team. Here’s an example of a landing page I created for one of our new ebooks, The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Marketing.
Looks pretty neat, right? Guess how much coding I had to do.
None.
With Wishpond’s intuitive drag-and-drop landing page builder, it’s easy for even most code-illiterate of marketers (read: me) to put together a gorgeous landing page. Because a landing page can often be the first thing potential leads see from your brand, it’s important that it makes a good first impression.
This means it needs to do two things:
- Look good: Wishpond offers a tremendous variety of beautiful templates, which means you’ll never have trouble finding a style that meets your needs.
- Work well: All of your forms and buttons need to work as intended – you don’t want to miss potential conversions just because your “submit” button is broken.
In Wishpond’s landing page builder, you have the ability to edit your landing page for a variety of screen sizes. This means it looks great whether it’s being viewed on a phone, tablet, or computer, all without coding (often called responsive or adaptive design).
Similar to many drag-and-drop website creators like Squarespace, modern landing page builders have pulled creative vision and finished product closer together than ever before. To the absolute delight of me and millions of marketers, around the world, knowing how to code is no longer a necessity when it comes to developing a dazzling, fully-featured landing page.
Create Forms to Gather Lead Data
Purpose:
Collect information on potential customers for future marketing efforts
Whenever you create a landing page, you generally do so with some sort of goal in mind – maybe you just want the names of your leads, or perhaps you’re trying to get a better idea of your customers’ habits and preferences.
Whatever your goal is, you need to collect and store that data for future use. With your landing page editor of choice, it’s simple – and guess what? No coding necessary.
To do this, you just need to create a form. Here’s what our Ultimate Guide to Instagram Marketing form looks like in the Wishpond landing page editor:
For this eBook, our goal was to collect business information from our leads, which is why we chose to collect their business website. As you can see, all I had to do was drag and drop the fields I needed into the form.
Through some Wishpond hocus-pocus, the data corresponding to each lead is sent into a Leads Database, where individual leads can be viewed and managed. On top of this, you can track each lead’s activities, like seeing which pages they’ve viewed or converted on.
Being able to collect such specific data allows any marketer to more strategically tailor their marketing efforts to the habits and behaviours of their leads.
Create Multiple Types of Popups
Purpose:
Prompt visitors to convert
Popups – you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who loves them, but fact of the matter is they work. They draw the attention of website visitors, and can often turn a lost lead into a conversion. So, as a marketer in the digital age, it definitely doesn’t hurt to know how to put together different types of popups. There’s quite a few: click, scroll, exit, timed, entry… the list goes on.
Lucky for you and me, modern marketing suites make it easy to put great-looking popups together. Here’s what Wishpond’s popup builder looks like:
Just like the landing page editor, it’s simple to build popups just by dragging and dropping elements onto the editor. Again, there’s a multitude of templates available, so you can create popups in just a couple minutes.
When you’re ready to publish, you’ll select the type of popup you want. Here’s a quick infographic to highlight the five main types:
Just like landing pages, you can A/B test different popup variations and track the performance of each of your popups from the Wishpond dashboard.
Remember when I said there was no coding involved? Okay, I lied a little – you’ll probably notice that certain types of popups actually require you to insert code into a blog post or webpage. Luckily, all you need to do is copy and paste the code and change the link text – simple.
Here’s an example, featuring a click popup for our State of Lead Generation Industry Report. The popup is live and now I want to feature a click popup in our next blog article about lead generation. Here’s what I see once I’ve published the popup:
Like it says, I first need to copy the code from the first box into the blog post:
Now, I’ll copy the code from the second box and paste it into the location I’ve chosen within my blog post. I’ve also edited “YOUR TEXT HERE” to the include the copy I want to use for my click popup. In practice, you can jazz it up a little with CSS and HTML, but we’re going to stray away from that because we’re in a code-free zone. Here’s what it looks like (highlighted in green):
Here’s what my click popup text looks like:
And our (slightly fancier) live click popup:
Reach Out to Leads with Email Marketing Automation
Purpose:
Nurture leads into sales
Between landing pages and the different types of popups, you have several avenues through which you can collect leads for your business. So what now?
The best course of action is to nurture these leads using marketing automation.
What is marketing automation? you might be asking.
At its simplest, marketing automation is the use of software to automate actions based on activity from leads or customers. The emails you get when you sign up for a new service with a discount for an upgrade, or when you’re about to check out and balk at the cost of shipping, or when it’s time to pay for that Netflix subscription you only use to watch Friends? Marketing automation.
It’s safe to say that pretty much any email that isn’t personal, a newsletter, or someone claiming to be the wealthy king of a foreign nation is automated.
Here’s an example from an email our friends at Buffer sent me after my Buffer queue emptied:
Basically, they created a workflow to run as soon as my Buffer queue emptied. That workflow was set up with a condition that was met when my queue became empty. The fulfillment of that condition triggered an action, which in this case was the sending of this email. Sounds simple enough, right?
Marketing automation is an easy way for brands and marketers to maintain constant contact with their leads using more personalized communications. Structuring these communications around lead data you’ve gathered makes it much easier to write an email that will lead to a signup or sale.
Here’s what conditions look like within the Wishpond marketing automation tool:
As you can see, users have several condition options for leads, including being having viewed a certain page, having a particular lead property, or converting on a certain campaign, among others. These conditions can be mixed and matched on the Wishpond platform to ensure you can manage your leads with laser precision.
Next are actions – these are the events that trigger when a lead has met the workflow’s preset conditions. Here’s what actions look like:
Like conditions, workflows can trigger multiple events. A common use for multiple events is to create email drip campaigns, in which you send several emails with delays in between them.
Though most workflows are pretty simple, you can also set up marketing automation to add certain properties to your leads, run Javascript, or send internal emails – for example, you might want to send an email to your sales team when a lead has visited your pricing page, or has looked extensively at your product features.
Wishpond makes it easy to track automation metrics, like lead activity and email performance:
Email marketing automation takes a lot of the guesswork out of communicating with leads – it’s an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, and if you aren’t currently using it, chances are you’re missing out on turning a ton of leads into sales.
Run Contests
Purpose:
Engage followers, collect leads and increase awareness
With marketing software suites, it’s easy for marketers like you and I to run a ton of different types of contests and promotions. As you’re probably aware, running contests, especially on social media, can be a great way to increase social engagement and awareness within your industry.
A good landing page builder will make creating a contest simple. In Wishpond, you can create contests using a drag-and-drop editor, just like a landing page or popup. Wishpond offers more than 10 different contest types.
When running a contest, your best bet is one of our two most popular contests:
- Sweepstakes: Basically any contest with a random winner. Sweepstakes are so popular because they’re easy to set up and run – participants just need to provide the information you asked for, and they’re automatically entered to win. Because there’s not a lot of effort necessary on the part of the entrant, conversion rates are often pretty high.
- Photo contests: Photo contests are great because they help you collect user-generated content from entrants, which you can use in your future marketing efforts.
You’ve made it this far through the article, so I won’t bore you any more by explaining Wishpond’s drag-and-drop editor. Design your contest landing page like you would any other landing page, and when you’re done, press “Next” to head into the contest settings page.
Here, you’ll have a few decisions to make. Besides naming your contest, you’ll have to choose where you want to host your campaign – you can do this on a custom Wishpond subdomain, your own domain; or on Facebook or Twitter, among other options. Other options include requiring voters to log into Facebook, displaying a Facebook Share popup after entry, and choosing between different photo upload methods.
Once you’ve fixed up your contest just the way you want it, you’re good to go! Entries will appear on your landing page in a gallery for others to vote on. Here’s an example from a contest by Pet Supplies Plus:
And here’s what an individual entry looks like:
As you can see, Wishpond’s contest builder makes it easy for participants – both entrants and voters – to share entries on social media, which can be a great way to organically spread brand awareness.
If you’re running a contest, don’t miss our free Contest Rules Generator tool!
Conclusion
Phew – if you’ve made it this far, I’d like to thank you for reading! I hope you learned a few new things along the way.
If you have questions about any of the tips or Wishpond, feel free to leave a comment or reach me directly at [email protected]!
Let’s talk! Join the discussion on GrowthHackers and Inbound!