In today’s always-connected-and-online culture, providing useful information and experiences to your customers is not something to consider. It’s a crucial key to business success and an expectation from consumers.
Inbound marketing uses non-paid marketing tactics to attract, engage, and delight customers. Through search engine optimization (SEO), email, content creation, and social media, you can connect with your target customers with useful and educational content. Inbound marketing focuses on understanding the target audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points and showcases how your company can help solve those problems or achieve their goals. Inbound marketing can move them along the marketing funnel from awareness to purchase and continuing brand loyalty.
Just like any other marketing tactic, setting clear and measurable goals for your inbound marketing efforts will empower you to make data-driven decisions. Proper tracking can provide insight into what’s driving quality traffic to your site, which efforts are most effective for lead generation, and the amount of sales generated through your inbound strategies.
Keep reading to learn about goal setting in inbound marketing.
Why Is Goal Setting Important for Inbound Marketing?
If you were leaving for a road trip, you could start driving. However, without a clear plan or map, you likely won’t get the results you were hoping for. The same is true for inbound marketing.
Here are a few examples of why goal setting is important for inbound marketing:
Establish Clear Direction and Focus
Setting goals provides a roadmap with clear steps that you need to take along the way. These include setting up call tracking and goals/conversions in Google Analytics to make sure your inbound marketing efforts resonate with your prospective customers. Clear goals that tie into your broader marketing and business objectives ensure a cohesive direction that impacts the bottom line.
A lack of clear goals makes it easy to chase shiny new trends or shift directions frequently. With the sheer volume of strategies available, that would leave your efforts without focus and, likely, stretched too thin to really have an impact.
Measuring Success and ROI
Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as the number of qualified leads per month or net sales, and key metrics can help you measure your return on investments (ROI) for your inbound marketing efforts.
Adapting and Improving Strategies
By setting goals for inbound marketing efforts, you can see if certain tactics aren’t yielding results and pivot as needed. After all, who wants to keep spending time and money doing things that aren’t successful?
There’s no “set-it-and-forget-it” mentality in marketing for the E-Power team. While inbound marketing efforts take longer than advertising to see results, measuring and adjusting strategies ensures you are investing your time and resources in a way that drives results. The E-Power team builds out editorial calendars on a quarterly basis to ensure the latest trends and keywords are being worked into your efforts, and those efforts are monitored with a live dashboard to truly track success.
Goals also help your organization foster a culture of continuous improvement (and growth). When everyone knows the expectations and what the company is driving toward, employees are empowered to make decisions and work to achieve them.
Understanding SMART Inbound Marketing Goals
You’ve heard the acronym time and time again, but we’ll say it again: SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals will power your organization’s successful inbound marketing strategy.
Specific
Clear and to-the-point objectives will ensure that everyone across the organization understands what will be done and who will execute it. The more specific your objectives are, the more likely your team can make meaningful progress with your inbound marketing.
Measurable
Your team can track progress and success by setting a measurable or tangible element within your goals, such as a target number or percentage change. Including these items in a live dashboard can help keep your team on track at all times.
Achievable
While stretch goals are important to continued company growth, it is important to make sure your goals are still within reach. What’s achievable may also be determined by how much time and money you’re willing to invest. Set realistic and achievable goals. If you hit those goals sooner than expected, set a new goal for continued growth and keep the momentum going!
Be sure to factor in market conditions, resources, and past performance as you determine whether your objectives are feasible. Keep in mind that many inbound marketing tactics, such as SEO or content marketing, take time to gain traction. Be sure to allow enough time to measure if your efforts are making an impact.
Relevant
Solid growth in website traffic is great to see, but only if it’s tied back to a clear marketing or business objective. Make sure your goals align with your overall business objectives and meet the needs of your target audience.
Time-bound
Start and finish dates are important to guiding how your team plans their work to achieve goals. Milestones, checkpoints, and deadlines ensure you are making progress at the pace you need to achieve business goals.
When it comes to inbound marketing efforts, setting short- and long-term goals also ensures that you give your efforts enough time to gain traction (and your audience time to engage with them).
SMART Inbound Marketing Goal Examples
Whether you are just getting started or have been setting goals for decades, it is also nice to see some examples in action. Here is one example of how we set attainable goals for a new client of ours:
- Goal 1: To acquire 5 new customers over the course of a year. Specifically, these individuals are just looking to get into the spray foam insulation and protective coatings business and would be looking to purchase a rig and ongoing supplies. NOTE: For those that come to a training session, nearly 90% turn into ongoing customers (for parts, supplies &/or rigs).
- Objective 1: Gain an understanding of what type of traffic digital marketing is driving to the site
- Strategy 1: Leverage optimized Google Ads starting in December 2023.
- KPI: Increase ad CTR from ~5% to 7% by the end of January 2024.
- Strategy 2: Audit the company’s SEO and develop a plan to boost SEO.
- KPI: Regular and consistent SEO updates to improve site performance.
- KPI: Increase organic traffic from 7.5% (July-Dec. 2023) to 10% by March 31, 2024.
- Strategy 3: Build content on your site to showcase your depth of experience and better tell our brand’s story
- KPI: Increase engaged time on site from 22 seconds per visit to 55 seconds to boost requests for quotes/samples.
- Strategy 1: Leverage optimized Google Ads starting in December 2023.
Key Challenges of Inbound Marketing Goal Setting
Setting goals for inbound marketing efforts can seem overwhelming, and needs careful attention to make sure proper goals and measuring tools are in place so your organization can see success.
Here are a few roadblocks we’ve seen our clients run into and how you can address these challenges:
Tracking and measuring effectively
The Challenge
With the abundance of data available, tracking and measuring the impact of inbound marketing activities can be daunting. In fact, many organizations don’t have robust conversion or event tracking in place to really tell them how their audience is engaging with their inbound marketing efforts.
How E-Power Helps Solve This Challenge
To ensure your organization can track and measure effectively, an investment in analytics tools (and properly setting them up), training, and ongoing analysis is a must. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager must be optimized for your site to ensure event and goal tracking is set up.
In addition, creating dashboards and scorecards with a consistent cadence for when you review those reports will help you identify what else you may need to track or measure.
Integrating online and offline marketing efforts
The Challenge
We know that every customer journey has multiple touchpoints before your target audience makes their first purchase (and hopefully turns into a repeat customer). This includes a mix of traditional marketing, inbound marketing, and potentially advertising, too.
While tracking online efforts may seem very straightforward, how do you track the performance of your offline marketing efforts and connect the dots to your inbound marketing?
How E-Power Helps Solve This Challenge
We have helped clients get a holistic view of their marketing efforts by setting up call tracking for their print and digital efforts, as well as providing QR code tracking, incorporating social activations at live events, amplifying PR pieces online, etc.
By doing this, we provide separate phone numbers or tagged URLs to use on their website, emails, social media, and in printed pieces (like direct mailers) to show them where calls and clicks are coming from. A blog post we created for a plumbing client three years ago is still one of the highest sources of service phone calls.
Working with freelancers and agencies
The Challenge
As an agency, we know firsthand how outsourcing some (or all) of your marketing efforts can make it challenging to ensure all efforts are cohesive. Collaborating with freelancers or agency partners can make it challenging to stay aligned on goals, manage expectations, and provide timely updates and information for seamless integration into your overall strategy.
How E-Power Helps Solve This Challenge
We help bridge this gap with clients by providing a live dashboard that provides up-to-date information on how each tactic is performing. In addition, our team strives to be as available as possible to ensure frequent check-ins occur and everyone is on the same page. We strive to ensure our clients understand what they are paying for and empower them to make data-driven decisions for their marketing efforts.
Limited resources and budgets
The Challenge
Marketing budgets are consistently getting evaluated, which means what you had to work with last year may not be the same this year. Not only can that make planning your inbound marketing efforts challenging, but it can also impact the resources and capacity available to get it all done.
How E-Power Helps Solve This Challenge
One way to manage ever-changing budgets is to focus on what’s going to move the needle fastest toward your big-picture business goals. It is important to balance high-value, low-effort strategies with longer-term investments. As a reminder, marketing plans are not etched in stone—you have the flexibility to pivot as needed.
Let E-Power Help You Achieve Your Goals
If you are ready to set SMART goals or aren’t quite sure where to start, we’d love to talk!
Our team is passionate about sharing inbound marketing goal examples and setting a solid foundation for your marketing program.
