Building an Inbound Marketing Campaign: Part 2 Goals

 In this blog post, we are continuing our guide to building an inbound marketing campaign. Last time we discussed how to define your audience and your buyer persona.

The next step is to set our marketing goals. It is easy to ignore goals in marketing campaigns; often people are just too excited to take the time. That is a real shame because otherwise how do you know if you win? How do you know if this was a proper use of time and resources? You really don’t if you haven’t taken the time to set your goals.

We have spoken about how you need to tie down your marketing goals. You need to make them SMART. Making your goals smart gives you a better way to look at your goals and ensure that you meeting them.
So how do you make SMART inbound marketing goals?

• Specific
• Measurable
• Accurate
• Relevant
• Timebound

Specific: Your goals need to be very specific. What do you want to do with your inbound marketing campaign? For your first inbound marketing campaign, you might decide to focus on leads.

Now, how do we know we have the leads we want? How will you make sure that they meet the qualifications of your audience, what demographic? For what product or service are these leads? Specify everything you can about them.

Measurable: Seems easy. You need to be able to measure your goals. They need to be quantifiable. However to make sure that you are only counting results towards your goals you need to be vigilant as to what meets your goals (see specific).

Attainable: While it is great to have historic goals it is much more beneficial to have attainable ones. Increasing opportunities by 10% is a feasible objective. Increasing them by 100%, maybe not. Think how disconcerting it is if you set unattainable goals for you and your employees.

Relevant: You must choose goals that are relevant to your business and your overall strategy. If you want to increase leads by 20% but you don’t have the resources to handle that much more business, that would not be a relevant goal.

Time-bound: You need to have a particular time tied to your goals. If you don’t relate a time range to your goals all of the other metrics you have linked to it become moot. A time-bound goal might be we want to meet a goal in an individual quarter or month.

Want to get our introduction to inbound marketing? Click here to download. Our next installment in this blog series will be about creating your offer or content.