My New Year’s resolution was to “make it to the gym for an hour, 3 times a week in 2016.” But that was also my resolution in 2015. Okay, fine – it’s been the same for three years now. What can I say, I like Netflix.
As a Pittsburgh SEO company, we set annual online marketing goals for ourselves and our clients that help to reach overall business goals. Your online business is becoming more and more important every year and setting goals like:
- Increasing your google page rank
- Generating more social media engagement
- Redesigning your website
- Improving your organic search traffic
Can increase your profits. Unfortunately, New Year’s resolutions have a rough time being completed in a year and when it comes time to set your goals for the next year, the same resolution gets repeated. Lucky for you, we’ve created this nifty little list of all of the things you can do to reach your goals in one year (and not three.)
Set SMART Goals
When setting your industrial B2B marketing goals, make sure they are as clear and concise as possible by setting SMART goals for your team in the beginning of 2016. SMART goals are an Inbound marketing tool that helps you stay on track and accurately communicate your goals. For instance, my goal for 2016 is framed as a SMART goal.
“Go to the gym three days a week for at least an hour a day.”
The goal is Specific (go to the gym), Measurable (3 days a week, 1 hour a day), Attainable (I should have done this 3 years ago), Realistic (honestly, I’m not asking that much of myself), and Time-bound (if I didn’t procrastinate.) With all of this information, your online industrial marketing goals will go from this:
Increase traffic to the blog
To this:
Increase organic traffic to the blog by 50% from 100 visits to 150 visits by March 30th
It’s very important to refer to your current analytics – and your analytics from that time period in the previous year – before setting your goals. The most important part of a SMART goal is that it is attainable. Setting a goal that is too low won’t allow you to reach your full potential, and setting a goal that is too high will cause you unnecessary stress and a feeling of defeat if you do not reach that goal at the end of that time period.
Determine Your Lead Value & Set Your Industrial B2B Marketing Budget
If you are practicing Inbound marketing, you should be familiar with the buyer persona and the buyer journey. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional persona that represents your ideal client, or target audience. The buyer journey represents where your buyer persona is at in their problem-solving process. With these tools, you develop leads – or potential customers. The Inbound marketing process is designed to make sure that your marketing efforts are very guided so you are not spending unnecessary resources marketing to an audience who is not in need or interested in your services or product.
To determine the value of your leads, and see the ROI for a particular offer or campaign, Pittsburgh Internet Consulting has developed a Lead Value Calculator that you can download for free. The Lead Value Calculator helps you to determine if your marketing dollars are being used effectively. The tool helps you determine ROI by calculating the cost and value of a lead.
For instance, your exhibit at an industrial tradeshow is targeting your product manager buyer persona and your show budget is $100,000. For this campaign you received 175 leads. Of those 175 leads your sales team closed 13% of them with an average sale of $68,000 and a 40% margin. With this information, the Lead Value Calculator easily determines that your campaign return was $18,800, your cost per lead was $571.43, and your lead value was $2965. Because your cost per lead is significantly less than the lead value, you can determine that this was a successful campaign.
You can do this with various campaigns to see which ones are the working the best for your businesses. A great way to help you see where to focus your marketing efforts.
Schedule Updates to Measure Your Progress
If you’re anything like me when it comes to reaching New Year’s resolutions, you need someone or something to push you to finish it. The hardest part about executing a goal comes after the goal is set. You think you have so much time to start on your resolution and before you know it, its December again and you haven’t used your gym membership once, even though you pay $20/month for it.
When you create your annual goal, set milestones to help keep yourself and your team on track. This holds everybody accountable for their role in reaching the goal throughout the year. Hold meetings to discuss these milestone goals and to remind everyone of the overall goal. For instance, the above goal is a milestone goal towards an overall goal of increasing organic traffic to your company’s blog.
Whether you want to create milestones bi-monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually is up to you. We suggest that if you are just beginning your online marketing efforts, or if you are a new business, to meet bi-monthly until your team becomes more comfortable and more experienced in their roles.
Instead of repeating the same resolution year after year, follow through with your 2016 marketing goal and enjoy making a new resolution for the next year. With these tips, executing and completing your goals this year can take the edge off of the struggle to complete it.
