Time after time when I meet with prospective clients, or I'm doing a free Inbound Marketing assessment, I see lead generation programs executed more as a random, adhoc process, rather than a planned and aligned process aimed at achieving the greater business goals.
When I ask this prospect why they haven't set quality marketing goals, or why they dont even have a plan, they often reply saying they just haven't got he the time, or marketing has never had the proper focus, or importance within their organization.
That's why whenever we start an Inbound Marketing engagement with a new client, the first thing we do is reaffirm business SMART goals, strategies and objectives.
And of course we ask lots of questions. How do you decide on your marketing strategy. What marketing tactics does that translate into? Do you measure and track marketing results? How do you know if marketing is working and if marketing is helping to grow your business?
Only then when we have your goal setting agreed to and set can we align marketing tactics to each goal.
Here are some other typical questions to help you get started with determining your business marketing goals.
- What is your revenue target for the next 12 months?
- What is the average revenue target per month?
- What is the average dollar spend per customer?
- How many customers do you need per month, to achieve your monthly revenue target?
- How many leads equal one customer?
- How many leads do you need per month?
- How many website visitors do you need to achieve your lead goals?
If you haven't already thought of this, you'll see that the next step is to be able to measure all the goals against the Inbound Marketing tactics you deploy.
You'll need to start tacking your traffic to lead conversion rates. For example if you need 20 leads per month to achieve your customer goals, and you know your lead to conversion rate is 2% you'll need 1000 website visitors per month.
If hitting 1000 website visitors is not realistic you may need to look at improving your traffic/lead conversion rate with better offers or improving the quality of your content, specific conversion CTAs, and your lead to customer conversion rate with lead nurturing.
Once you have your goals in place for: website traffic, leads and customers you can begin testing and measuring different marketing tactics to see which ones yield better results, often done by A/B testing, but it can be done informally as well.
What are the most common Inbound Marketing tactics to build your website traffic:
- Blogging
- Social media marketing
- SEO - Search Engine Optimization
- Content Marketing
- Onine PR
- PPC Ads
Suggested Inbound Marketing tactics to achieve your optimize your traffic to lead conversion goals are:
- ebooks
- How to tips
- Webinars
- Free product trials
- Offers such as free consultations, downloads and useful tools
In summary we recommend that Inbound Marketing should always be aligned with your business goals, and remember the setting of your budget and tactics, (what you do and how often you do it), will then be easier and clearly aligned with your business.
- Set clear SMART goals for each step of the marketing process
- Identify the purpose and goal for each of your tactics
- Have optimized lead generation and conversion offers on your website
- Have a lead nurturing process in place
- And most importantly, have the proper tools in place to track and measure everything.
If you would like some help creating an effective Inbound Marketing game plan for your business, or you want to learn more about the best software and tools for Content Management (CMS), Marketing Automation, Analytics, or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) we have some really good solutions that are worth taking a look at.
