New year, new slate, new goals.
We’re willing to bet that alongside your personal resolutions, you may be making some professional ones too. When it comes to your marketing strategy, whether you’ve recently adopted inbound marketing for your business, or have been executing it for years – inbound success should be among your top marketing goals.
Inbound marketing is here to stay, plain and simple. So let’s seize the new year, the opportunities it brings to reflect and make adjustments, and talk about how to set some legit and specific new marketing goals for your inbound marketing strategy.
Let’s do this!
Step #1: Document Your Benchmarks
First things first, let’s look at your benchmarks. It’s important to assess where you currently stand. How well are you generating awareness and leads? And how are you moving those leads through the customer value journey to becoming a customer and advocate? You will want to document:
- How much traffic you are generating to your website
- How many leads you generate monthly, and what sources are generating those leads
- The average number of sales or customers in a month
- Your conversion rates for visitor-to-lead and lead-to-customer
In order to set realistic, attainable goals, you have to know what your baseline is for these metrics. Then you will be able to accurately measure the future success of your inbound efforts. Begin with a Customer Value Journey Audit to audit and benchmark your entire marketing and sales process. For some additional tips on benchmarking, click here.
Step #2: Assess Your Business Goals
What are your overall business goals for the new year? This is an important step, so don’t rush this process! Your marketing and sales goals should align with your overall business goals. For example, your goal may be to increase sales by 10%. To accomplish this goal you could increase the number of leads your sales team receives. You could also work to increase the conversion percentage for lead-to-customer. Both inbound strategies will help your company achieve it’s goal of a 10% increase in sales. Developing your inbound strategy around defined business goals ensures that your marketing efforts are directly contributing to the overall business plan.
Step #3: Develop Your Inbound Marketing Goals
Once you have successfully defined the customer journey, assessed your benchmarks, and determined your business goals, now it’s time to set your inbound marketing goals. Based on where your business is headed this year, your marketing team can decide what your top priorities are for your inbound marketing strategy.
Not sure where to start? Here are some examples to kick off your brainstorming session:
Example 1: You determine organic leads are closing at a higher rate. You may set a goal to grow organic website traffic by 20% over the next 12 months
Example 2: Although you are generating traffic, you aren't generating as many leads as you would like. You may set a goal to increase traffic to lead conversion by 1%
Example 3: To meet your revenue goal for the year, you set a goal to generate 10% more customers
If you are looking to increase website traffic, then you’ll need to conduct keyword research and build remarkable content around those terms. If you are looking to increase the number of leads your site is generating, then you’ll need to take a look at your current lead generation opportunities on your site. Can you send more traffic to those pages? And, if you are looking to increase your customer conversion rate, do you need to develop content to support the sales process?
Your inbound marketing strategy may include very similar goals, or you may have entirely different needs. No matter where you stand, once you’ve identified your goals, you can build out your tactics to achieve your defined objectives. Just remember: having a clear direction is key. Once you have that, you have essentially created a roadmap to success!
And now we want to hear from you! What inbound marketing goals are you setting for the year? How do you think those goals will help build upon your successes? We love a new year and new goals! Comment below, and let’s discuss!
