There are a lot of different approaches to your inbound marketing strategy. Bringing in leads and converting them to customers is a process and takes a creative team with lots patience to implement. It utilizes different forms of marketing, like SEO, content creation, email marketing, and social media, to introduce people to your business. It also takes the work of a marketing automation software to help analyze your efforts and see whether or not they were effective.
But, all of that is rather overwhelming, isn’t it? So, all you need to do when it comes to setting your inbound marketing goals is be smart. And, by smart, we mean, S.M.A.R.T, smart!
(This can be applied to all the goals your company makes in business, but we’ll talk in terms of inbound marketing.)
S-Specific
The first rule of being SMART is being specific. After all, there’s no point setting an inbound marketing goal if it’s not clear. How else would you be able to plan steps to reach it, then? Whether your goal is to bring in fifty new leads through content creation on your blog, five new subscribers through email marketing, or have ten people make purchases based on your Facebook shares, don’t be afraid to challenge yourself. Just make sure it makes sense for your business!
M-Measurable
How will you measure the goals you have? Will it be on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? Are you going to be able to set a deadline for this goal and determine whether or not it’s reached by the end of that day, week, month, or quarter? If you can’t measure the goal, then you won’t be able to assess whether or not you’ve reached it.
A-Attainable
Is this inbound marketing goal you’re setting attainable? Meaning, is it realistic for your company? While it’s good to set the bar high, achievement sometimes comes slowly but surely. Be sure that the goals you set aren’t too out of reach for your company. Likewise, be sure not to write up goals that are getting accomplished automatically. (If you’re already bringing in ten new leads a month, then making your goal eleven leads is not really “smart.”)
R-Relevant
Are your inbound marketing goals relevant to your company? This one may be obvious to you, but sometimes we need a gentle reminder. If you’re running an online store, it wouldn’t really make sense to have your goal only involve people signing up to your email list. While that may be part of the goal, ultimately, you want people to buy your stuff. So, you may need to expand on making your goals relevant so that you can get your leads to do what you want.
T-Time Based
Last but not least is that you need to be timely on your inbound marketing goals. If you have a long-term goal on the list that will take quite some time to achieve, that’s okay. But, for most of your goals, you need to be able to set reasonable deadlines for yourself. This way, if you don’t reach those goals by the deadline, you can easily go back and re-evaluate.
Here are examples of some goals you could set:
“By next month (T), our company will bring in at least fifty new leads (M) via social media sharing (R) of two blog posts per week (S) in order to reach over $1000 in revenue for our inbound marketing (A).”
“Our company should rank in Google’s top ten (M) for the keyword search “customized smartphone cases” (R) which we will achieve by implementing these keywords into our landing pages and blog posts (S), tripling the number of visitors to our site (A) by the first quarter (T).”
So, are you ready to be SMART when setting your inbound marketing goals? Let us know how this strategy works for your business.
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