When thinking about goals there are 2 quotes that I just love. The first one is “Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” – Tony Robbins. And “Vision without execution is just hallucination.” Both quotes are very powerful. The purpose of this article is not only to help you to develop highly attainable goals but also to provide a roadmap to execute. And for that, you need something we call an IMP.
An Inbound Marketing Plan (IMP) is a roadmap for achieving specific objectives within a defined time frame. An IMP helps you identify where you want to go and how you’ll get there.
You should always start by defining your goal(s). Once you’ve done that, you can move on to identifying your audience, determining their pain points, and developing a strategy to address them. Ultimately, the goal of your inbound marketing plan is to systematically generate leads, nurture those leads into clients, and then convert those clients into raving fans of your brand, mission, products, and services. Then, you can create a detailed action plan that aligns with your overall objective. Finally, you can measure your success along the way using goal tracking, key performance indicators (KPIs), and other metrics in the HubSpot platform and Google Analytics.
What we like to do is to view marketing as a numbers game. First, you need to know how much you want to grow in the calendar year (Sometimes, the time frame can be 3+ years). If I want to grow by 10 million dollars this year, I’m going to need to know how many sales it takes to get to 10 million dollars. Then, I need to know how many leads it takes to get a sale. Finally, I need to know how many visitors it takes to get a lead so ultimately I know how many visitors it will take to get to my goals. We basically back into our numbers or look at it in reverse, as shown in the graphic below.
Annual Revenue Goals
Inbound Marketing is a great way to attract customers through quality, link-worthy content. This method helps build trust between businesses and their audience.
The ultimate goal in developing content is to establish yourself as a thought leader, to win a loyal audience, and to create enough quality content to help you develop more authority in search engines.
It is important to consider the amount of time and resources required to create high-quality content. If you want to see success in your inbound marketing campaign, you’ll need to invest wisely.
The first investment that we would recommend you do is invest in a marketing automation platform that’s going to help you reach your goals. There are a lot of platforms out there, but we highly recommend using HubSpot!
The next investment that you need to understand is whether or not you are going to use your inbound marketing in-house or use an external agency. Our recommendation is to use an agency that has a team-based approach as opposed to finding isolated vendors such as an independent copywriter, independent SEO professional, independent social media expert, etc. The goal is to have your entire team collaborating under the same roof. In the ideal sense, if that team can also handle ads and web development, your results will compound even more!
The final piece you want to keep in mind when looking at your budget is whether or not you are willing to invest in advertising. Advertising is the most targeted and effective way to generate interest in your product and services, however, it’s commonly the most expensive and it’s recommended that you know which approach you are going to use. Whether it’s Google paid ads, social media ads, programmatic ads, or LinkedIn ads. If you don’t know which approach to use, it could be very expensive and deflating for your business.
How To Set Well-defined Marketing Goals to Reach Annual Goals
A good starting point is to define your business’s annual revenue goals. You can then use this information to determine what type of marketing activities are most likely to help you achieve these goals.
Once you have determined which areas will best support your business goals, you can begin planning your next steps.
The critical goals that should be measured are as follows:
- Lead Generation Goals
- How much traffic can I drive from e-mail marketing? How about from?:
- SEO
- Social Media
- Paid Advertising
- Social Media Advertising
- Programmatic Advertising
- How much traffic can I drive from e-mail marketing? How about from?:
- Lead Nurturing Goals
Now that you’ve generated your leads, now you have to nurture those leads into clients. Critical goals for lead nurturing are:
- Have I developed a lead scoring rubric to understand how engaged our potential audience is?
- Have I developed marketing automation or drip marketing e-mails to nurture them?
- Have I set up retargeting ads to push them down the funnel?
- Have I set up programmatic ads to push them down the funnel?
- Are these leads addressable in your CRM?
- Conversion Goals
At this point, you have generated and nurtured your leads down the funnel through continuous thought leadership marketing. Conversion goals that I would want to know are:
- How many leads were we able to get into first-time appointments (FTA)?
- How many leads were we able to get into second-time appointments (STA)?
- How many proposals was I able to write?
- How many leads was I able to close?
- How many strategic upsells was I able to close?
Let’s do some simple math.
If you have a website that receives 10,000 visits each month and has a 2 percent conversion rate, then you would expect to get 200 new leads every month.
But let’s say your goal is 300 leads per month. Your reaction to that might be to think that if you increase your traffic by bringing in 15,000 visitors, then you’re going to get more leads.
However, in reality, that’s even harder, far more expensive, and will probably require more time.
However, you know what makes it even more SENSIBLE and is SIGNIFICANTLY less expensive?
If we take a closer look at improving your conversion rates.
One of the best ways to improve your site’s conversion rate is by going back and rewriting your existing content in a more engaging manner.
If you increase your conversion rate by just 1%, you’ll be able to achieve your goal of 300 leads with the same amount of visitors.
Pretty cool, isn’t it?
That’s one reason why killer content is so important.
So many times, companies will come to us and tell us “We need to reach our goals! We need more leads!” As a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimizer), we want to help with that initiative. However, we’ve found that over the years, a lot of the companies simply don’t have a great story, not only for their brand but for their products as well. It’s almost like having a bucket that has a really big hole in it. The client might think “I just need more water!”, but what they really need is to fill the hole first so that as I bring more water the bucket will be able to hold more water. Sometimes, you can get more sales off of fewer visitors than you could by driving a lot of traffic while having a leaky bucket.
Understanding Your “Revenue Gap”
The large majority of companies are doing something called “RAM” (Random Acts of Marketing). Just like going to the gym, the person who goes to the gym for 8 hours on the first of the month and never goes back is going to see less results than the person who goes to the gym every day for 20 minutes. The individual who works out consistently is going to get much better results. The same applies to your marketing.
When you develop a systematic approach that generates, nurtures, and converts leads, you’ll probably notice that it will transform your marketing efforts tremendously. However, all of this is dead unless you are looking at your analytics. Your analytics are gonna give you the numbers so that you can make data-driven decisions about your marketing. The number one metric that we strive to look at is CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
To calculate CPA, you simply divide the amount of money you spent on a campaign by the total conversion you acquired via the same campaign. For example, if you spent $2000 dollars on a campaign and got 250 conversions, then your CPA would be $8 ($2000/25=$8).
This is easy, but it’s a critical first step. We call it the “revenue gap.” In our experience, most businesses don’t know exactly where they stand today. They know what they spend on advertising, but they don’t know how many leads or customers they are generating each month.
Determine The Number of Sales You Must Reach to Meet Your Revenue Goals
The key to making sure you are getting enough qualified leads is knowing what your conversion rates look like. You want to know what percentage of people who show up on your landing page convert into paying clients. If you don’t have data about your conversion rates, you’re missing out on a lot of potential revenue.
To calculate the number of new prospects you need to bring in to reach your revenue targets, simply take your revenue gap — the amount of money you need to make each month — and divide it by the average sale price. In our hypothetical scenario above, we’ll use $600,000 as our revenue gap and $50,000 as our average sale. So, to come up with the number of new prospects we need to generate, we’ll divide 600,000 by 50,000 = 12 new prospects.
What Does the Average Inbound Marketing Investment Look Like?
Clients usually invest a lot of time and money at the start to develop critical assets such as updating their websites, creating videos, setting up new software connections, etc.
Once you’ve completed this initial phase, the overall marketing system can get going and kick into active management. A big piece of this stage is using an editorial calendar to create consistent, quality content that:
- Generates leads
- Nurtures leads into customers
- Converts customers into brand ambassadors
Once you’ve reached the end of the road, you’re ready to reap the rewards. In other words, the final stage will be when the client begins to see a return on investment. We’ve been able to create such a clear ROI for our clientele that they’re willing to spend even more on their marketing efforts.
That is the type of win-win scenario that you are looking for with your digital marketing.
What’s the Best Inbound Marketing Strategy to Reach Your Goals?
As we’ve previously mentioned, the goal of inbound marketing is to develop a systematic approach that generates leads, nurtures those leads into clients, and converts those clients into raving fans. However, you first need to understand the simple science of what inbound marketing is.
Traditionally, marketing has been 100% based on interruption marketing. Before the digital age, we had no idea how to know if people were actually looking for our products and services. We had to develop marketing that functions the same way advertising does in which we create marketing messages and get them in front of individuals who might not be looking for our products or services. We’re interrupting their pattern, hence interruption marketing.
With inbound marketing, now that we have technology that understands how people engage, we’re able to create marketing materials that are highly personalized and that make strategic arguments to potential buyers.
We have two personas here. There are people who are trying to sell a product/service and people who are looking for that specific product/service. The problem here is the space in between. We used to interrupt people’s patterns to solve that problem. Now what we do is try to make our marketing materials so incredibly helpful, useful, educational, and transparent that we invite them to investigate. Once we do that, we establish ourselves as thought leaders, which means we have more authority and become a reputable source.
That’s the simple science behind inbound marketing.
If you need more specifics on inbound marketing strategies, check out another article we wrote!
Attracting Strategies
Barry Feldman describes a website by saying that “Your Website is the Mousetrap, Your Content is the Cheese”. What he means by that is that when you are trying to attract individuals to your products and services, 9 times out of 10, they end up on your website. The first thing you have to do before you start to attract individuals is to build a website that can capture people’s information, strategically. The number one way to do that is to connect your website with a marketing automation platform. As mentioned before, there are a lot of platforms out there, but we highly recommend using HubSpot!
With the assumption that you already have a marketing automation platform set up, the next thing we have to worry about is the “cheese.” What kind of marketing message are we going to deliver to clients? Before we do that, we have to understand that you cannot market to all clients in the same way.
To market to different clients, you’ll need to understand why people buy and when they buy.
The Buyer’s Journey is traditionally broken down into three stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
To best illustrate this, let’s use the analogy of buying a car.
When buying a new vehicle, you don’t just walk into the dealership and pick out the first one they show you. It’s more complicated than that.
Usually, the journey starts because there was some kind of problem. Maybe your old vehicle broke down or you just wanted to get rid of an old one for a completely new one. That is the awareness phase.
During the consideration stage, you’ll ask yourself what kind of car you want and then choose from one of them.
Am I going to get a sedan?
An SUV?
Or maybe even a sports car?
Once you’ve decided which car you want, you’ll then need to determine what kind of features you are looking for. Now you just need to figure out some specifics.
What make, model, color, dealership, etc. will you go with?
All of this happens subconsciously and that is how you eventually decide which car you want to buy.
Now, that’s not exactly rocket science.
As marketers, we often employ psychological tactics when selling cars or giving people information about spinal surgeries, for example.
Before we dive into some different approaches, we also need to look at buyer personas, or ideal patient personas if you are in the medical field. The goal of developing buyer personas is to get the right message to the right client at the right time.
For instance, here’s an example of how we approached one of our most recognizable clients: The Rothman Orthopedics Institute.
We’ve been helping them optimize their digital presence for nearly a decade.
At the time, they had a very successful advertising campaign called “Rothman First.”
We piggybacked on that campaign to develop a wide net approach.
The wide net approach helped us create general messages that could be applied to any person who has hip, knee, back, neck, shoulder, or spinal issues.
“If you have pain, think of Rothman First.”
But that was just the beginning….
We decided to take it one step further.
Rather than focusing on selling orthopedic services to individual clients; we wanted to focus on selling orthopedics to COMMUNITIES.
Here’s the logic behind it.
If we’re targeting people who have back pain, it’s likely to be quite difficult to reach them because no one advertises their back pains to the world.
However, they will talk about things in their life like their hobbies.
In this case, the hobby that caught our attention was cycling.
Cycling is HUGE in Philadelphia.
Orthopedic practices like cyclists a whole bunch because…
Well, they tend to hurt themselves frequently and are often plagued by chronic pain.
So, we identified some common sports and activities that lead to similar pains.
If we established Rothman as a thought leader in those communities and if there are ways for us to serve influential people in those communities, then it won’t take long until most of the cycling community in the region thinks of Rothman first when they have joint pain.
We invested in the entire cycling community by positioning ourselves as a thought-leading authority in the cycling world.
We wrote an article regarding steps on how you can convert clients into promoters if you want to check it out!
SEO Strategy
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become the backbone of every successful marketing strategy. In today’s competitive environment, having a strong SEO presence is essential to stay ahead of your competitors.
There are several ways to generate leads through SEO. Here’s a disclaimer before we dive in: SEO is very complex, and this is an oversimplified explanation.
Content-Based SEO
This is the foundation of all SEO strategies. When it comes to creating great content, it is essential to think about two things: 1) Who is going to consume your content? 2) What do they want to learn?
If you are writing blog posts, articles, or ebooks, you need to ask yourself questions like: Why should anyone care about my content? What would I say to convince someone to read it? What kind of keywords am I using? Are those words even related to my niche?
On-Page SEO
Once you have created high-quality content, the next step is to optimize it for search engines. There are three main components to consider when optimizing your content for search engines:
- Title tags – These appear above the URL in the browser address bar. They contain text describing the page being viewed.
- Meta descriptions – These appear below the title tag. They describe the contents of each individual page.
- URLs – These are the addresses of websites. They are usually made up of four parts: domain name, subdomain, folder, and file. For example, www.example.com/blog.html.
Backlinks & Off-Page SEO
When you create content, you should try to get links back to your site. A link is basically a reference to another website. Links are used to determine the importance of a certain webpage. If you have a lot of links pointing to your site, it means that others believe that your content is valuable.
Links are also very powerful tools for off-page SEO. To build links, you need to write guest posts on blogs and directories that are relevant to your industry. Then, you need to contact the owners of those blogs and request permission to post your content on their sites. Once you have posted your content, you need to monitor whether or not they publish your article.
Social Media Strategy
Social media can play a big role in driving traffic to your business. However, if you don’t use social media properly, then it could hurt more than help. Social media is all about engagement. Engagement takes time. You need to invest time into building relationships with other people who share similar interests.
You need to make sure that you’re posting regularly and engaging with your followers. The goal is to develop authentic connections with your customers. By doing this, you’ll be able to gain trust and ultimately convert visitors into buyers.
Moreover, you should be sharing content that’s relevant to them. If you do this, then they’ll start following you back. This will increase the chances of them buying from you.
If you want to get noticed on social media, then you need to post something that’s going to stand out from the crowd. This means that you need to take risks and try new things.
It’s also very important to understand which platforms best fit your goals. Traditionally, LinkedIn has always been a more effective platform for B2B, whereas Facebook and Instagram are usually a better fit for B2C.
You’ll also want to take a look at your demographics and which age groups best respond to each platform. Facebook will surely have an older audience compared to a younger-generation-based social media platform like TikTok.
The most neglected social media channel that people tend to forget about is YouTube. It’s the second-largest search engine in the world and there is a ton of content being uploaded every minute. With the rise of video, the future will surely have video at the forefront, so make sure you are ahead of the curve!
Paid Social Media Ads
Since Facebook became a public company, it’s been widely understood that your organic visibility with social media went from 40% down to a whopping 2%. Even though you’ve worked hard to get fans, followers, likes, and connections, very few people see them unless you are using paid advertising.
It’s been widely accepted that paid social media advertising is a pay-to-play game. Before you get too upset, you should know that it does offer the best and most effective targeting for your audience. The functionality that it offers is second to none. If you find that social media ads would work great for your goals, then we would HIGHLY recommend you implement this strategy.
There are many different paid advertising platforms available online. Some of these include Facebook ads, Google AdWords, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, Instagram ads, Pinterest ads, etc.
Every company is different, so you should choose the platforms that work best for you and your company.
These platforms allow businesses to target specific audiences based on age, gender, location, interest, etc. When you run a campaign on one of these platforms, you pay a set amount every time someone clicks on your ad.
The best part about using paid advertising is that you can test different campaigns until you find the ones that work well for your business.
One of the things you should strive to do with social media ads is to gather enough traffic to your social media page to start to do targeted look-a-like campaigns. First, you would put a pixel on your website to gather information on your audience’s demographics. From there, you could to Facebook and say “Hey, I want to advertise to the people who’ve been on my website, but I also want to advertise to people who match the demographics of the people who are already engaging and converting on my website.”
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising refers to the automated purchase of digital advertisements. It allows advertisers to buy targeted inventory at scale.
This type of advertising has become increasingly popular over the past few years. As a result, there are now several companies offering programmatic advertising services.
Advertisers can choose which platform to advertise through depending on what works best for their business. There are two main types of programmatic advertising: real-time bidding (RTB) and demand-side platforms (DSP).
- Real-Time Bidding
- With RTB, advertisers bid against each other to place bids on keywords. These keywords are usually chosen by the advertiser.
- As soon as the keyword is selected, the advertiser pays the highest bidder. This process continues until the budget is spent.
- Demand-Side Platforms
- A DSP is a company that buys large amounts of inventory across multiple channels. They then sell this inventory to related to products or services offered by the advertiser.
- Advertisers bid on keywords that are most likely to lead to conversions. For example, if you sell shoes, then you might bid on terms like “shoes” or “buy shoes.”
- Once the auction ends, the DSP selects the winning advertiser and delivers the corresponding ad to the user.
Engaging Strategies
There are many ways to engage users online. The key is finding out what works best for your audience. Here are some examples of engagement strategies:
Social Media Engagement
- Facebook – Facebook is the largest social network in the world. With 1.5 billion monthly active users, it’s no surprise that this platform is used heavily for marketing purposes.
- Twitter – Twitter is another popular social networking site. With more than 300 million monthly active users, it is also widely used for marketing purposes.
- Instagram – Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social networks in the world. With nearly 500 million monthly active users, marketers use this platform to drive traffic to their websites.
- LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a professional networking website where members build connections and find jobs. Marketers use this platform to attract potential customers to their businesses.
- YouTube – YouTube is a video-sharing website with more than 1 billion unique visitors per month. It’s a great way to create engaging content and promote your brand.
- LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a professional network with more than 400 million members worldwide. It’s a good resource for connecting with people who have similar interests to yours.
- Pinterest – Pinterest is a visual search engine. Users can browse through different images and videos. It’s a good tool for promoting your business.
- Google AdWords – Google Adwords is a pay-per-click (PPC) program that helps businesses advertise their products and services on search engines such as Google.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular because it’s effective at driving traffic, converting leads, and increasing sales. There are several types of video marketing including:
Videos posted to social media sites can either be short-form videos (less than 15 minutes) or long-form videos (15 minutes or longer).
In addition, some videos are used as a part of an online advertising campaign. These videos are typically longer in length and may include multiple shorter segments.
For example, a 30-second video ad might consist of 3 separate 5-second videos. The reason for this is that the viewer will have more time to view the entire video if they watch each segment individually.
Every viewer is different. Some prefer short and to-the-point videos while others like long videos that take you on a journey. Once you find what your target audience prefers, stick to it and become a master at making your content captivating.
Conversion Strategies
The most important thing to remember when creating any type of marketing strategy is to make sure that it converts. If your strategy doesn’t convert, then you’re not going to get the results you want.
Here are some conversion strategies that you can implement into your own marketing plans. We’ve already discussed social media marketing and SEO, but others can also be valuable to have within your strategy.
Email marketing has been around since the early days of the internet. However, it wasn’t until recently that email marketing became a viable option for small businesses.
With the rise of smartphones and tablets, consumers now expect to receive emails instantly. This means that if you don’t provide value immediately, you risk losing out on future opportunities.
Content marketing is another great way to promote your brand. It is all about providing valuable information to your potential clients. You do this by writing blogs, articles, guides, etc.
This is one of the best ways to attract organic traffic from websites and increase engagement. When someone reads something useful, they share it with friends and family which increases reach even further.
Another form of content marketing is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing involves partnering with people who have large followings on social media. They help bring awareness to your product or service by posting promotional messages about your brand.
By partnering with them, you can gain exposure and trust with your target market. Influencer marketing can work well for both B2C and B2B brands.
ROI of an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy
When you create an inbound marketing strategy, you need to think about how much money you can generate for your business.
You can measure ROI (Return on Investment) through many different metrics such as:
How many new customers did you acquire? How many repeat customers did you acquire? What was the average order size? Did you see any growth in revenue?
If you were able to answer these questions, you would know whether or not your efforts were worth it.
You should be looking at a minimum of $1 per customer acquired and a maximum of $10 per customer acquired. If you’re generating more than that, then you’ve got a good campaign going on.
The best way to get started with this is by creating a simple spreadsheet where you can track your results over time.
When conducting an inbound marketing program, you are in for the long haul. Being able to track your progress and fix your previous mistakes is the best way to see what works and what can be changed or continue to work in the future.
What if You Don’t Have the Time, Expertise, or Resources?
It might seem like you can just jump right in and start making money, but you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed with tasks.
Starting a business requires a lot of research, planning, and execution. These things take time and energy. If it is important to you and your business, you will have to allocate time to start planning out your ideas.
Expertise comes with time. As you do the work yourself, you start to gain exposure, knowledge, and confidence.
Resources can be found and purchased easily. Researching software plans, functions, and reviews can be a good way to vet which software programs will work best for you. Some have free versions that you can try out before purchasing.
You can also consider hiring an inbound marketing agency to help with all your marketing needs. We have an article regarding this if you need information about how an inbound marketing agency can transform your company!
In conclusion, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t start an inbound marketing campaign today. The benefits of doing so far outweigh the costs involved.
