Book More Appointments With Booking Campaigns
How to get more sales appointments booked with lone-standing landing pages & booking links. [Full campaign strategy.]
What is a Booking Campaign?
If you are not booking sales appointments regularly, you aren’t doing your job and you aren’t going to grow businesses.
Everything you do in marketing has to point to the booking of a conversation about your offer.
A booking campaign is one focused marketing campaign that guides a target customer through a digital campaign from social media content & traffic source to a tailored landing page where the action block is an online scheduling tool that connects to your sales team’s calendars and puts the lead directly on their calendars and enacts a messaging campaign to pre-position your team for making the sale.
Here are the five steps to a booking campaign.
- Create content with the objective of driving traffic or conversion to your value offer (webinar, workshop, intro, discovery call, demo, etc.)
- Design a landing page with clear and pointed copy and a bookable calendar as the direct call to action.
- Use videos and PDF downloads as indirect calls to action to help researchers provide resources to decision makers.
- Trigger an email and text campaign to further enlighten the lead prior to the meeting.
- Deliver the value offer whether that was a webinar, workshop, intro, discovery call, or demo.
How To Drive Traffic To A Booking Campaign
Your booking campaign has to have a traffic source in order to be successful. But with all of the mediums available it can be hard to decide where to put your time and money.
There is no excuse for consistently working to drive traffic to your conversion mechanism such as a booking campaign. But we make excuses anyway. However, with marketing you can always find a way. If you think you don’t have enough money to market, then what you do have is time. If you don’t have time then chances are you have money. Ideally, we find a balance for both.
If time is the resource you have an abundance of then organic traffic from social media, SEO, and your existing email list is where you’ll focus your energy.
When you design your landing page copy use keyword researched phrases for your headlines, subheadings and body copy. This will help your booking campaigns stand as a pillar of your SEO content and get found in Google searches.
Write articles on Medium and syndicate across your blog and submit to popular publications with back links to the landing page. Share these articles on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Create video about the problem you are focusing on solving in the booking campaign and share that to your network. Post the audio to podcast platforms. Put links in the comments or in the show notes to send people back to the landing page.
Send out emails containing your articles and videos as well as a call to action to visit the landing page.
All of the above traffic resources can be amplified with ad spend. The beautiful thing about focusing on individual booking campaigns is that you can test different copy and different audiences to see which ones convert better than others. As you track the results of the individual booking campaigns you can push the highest performing campaigns to your live website navigation.
How To Measure Results
Knowing what to measure is what determines future success. Be careful not to confuse activity with productivity.
At each stage of the booking campaign there are metrics recorded by the different tools of your booking funnel.
Your traffic source records things like impressions, open-rates, clicks, conversions, etc. Your landing page when connected to Google Analytics tracks page views, bounce rates, sessions, and goal conversions. Your bookable records bookings. You record pipeline and sales.
When I look at these numbers, I take attribution with a grain of salt, which is probably counterintuitive. I don’t ignore attribution but I look at the macro first.
Cost To Reach
I look at all of the traffic sources together to compare my cost to reach over time. This lets me know that my brand is expanding. Too many CEO’s overlook brand because they want trackable conversions. (The irony is they’ll spend tens of thousands on untrackable billboards but we’ll not get into that.) But conversion money is a lot more expensive when the person clicking through has zero brand awareness or affinity.
When a person has brand affinity, the sale is much easier to make and the competition is reduced. It is possible to compete on brand when your audience is narrow. Another counter intuitive idea, but think of your online audience more like a city or region. You can be very well known in a small town. You just have to focus on a “small town” of your buyers that just so happen to be distributed across the globe. Those people may not be ready to buy, but if you have appropriately targeted people with latent needs, you’ll have plenty of pipeline when those latent needs become recognized and the problem agitated.
With reach what I care about is cost to reach improvement over the last 180 or more days. Even year over year. Is my cost to reach ratio going up or down? Or in other words, is it getting cheaper to reach more people. If there are dips, I can drill down into the dips. If there are spikes I can drill down into the spikes. But in general I know that in 30 days that things going up or things going down is too micro to make good decisions. I think of it more like the stock market. I expect ups and downs but as long as we’re trending up I’m happy.
The reason your cost to reach ratio would go down would be because your organic reach is climbing, your targeting is getting smarter and more efficient, or you’re introducing new mediums that are underpriced. It’s all a balance.
Linkedin might come at a premium but if the quality is higher then that’s good. TikTok is very underpriced right now and the reach is crazy good. Both of those mediums are good bets because they have an over abundance of eyeballs and not enough contributors. Clubhouse is the same deal but it’s free and it’s gaining crazy traction with a fast growth user base and a shortage of good room moderators. If you can be a great moderator, you can expand your reach quickly.
Click Through
The second thing I measure is traffic from source. That’s the click through rate. If I’m getting a good amount of clicks then I know my content is both on target and that the call to action is effective. Again, we want to see this trend up. I’m not too concerned about the target CTR. They vary across traffic sources and it’s less important to me where you begin then where you end up. This metric is the one most likely to vacillate early on and come to a plateau. I don’t expect CTR to climb forever. I just want to see it rise and then stabilize. If it’s trending down then I know my CTA or targeting is missing.
If my CTA is missing, then I look at the actual words of the CTA or I look back at the offer on the other end and ask whether the offer is compelling enough. This is why building new booking campaigns regularly, at least every sprint, is so important because each one stands on the web until you take it down. You’re creating more for SEO and as an ancillary benefit you are testing the highest performing campaigns. As long as they are producing a return, there is no need to stop sending paid traffic to them. But pay attention to the 80/20 rule. 80% of results will come from the top 20% of performing campaigns. Keep the gas pedal on the top 20% but when you run a new campaign make sure you give it enough gas to perform well. Compare performance in the first three weeks to the performance of other campaigns in the first three weeks. If those first three weeks look good, make some tweaks and keep it going. So long as your campaigns are providing a return, your ad spend should be increasing in alignment with the growth.
Conversion Goals
Once the clicks get through to the landing page I look at goals conversion. I trust what’s happening in my Google analytics more than I trust what’s being tracked as conversion from my traffic sources. I say this because I’ve experienced having my pixels set up incorrectly too many times and there is always a chance that you do too. If they are tracking correctly great. But just a word of caution that a lot of people don’t set it up right. So I look at the goals I’ve set up in Google analytics.
My booking site landing page will have a couple of conversion options. This is because I don’t really know who is landing on the page or what stage they are in. They could be a decision maker and ready to talk and so the bookable is there to let them schedule a time to talk. They could be an advocate that needs to get an idea of the offer before committing time to a conversation so a link to a video is a goal or even a chat. They could be a searcher who doesn’t want to talk to anyone but they do want to get an idea of the offer through a video and they need to have something to take back to their boss like a shareable pdf.
I expect that video view count and downloads of the pdf will be higher than bookings. That’s good. The more context they have before the call the better. But if bookings aren’t happening then I’m looking at two things. One might be the copy on the website. For that I’ll either add to the landing page more images and copy below the fold to provide more information. Or I will go back to my targeting and ask if my offer is aligning with the audience.
Again, the advantage of using booking campaigns in this process is that I can test audiences. After years of ideal client profile exercises, I’ve come to realize that the vast majority of people going through these exercising are starting with an assumed client. Not a tested client. And the reason is because they have to start somewhere and market research is expensive so they just go with who they think wants their service. But with this process you can do what you’re going to do anyway which is start with your assumptions and then test your marketing against different target audiences so see which perform better. Once the campaigns are published they can always gain more organic reach with the designated audience of the original campaign but with this approach you are comparing results and pushing the gas on the best performing campaigns.
Demo Conversion Rate
Demo bookings is the metric that matters and while I care about cost, what I care most about is the cost of my marketing compared to revenue. Booking by booking will show a lot of cost variance across traffic sources. I’m ok if some higher cost bookings are balanced out by lower cost bookings so long as the overall ratio of marketing to revenue is trending down or stabilizing around company growth goals.
The underlying question I’m asking is “does marketing on a whole generate revenue?” It’s macro thinking. Short term, specific lead attribution judgement calls don’t give me a broad enough view to make a good decision. It’s the sum of all the parts that make marketing work and dialing in micro attributions one variable at a time.
Long Term Benefits Of Booking Campaigns
Whether you continue to send paid traffic to your booking site landing pages or you allow them to stand alone as SEO pillars, you’ll see traffic come in and filter through your booking campaign for as long as you leave them live (which should be indefinitely).
The process of creating a booking campaign is highly repeatable. You don’t have to guess about what to post and how to get people through to a funnel. 80% of the principles will apply for a very long time.
The basic premise is you create content, drive traffic to a booking site, give them a reason to book, and give them the information they need before the event to tee up a great meeting.
You will not regret having those campaigns out there building on each other over time and gaining momentum. And truthfully it will be a hard train to slowdown.
Torlando Hakes, is the author of the book Sprint and host of such podcasts as The CTA Podcast, The PaintED Show, and No Trade Secrets. Torlando is open to meeting new friends and building a community of like-minded peers. You can jump on his calendar for a 1–1 anytime for advice, to share networks, for podcast interviews, and for help getting more bookings.
This article is syndicated from the Periodic Knowledge Base, which is a repository of articles and videos created for Marketing Agencies who are certified Periodic Agency Partners. As Agency Partners, they have a license to sell the Periodic white label booking platform to their clients helping them increase conversions through their website. Advanced features such as complex booking, dynamic forms, and automated email/text messages add to their agency tech stack and help them set themselves apart from other agencies and get better results for their clients.
Check out the Periodic Agency Partner Program at Periodic.is to set yourself apart from the competition, book more appointments for your clients, and retain them for longer.
Design a site that books with Periodic.is and Webflow.
