Setting SMART Inbound Marketing Goals For Your Business Size

When planning your inbound strategy, setting goals is crucial to measuring your success. How will you know if your inbound marketing is working without a benchmark to measure against? These goals also have to be SMART—you know, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. That is, a goal to "increase brand awareness" will never really be met.

Instead, focus on a goal that works for your business. Inbound marketing objectives are not one-size-fits-all. In fact, you should set your goals based on the size of your business. After all, a start-up and a large corporation have different needs.

Every business should start with creating quality buyer personas. From there, set goals based on what your business is capable of accomplishing. Below, we’ve provided a few starting points, but you can adjust these suggestions to be more specific to your company.

Small, Brand-New Start-Up

If you’re just starting out, your ideal customers (not to mention competitors and potential partners) probably don’t know you exist. Focus on key attraction strategies to bring them to your site and get to know what you offer.

Your Goal: Increase traffic to your website.

SMART Goal Example: Attract 500 new organic visitors to our blog by the end of the quarter.

How To Get There:

• Write helpful blogs that solve your ideal clients’ problems.
• Optimize those blog posts and web pages so they can be found on a search engine.
• Connect with potential customers on social media with the goal of directing them to your site.
• Contribute to other blogs as a guest writer to find new prospects.

Small-But-Growing Venture

Now that you’re well known and have attracted visitors to your site, focus on converting them into leads. Then, nurture those leads into customers to boost sales.

Your Goal: Convert more leads to customers.

SMART Goal Example: By the end of the month, increase landing page conversion rate by 0.5% to close at least 2 customers.

How To Get There:

• Offer helpful premium content in exchange for visitors’ contact information.
• Send emails with logical workflows appropriate to the prospect’s stage in the buyer's journey.
• Spend time monitoring social media to engage with potential clients.

Established Enterprise

If these two important departments are working toward different goals, both are missing out on opportunities, and your company is missing out on revenue. Sales and marketing alignment makes sure both teams' work doesn't go to waste.

Your Goal: Aligning your marketing and sales teams.

SMART Goal Example: Increase marketing generated qualified leads by 10 percent by May 31.

How To Get There:

• Create a Service Level Agreement, or SLA, to define each team’s responsibilities.
• Host more meetings—at least once a month—so everyone stays on the same page.
• Talk to members of each team to assess what’s working well and what needs changing.

Takeaway

Businesses of different sizes have to have different inbound marketing goals. These goals can change over time as your business grows, but they should progress naturally and logically. Setting objectives that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-sensitive will help you get the most out of your inbound strategy.