Blog

Inbound marketing is a holistic approach that helps prospects convert into customers through your sales and marketing channels. Inbound marketing can be scaled to make your digital channels a 24/7 salesperson who constantly brings in new prospects for your sales team and engages with existing customers. In simple terms, it is the process of helping potential customers find your company. This frequently happens before the customer is ready to make a purchase, but making contact early can turn into brand preference and leads and revenue. Inbound marketing is a strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing—content marketing, blogs, events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and more—to create brand awareness and attract new business. Whereas outbound marketing seeks out customers, inbound marketing focuses on visibility, so potential buyers come to you. Instead of “renting attention,” companies employing inbound marketing focus on new methods geared toward building awareness, developing relationships, and generating leads.

These methods make you attractive to customers because they don’t make people feel like they’re being sold. The content provided by inbound marketing is educational, entertaining, and welcomed by consumers. When done correctly, inbound marketing can return dramatically better results than traditional marketing that disrupts prospects rather than giving them an open invitation to engage. 

Inbound marketing can be a great tool for your company if used correctly.

• Attract the right prospects for your company by creating qualified leads.
• Build inbound and social media links to help drive brand growth.
• Allow prospects to find you by using search engine optimization. Use unique content that you create and share through your digital channels.
• Turn prospects into qualified leads for your sales team.
• Allow customers to communicate with you whenever and wherever they are most convenient. This will increase customer retention.
• Make your brand promise and influence customers’ future purchases based on their experiences with your company.

Prospects are empowered and consume content faster than ever before. Organizations must ensure that all channels are covered in their content marketing efforts. Prospects will visit many digital platforms to find the right information. Your company must be accessible and active on these channels to answer prospects’ questions and connect with them when and where they are most convenient. Marketing departments are shifting to inbound marketing because it gives the consumer power. To help your buyers make informed decisions, think about the following:

Inbound marketing is a strategy that aims to achieve three things for organizations.

• Attract qualified prospects to your company.
• Connect with prospects in a meaningful, scalable manner
• Treat your customers and prospects so that they become brand advocates

Tip: To learn more about the Attract and Engage stages of inbound marketing, visit the blog posts.

These three stages allow marketers and business owners to build brand loyalty and ongoing engagement with prospects and customers. You can use many tactics and tools to engage prospects and customers at these stages. Your primary goal is to guide prospects through the buyer’s journey to assist them in making the right decision to become loyal customers.

There are many companies in the world. Many of these companies have partnered with dedicated partners to help them plan and create cohesive inbound marketing campaigns that maximize their potential. These agencies can help companies achieve the marketing results that they desire.

Many companies ask us to show them comparable results from companies who worked with us before and after hiring us as their agency. We’ve decided to show you exactly what you can do with the software when used in conjunction with partnering with an agency certified to maximize your results.

THE CROSSING QUESTION:

One of our clients was not using all available tools and wasn’t using their full potential. This created gaps in their sales and marketing processes and, most importantly, in reporting analytics to determine which campaigns were most successful. They specifically needed assistance from the agency in these areas:

– Increasing organic search volume for keywords that are important to their business

– Optimizing website conversions to increase sales qualified leads

– Improving sales reporting to ensure that the right people in the team have accurate reporting on sales performance

– Ensuring that sales and marketing communicate effectively to share success stories and learn from each other about all aspects of sales and marketing

The INBOUND METHODOLOGY & IMPLEMENTATION PLAN:

Our team performed a HubSpot audit of the company’s digital marketing strategy. We used HubSpot tools and their inbound results to find short- and long-term opportunities. Although this company already used HubSpot, there are many ways to improve the ROI. We made these recommendations and implemented them.

• Optimized search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization.
• Our team performed a thorough analysis of the organization’s search engine optimization. This included page-level recommendations for targeted keywords, page titles and meta descriptions, content, and page-level improvements to navigation. We also developed a conversion rate optimization strategy to improve the conversion of website visitors to qualified leads for the sales team.
• – 63% Increase in Website Sessions
• – 133% Increase in Leads
• We have moved external landing pages hosted by WordPress to HubSpot.
• We provide detailed information about landing pages, including new contact rates, conversion rates, source traffic, and overall trends. This information will help you make better marketing decisions.
  • More than 12,700 landing pages were viewed. As a result, email promotion, social media promotion and link/CTA positioning throughout the website and blogs.
  • More than 1,350 submissions
  • More than 550 new contacts
  • 161% increase in contacts from organic traffic alone
• 10.75% submission rate from landing page view
  • Note: This data was not available in WordPress. It was an issue when assessing landing page performance. HubSpot now provides transparency to help determine which pages are generating the most ROI and those that require improvement.
• To re-engage contacts, we will be using a batch email strategy.
• Although this company created great content such as white papers, checklists, and catalogs, they didn’t promote it to their audience. You can lose your subscribers if you don’t communicate with them by email. They may forget they signed up and then move on to another company. Engaging with your existing contacts will help you re-engage prospects and make them potential new prospects in your pipeline. It doesn’t mean that someone is not qualified just because they entered your funnel last year. You may have the opportunity to re-engage them at the right time. Make use of the tools you have to do this.
  • More than 350 landing pages were submitted via email (300 contacts already in place and 50 new contacts).
  • 33% more in new contacts via email
• In 12 months, over 2,600 contacts engaged with emails again. This was a significant increase from the number of contacts who had never engaged in email. This was possible by integrating Seventh Sense into HubSpot, a HubSpot integration that leverages AI to personalize email send times.
• To increase sales qualified leads, we implemented progressive and dependent forms:
• If you use a static form, you will see the same fields with the same form fields every time the form loads. If the contact who fills out your form is already registered, you can use the progressive field to add another field. This makes it easier to collect more information for your sales team. You can display additional fields based upon the responses of your contacts to a previous field using dependent form functionality.

 

Inbound marketing is not a one-off campaign. Inbound marketing requires a comprehensive strategy. This strategy should include content marketing, lead generation and prospect conversion. This comprehensive strategy will help you attract the right people to your digital channels and make them engaged customers. Inbound marketing is best done by identifying your target audience and the decision-making process they follow.

What are you trying to reach with your marketing efforts to reach? The first step to developing an inbound marketing strategy is to define your buyer personas. Based on data from your customer base and internal market research, buyer personas are your ideal customers. Creating buyer personas gives you and your organization a lot of insight. Creating buyer personas can target your sales and marketing strategies to the right prospect. You can also help identify your ideal customer and un-qualify those who do not fit your persona profile. Your sales team can focus on your ideal customer, guide product and service improvements, and align marketing, sales, customer service, and sales. It is important to attract the right people to your digital channels. Convert them into qualified leads and make them loyal customers who will help grow your business.

Six Factors to Consider when Building Buyer Personas

1. Determine the job title or role of your target persona. This will help you to understand their company and position.
2. Think about how they measure success in their job. How can you help them get there?
3. Consider the industries in which your product or services are most relevant.
4. Identify the most important challenges and pain points that this person faces in their job. How can you help them save time, money, and resources? Your product or service must always solve a problem.
5. Find out how people search for information about your product or service. Your marketing efforts will be centered if you can identify where they are searching for information. This will help you stay in front of your target audience no matter where they are in their research process.
6. Take into account the targeted buyer’s demographics. These include education, background, location, career path, goals, etc.

Practical Application:

To ensure that their content reached the right audience, a professional services company needed to identify its personas. Their content might have been too broad without a target persona. This could have resulted in unqualified prospects or unnecessary sales conversations with people who will not convert into customers. We analyzed the top ten clients they had over the past five years to determine their target buyer profile. This allowed them to identify the industries in which they had the greatest success and the most interested people in their offerings. Their target audience was:

• Mid-sized business owners: They are aware of the internal challenges they face with training, development and hiring but don’t have the time or resources to devote to these tasks because they run the day-to-day business.
• The VP of Human Resources for an enterprise or mid-sized company: This person is responsible for overall strategy and hiring processes and needs outside perspectives to help them build a comprehensive learning program. They turn to professional services firms to help with ongoing initiatives and strategic projects.

These personas were identified and targeted to help with content development. This also allows for alignment between sales and marketing to create a comprehensive marketing plan. This allows you to make sure that your content is relevant to your buyer’s journey and helpful to them. Persona development is the most important part of an inbound marketing plan. This will allow you to strategize how your marketing plan should target your ideal prospects.

Your buyer personas are the first step to developing an inbound marketing strategy. Once you’ve identified your buyer personas, it is important to understand how your buyers evaluate, assess, and consider your product or services. This is known as the Decision-Making Journey (or the Buyer’s Journey). This journey is the same across all industries for B2B and B2C organizations.

The stages of the Decision-Making/Buyer’s Journey process are:

Awareness: The buyer recognizes that they have a problem. The buyer decides if this particular problem should be prioritized and if they should keep searching for a solution. Strategically utilizing keywords and optimizing your online presence will have a tremendous impact at this stage. And the content you are putting out should be problem-focused—not a sales-y pitch about your product or service. Create blog posts, ebooks, white papers and editorials that outline the problem that your prospective customers are experiencing. This content should be strictly educational. If one or more of these content pieces creates an “a-ha!” moment for these buyers, they are much more likely to continue their buyer’s journey with you in mind. Ask the following questions to get a better understanding of what your prospects are experiencing during this process:

• What are buyers using to describe their particular goal or challenge? And why do they believe they need to resolve this problem?
• What are the consequences of inaction? This can help you plan how your content will answer these questions. It can also give insight into the consequences of inaction. They are still trying to decide if the problem is worth their time and resources.
• How can your buyers decide which goal or challenge is most important?

Consideration:

The buyer defines the problem clearly and begins to evaluate options to resolve it. These are some questions you can ask to understand your buyers’ journey.

• Which solutions will your buyers start looking for?
• How are your buyers learning? Where will they find information?
• How will your buyers evaluate each category’s pros and cons?

Decision:

The buyer narrows down the options and then moves to the evaluation and selection phase. These questions can help you understand your buyers’ feelings during this phase.

• Which criteria do your buyers use when they reach this stage?
• How competitive are buyers comparing your offer?
• Who should be involved in the final decision-making process?
• Which other types of products and services do buyers look for in making final selections, such as ongoing training and onboarding plans or the implementation process?

Based on my experience, the following numbers can determine how many competitors are at each stage. The most likely buyer:

• Evaluating Up to 10 Solutions as Part of the Awareness Stage
• Reducing it to 5 – 6, as part of the Consideration Step
• Focus on 2 to 4 as part of the Decision Stage

You can see that defining your buyer personas (target audiences) and understanding the buyer’s journey is key to your inbound marketing strategy. Your inbound marketing program will be based on defining your audience and understanding their journey.

Inbound marketing is essential today. Digital Market doesn’t even begin to cover the topic. Because of the complexity and sophistication of client behaviour across different platforms and networks, Inbound Marketing is the only way to provide the best possible support for clients and achieve the desired return on investment.

Inbound Marketing helps businesses save more than $14 per client, according to a study by Invesp. Inbound marketing is also proven to have positive results for 41% of experts in marketing. 82% of them believe that Inbound marketing positively impacts their marketing strategies.

It is important to establish goals throughout the inbound market process. However, they must be smart goals that allow us to move forward. You can still learn the SMART methodology, but it is very helpful.

What are SMART goals?

Smart Goals must meet 5 criteria.

• Specific: Answer specific questions such as what, how and when. When defining them, you must be specific and concrete.
• Measurable We can quantify our goals and the benefits and then analyze and compare the results to determine whether we succeeded or failed.
• Attainable Don’t waste time on unattainable goals or impossible targets, even if they are important to you. It is important to see the truth of the situation. This will allow you to avoid frustration and failure. It would be best if you continued to grow, not at once.
• Relevant Your company’s goals should have an actual and significant impact.
• Time-related: Goals should be accomplished within a set timeframe, have a time frame for realization, and be in the desired scenario. Scheduling is crucial for project success.

The SMART philosophy can be applied to inbound market goals and will help us expand the actions and routes that we can take to reach our goal. These inbound marketing strategies will help you achieve the smart goals for your project.

Key goals of the Inbound Marketing Strategy

Attracting web traffic

Your web design must be well thought out to grab the attention of potential clients. Next, you need to interact with them via forms, CTAs and other acquisition methods. For visitors to become leads, they need to be able to navigate your site with ease and have the right content.

Traffic alone does not generate business. It’s important to draw the right people so that we can provide the product or service they require. Inbound Marketing offers these techniques to help you achieve your goals:

• Define the Buyer Personality: The BP represents the ideal customer for a company or a product/service. First, analyze and identify your users’ behavioural patterns and profiles to determine what they are interested in you. This guide will show you step-by-step how to create a Buyer Persona.
• Create content Quality, unique; informative content is key to attracting future clients. It is important to remember that your content should be targeted at your Buyer Persona. There are many formats for content: ebooks, blogs, webinars and video tutorials.
• SEO Techniques – To get traffic, web positioning is essential. We must learn SEO writing and how to use long-tail keywords. Also, we need to improve link building techniques to increase our domain authority and increase the number of backlinks.
• Social media: By sharing content on social networks that we know our target audience, we can create engagement, develop a community and increase our visibility to the users who are most interested in us. We must be cautious when choosing which networks we should strengthen or ignore based on the trends and profiles of each network.

 

It doesn’t matter if you view it from the perspective of business or personal life; setting goals is crucial. Your ultimate measure of success will be your goal setting. It will allow you to determine if your actions contribute to your long-term vision.

The goal-setting process is important, but it can also cause confusion or be done incorrectly. We have seen that even high-functioning people can confuse the goal-setting process when working with companies to create and implement strategic plans.

Steps 1 and 2 are not part of the goal-setting process, but they should be considered before you begin creating your goals. Here’s a 9-step checklist to help you set SMART goals.

A clear vision of the future

While it is not part of the goal-setting process, it is an important step you should consider. While goal setting is often neglected, creating a vision for your future is crucial to achieving your goals. Your goals will be your indicator to determine whether you are moving closer to your goal or not.

The vision of the future should always be visible to all. The vision should be displayed in your office or at home to remind you daily of the direction you are trying to go.

These videos will help you learn more about developing a vision.

• • Start the Vision Planning Process
  • How to Create a Vision For Your Organization

Prioritize.

After you have your vision for the future, it is time to prioritize. While prioritization is not an integral part of goal setting, it is a crucial step that must be done first. This step will allow you to choose three or four areas you wish to concentrate on. These focus areas can be vague, but we’ll soon get to the details. These examples apply to both personal and business life.

Business Personal

1. Revenue 1. Exercise

2. Culture 2. Diet

3. Delivery of Service 3. Family

Once you have identified your priorities, you can start setting your goals. You should make sure you have space for at least 4 to 5 goals for each priority. You risk becoming too focused on too many goals.

Download our goal setting guide & worksheet:

Download our Goal Setting Guide and Worksheet

These 5 steps will assist you in achieving your goals.

Be specific.

Your people and you won’t be able to make a concerted effort to achieve your goals if they are vague and unclear. They will also be susceptible to interpretation. Asking questions such as “Who is involved?” will help you make your goals more specific. What resources are available? What is the timeline? “, “What is the timeline? “, “Why is it a goal?” “Why is this a goal?” and so forth.

Make them quantifiable.

This step is where you need to establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which are measurable values that help you track your progress towards your goals. You are making it easy for yourself and your team to see what success (and failure) looks like by quantifying your goals. By the end of the defined term, it should be clear if the goal was met. Attach numbers, dates and percentages to your goals. They will become quantifiable if you attach numbers, dates, percentages, dollars, etc.

For creating measurable goals, you should consider both leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are predictive measures that tell you how you will achieve a goal. Lagging indicators measure the final output. A leading indicator might be the number of staff who wear a mask. A lagging indicator could indicate the number of COVID-19 cases. Keep your indicators in mind when creating your goals. You want to have a mixture of leading and lagging.

Make them possible.

Achievable goals are often used interchangeably with “attainable” because they give your people a realistic chance to achieve them. At the same time, achievable goals should motivate you and your team to achieve your goals. However, they shouldn’t be so far away that people don’t want to attempt them. There should be clear steps to reach that goal.

Social media.

Slowly, it began to creep into our lives. It became the centre of our lives.

Social media revolutionized marketing, and businesses reacted.

A well-executed social strategy can reap endless benefits.

Some of the benefits of a great social media strategy:

• Brand awareness has increased
• Increase your audience
• Better connections with your audience
• Traffic to websites has increased
• Get more leads
• Increase your sales and make more money

Social media is a crucial component of any marketing campaign.

Take a look at these eye-opening statistics from social media:

• Facebook receives approximately 4.4 million+ visitors per month.
• Pinterest? It is home to more than 454 million users.
• Instagram has 500 million+ active accounts every day.

This is a huge pond that you can fish in for your target audience. A marketing strategy that does not include social media marketing is incomplete.

Keep reading if you want to kickstart your social media strategy.

We are taking a deep look at the most cutting-edge strategies available.

Table of Contents

Describe your goals and objectives you want to get your social media strategy off the ground, and it is important to have a plan, objectives, goals, and a clear plan.

How can you achieve your goals if you don’t know the answer?

Without strong goals, you can’t evolve or measure your strategies over time.

Your overall marketing goals should be aligned with your social media goals.

If you want to achieve your goals, it is important to write them down.

A study found that you are 30% more likely to succeed if your goals are written down. Some studies show that this number can reach as high as 40%.

Set your goals and make them achievable. Then break them down into smaller steps.

Setting achievable goals for your social media marketing strategy is easy:

• Use numbers (e.g. reach 5K Instagram followers).
• Always set a deadline
• Make sure you are specific.
• Your entire marketing strategy should align with your goals.

Want more help in achieving your goals? Christine’s goal-setting post is available here at Blogging Wizard.

1. Learn about your audience by conducting research

If you want to make a profit in marketing today, you must connect with your audience.

However, understanding your audience inside and outside is key to success.

If you want to create a successful social media strategy, you should be able to pinpoint your customers’ needs, wants and desires.

How do you better understand your audience?

• Take a survey of your audience to understand their pain points better
• Could you pay attention to their demographics?
• Participate in discussions on forums that are populated with your target audience
• Comment on blogs that have the same target audience as yours and respond to their comments
• All comments and questions you receive through your social media channels will be answered
• Use one of the many user-feedback tools to collect feedback

You will be better equipped to assist your target audience once you have a sense of who they are. They are looking for businesses that care, not just faceless companies.

This is why it is a crucial step in any social media strategy.

 

Inbound can be a great tool for your business. If all your departments are aligned around inbound, including sales, marketing, and customer services, prospects and customers can have a seamless, consistent, integrated experience. Happy customers drive your business’ success. Referrals are an important part of any B2B business. Inbound marketing doesn’t change this. However, it provides your customers with content to share with their networks to promote your company and your services. B2C organizations are likely to have a lot of referral business online. Your customers will share your brand’s memorable experiences with friends and family by sharing it. This can help you grow your business.

It is important to remember that attracting leads no longer falls on the shoulders of the marketing department. Similarly, engaging in the sales process does not fall under the purview of the sales team. To build a lasting relationship between prospects and customers, both teams must work together. These roles will continue to overlap as there are many ways that people can interact with your company offline and online. Inbound is a method that combines marketing, sales and customer service to create a seamless brand experience for every interaction with customers and prospects. You will build trust and credibility with your company through this engagement.

What’s the goal of Inbound Marketing?

Marketing used to be straightforward. Marketing was about getting your message across to as many people as possible. The times have changed. Today, your goal is to get your message in front of your target audience. Your potential customer is not the entire world. Everyone is not going to be interested in your product or service. To make your marketing campaigns highly effective and yield the best return on your investment, you must target your messages and marketing programs appropriately. Marketers using inbound marketing should aim to:

• Attract qualified prospects to your company
• Connect with prospects in a meaningful, scalable manner
• Treat your customers and prospects so that they become brand advocates

Although inbound marketing can be a daunting task, it is not impossible. All you need to build this long-term strategy is a systematic and strategic approach. We will discuss each component of the inbound marketing strategy in greater detail. It is key to understanding how each marketing channel works together to create a customer and prospect experience ecosystem that grows on itself. This will lead to exponential growth over time. It’s not about having an SEO strategy or content strategy. But it is about thinking about how all these things can be connected to get the best results. Please keep checking our next blog for details on Attract and Engage and Delight.

Are you looking for ways to develop or optimize your inbound marketing strategy? The book ” Mastering Inbound Marketing: Your Complete Guide to Building a Results-Driven Inbound Strategy ,” written by Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner & Founder of Prism Global Marketing Solutions, covers every aspect of the inbound marketing methodology, including the revenue generation trifecta of marketing, sales, and the customer experience. 

THE CHALLENGE: A premium corporate gifting company has been using HubSpot for four years. Although they were using certain tools within HubSpot, they weren’t using the full range of tools available and were not making use of their full potential. This created gaps in their sales and marketing processes and, most importantly, in reporting analytics to determine which campaigns were most successful. They specifically needed help in the following areas from our agency:

– Increasing organic search volume for keywords that are important to their business

– Optimizing website conversions to increase sales qualified leads

– Improved sales reporting to ensure that the correct members of the team have accurate reporting on sales performance

– Ensuring that sales and marketing communicate effectively to share success stories and learn from each other about all aspects of sales and marketing

The INBOUND METHODOLOGY – PLAN & IMPLEMENTATION

Our team performed a HubSpot audit of the company’s digital marketing strategy. We used HubSpot tools and their inbound results to find short- and long-term opportunities. Although this company already used HubSpot, there are many ways to improve the ROI. We made these recommendations and implemented them.

• Optimized search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization.
• Our team performed a thorough analysis of the organization’s search engine optimization. This included page-level recommendations for targeted keywords, page titles and meta descriptions, content, and page-level improvements to navigation. We also developed a conversion rate optimization strategy to improve the conversion of website visitors to qualified leads for the sales team.
• – 63% Increase in Website Sessions
• – 133% Increase in Leads
• HubSpot has moved external landing pages hosted by WordPress to HubSpot.
• HubSpot provides detailed information about landing pages, such as new contact rates, conversion rates, source traffic, and overall trends. This information will help you make better marketing decisions.
  • More than 12,700 landing pages were viewed. As a result, email promotion, search engine optimization and link/CTA placement on the website and blog.
  • More than 1,350 submissions
  • More than 550 new contacts
  • 161% in new contacts from organic traffic alone
• 10.75% submission rate from landing page view
  • Note: This data was not available in WordPress. It was an issue when assessing landing page performance. HubSpot now provides transparency to help determine which pages are generating the most ROI and those that require improvement.
• To re-engage contacts, we will be using a batch email strategy.
• Although this company created great content such as white papers, checklists, and catalogues, they didn’t promote it to their audience. You can lose your subscribers if you don’t communicate with them by email. They may forget they signed up and then move on to another company. Engaging with your existing contacts will help you re-engage prospects and make them potential new prospects in your pipeline. It doesn’t mean that someone is not qualified just because they entered your funnel last year. You may have the opportunity to re-engage them at the right time. Make use of the tools you have to do this.
  • More than 350 landing pages were submitted via email (300 contacts already in place and 50 new contacts).
  • 33% more in new contacts via email
  • In 12 months, over 2,600 contacts engaged with emails again. This was a significant increase from the number of contacts who had never engaged in email. This was possible by integrating Seventh Sense into HubSpot, a HubSpot integration that uses AI to personalize email sending times. 

 

Inbound marketing is not about marketing your company for marketing’s sake. It is much more than that. It’s all about generating qualified leads for your sales team to increase revenue and customer growth. To measure how your inbound marketing strategy performs against your goals, you need to assess it continuously. You must identify your goals and the timeframe you will need to achieve them to ensure that your inbound marketing strategy is successful.

Measurable Inbound Marketing Goals

Measurement should be at the center of your inbound marketing goals. From setting your initial benchmark scores to figuring out your goals, measuring them is the only way you’ll know whether you’re on track.

Are you aiming to see an increase in overall web traffic? Are you looking for an increase in conversations with the people you’re already getting to your site? These are the things you should think about and focus your measurement on.

Also, when we say measurement, we mean consistent, ongoing measurement. This isn’t something you start and then six months later come back to. You need to be constantly measuring your performance. Identify what is going well so you can replicate it or see what isn’t working to either fix it or stop wasting time and resources on a bum tactic.

Begin by defining the marketing goals that your team would like to achieve in a given time frame. Your marketing objectives can be described as numbers or metrics that help you achieve your goal. You should set marketing goals that are specific and objective. This will ensure that the metric measures your performance. After you have identified the metrics you want to reach, it is important to be precise about how you will achieve them by setting micro-goals.

How To Set Inbound Goals

Your inbound goals must be SMART. This stands for Specific, Measurable. Attainable. Relevant. Time-bound. What does SMART mean for you?

• Select: You can choose specific metrics to improve, such as website traffic, subscribers, marketing qualified leads or customers.
• Measurable Set goals such as increasing visitors, subscribers or leads by a certain percentage over a specified period.
• Reachable: Make sure your goals are achievable. You can look at your previous numbers to see if your goal is realistic, but it will still take a shift in sales and marketing to achieve that goal.
• Relevant You need your marketing goals to align with the overall business goals of your company. If your goal is to increase revenue, align your marketing goals to help you capture more qualified leads for your sales team. This is where sales and marketing alignment intersect.
• Time-bound Establish a deadline to meet your metrics. To better understand your progress toward your goal, start by analyzing monthly metrics. Once you are clear about your baseline and areas for improvement, you can move on to larger quarterly or annual goals.

Practical Application

An initial increase of 8% in monthly leads for a professional services company was noticed. Their contacts were more likely to share their content and contact the firm for a consultation. Their SMART goal was to increase their leads by 10% -12% in three months. They did this by creating top-of-the-funnel content and new conversions on the website. This goal is a good example of a specific, measurable and achievable, relevant, time-bound, and attainable goal.

Inbound marketing goals are important to help you identify your desired outcomes and the timeframe you need to see them. You must ensure that you leverage SMART goals to ensure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.