A Zoho MarTech Agency
Many startups invest most of their budget in the product development stages, and “forget” to create a budget for one of the most essential parts of their company’s success — marketing.
For you to run a successful inbound marketing strategy, you need to create SMART inbound marketing goals. It’s through these SMART goals that you’ll formulate the metrics for measuring your success.
SMART, the framework used to set goals, refers to the following five elements:
According to the SMART index, your goals must be:
Goals should be clear, avoiding ambiguous expressions. For example, a goal such as “do your best to increase customers and do your best in sales” has no specific meaning, but rather may reduce the motivation and production effectiveness of your team members.
On the other hand, if you have a specific goal such as “increasing the number of new customer contracts to 150% compared to last year,” you can determine whether you have achieved that goal, at the set period. If you do not achieve it, you would be able to tell how much is lacking and visualize the evaluation based on the specific nature of the goal.
Also, when setting goals as a marketing team, there’s a concern that ambiguous goals will create gaps in interpretation among members.
The more specific your goals, the easier it is for your team to work together to share a vision for achieving those goals.
Set a target that can be measured numerically. For example, goals such as “improve customer satisfaction” sound good, but the indicators are difficult to understand, and it’s not possible to determine whether they have been achieved.
What is “customer satisfaction” in the first place? It’s not clear from the above goal whether you’ve gone through the process of defining. In such a case, replace “customer satisfaction” with a measurable number. such as “the number of orders received from existing customers”. Thus, here’s a better goal: “increase the number of orders received from existing customers by 120% compared to last year”.
Also, if you have an environment where you can introduce a customer satisfaction survey tool and quantify it, it’s not a bad idea to set the score to match your goal.
Even if you set a specific numerical value as a goal, you still have to ensure that your goal is realistic enough, factoring in your current resources. People have various benefits by accumulating successful experiences.
Thus, a successful experience provides two margins: work efficiency and a positive mentality.
In addition to business growth by achieving goals, it’s important to have a successful experience by achieving your goals from the perspective of long-term team building. Consider the resources in your team and set achievable goals.
The goal must be set based on management indicators.
For example, suppose your goal is to increase the number of followers on your Twitter corporate account to 3, 000.
At first glance, it looks like a good goal because the numbers are concrete. However, a closer look will show that it lacks the reason why increased Twitter followership has a positive impact on your business.
If you analyze your lead acquisition campaign by referrer and get a certain percentage of leads from Twitter, you may set a goal related to Twitter.
However, if you discovered through the analysis that Facebook has a higher lead acquisition rate and Twitter does not contribute to lead acquisition, that goal needs to be changed.
Achieving your goal must have a positive impact on the business, which is one of the premises for setting goals.
Even if a goal meets the four elements so far, it will collapse if you do not set a deadline.
By setting a deadline, you’ll be able to check your daily progress, and your daily actions and tasks will be materialized. On the other hand, if the deadline for the goal is not set, the schedule for achieving the goal will be vague, and it will continue to be impossible to incorporate it into daily tasks.
There are various period units such as annually, quarterly, monthly, and weekly. Choose the one that best fits other elements you’ve considered for your goal.
Marketing goals can be divided into the following three types according to the stage of monetization.
It is the stage of attracting potential customers to your brand. Examples of attract-related goals are:
Considering the goals above, many of the measures to achieve these goals will be related to content creation.
It’s a stage where you convert your web visitors into leads. Goals for this stage could include:
To achieve these goals, it is necessary to think about what value can be provided to the attracted users.
At this stage, your goal is to convert your leads into customers. Goals for this stage could include:
SMART Goal setting can also be applied to your ad campaigns. Examples include:
(CRM or marketing tools can be used to determine whether or not the customer is a prospective customer via advertisement)
It’s a good idea to set a conversion goal, as many accounts have conversion as their ad metric. In addition, if it is a campaign for brand awareness, it’s better to set an “attract” goal. If it’s a company that has a large amount of purchasing or customer data, it’s better to set the “close” goal after introducing a measurement tool.
Being a goal-oriented inbound marketer helps you in various ways. It helps you have something to look forward to at a given period, serves as a means of motivation for aiming higher, and also helps you evaluate your work.
Thus, you need to create a SMART goal template in preparation for each inbound marketing campaign. Brainstorm on these goals with your team and ensure that they sync with the company’s overall goals.
If you have experience with Zoho’s marketing software stack ( MarTech ) and understand this inbound marketing strategy foundations, you have a very powerful marketing starter pack ready to be configured and unleashed!
QuakeCinch can always help with your Zoho Marketing initiatives, just reach out to us!!
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