As a marketing manager, you have a lot of balls in the air and some worrisome hurdles to overcome on a daily basis. Such as… will that new campaign show positive ROI? Will your clients respond well to your design and messaging? Is this new social media platform worth investing time in, or is it a short-lived trend?

If your business is not in a highly regulated industry like healthcare, insurance, or financial services, you probably haven’t given a lot of thought to marketing campaign compliance issues. Maybe you’re in manufacturing or the tourism industry, not a hospital or bank – and your focus is on implementing the necessary campaign elements to ensure a positive experience for your customer.

For years, inbound marketing pioneer, HubSpot, revealed insightful and successful tactics that helped businesses grow while decreasing, or altogether eliminating traditional advertising from their marketing budgets. One exception has been the use of pay-per-click (PPC) and promoted social ads. As an agency, we have experienced that these types of digital ads can be an essential element of both B2C and B2B campaigns. At last week’s 2015 Inbound Conference, HubSpot representatives reiterated the benefits this type of advertising provides when implemented in a way that is measureable. In fact, 53% of customers have tried ads this year. As our team sat in the audience and listened to HubSpot co-founder, Dharmesh Shah, announce the release of the new Ads Add-On feature, we were all in agreement that this new enhancement will provide even more value for many of our clients.

Building buyer personas is one of the critical first steps to developing and implementing a lead generating marketing campaign for your business or client. Identifying your ideal customer and interviewing key individuals or groups of individuals who align with the characteristics of that ideal customer, is the spot-on way to gather information needed to create the most detailed persona outline. Individuals or groups may include current customers, prospective customers, and third party networks. Information collected that will provide valuable insight for your persona development may include both demographic and psychographic information, needs, interests, goals, challenges,pain points, social networks used, areas where the prospect interacts with others or does research online, and more.

When it comes to inbound marketing plans, kicking off a new campaign can be intimidating whether you are a rookie or a seasoned player. Change yourgame by identifying the way people learn about your company online, align your marketing goals and create the best experience for your prospects. Whether you are planning your first campaign or brushing up on inbound basics, we have 5 must-haves to plan like a pro.