"SMART goals" is something we’ve all been taught throughout our academic careers and when establishing goals for the work world. And if you haven’t, SMART simply stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. When creating a marketing strategy for your business, setting goals should be your first step.

Sure, using the SMART goals method is a great way to establish your goals. However, remembering to keep your goals revenue focused is also important, especially when you’re establishing what you want to achieve out of your marketing plans. At the end of the day, the goal of your businesses marketing is to strengthen your brand and generate revenue.

Ensuring your marketing goals have revenue as a main focus involves following a process of determine, identify, and implement. We’ll go through these three with inbound marketing in mind as you look to achieve your goals.

Determine your target revenue

Determining your target revenue growth from each section of your marketing efforts should be established right at the beginning. Setting a growth target of say, $250,000 from inbound marketing efforts and $100,000 from other events such as trade shows can help you determine a profit goal. Along with this, determining how many sales you need to generate this revenue can help you further zero in on what your target is and what needs to be done to achieve it.

Identify traffic and leads

Analyzing numbers regarding leads and traffic generated can help you better strategize expected revenue from each and what number you will need to attract to ensure you achieve the revenue goal you’ve set for yourself. Identifying how many sales qualified leads (SQL) and marketing qualified leads (MQL) you need to reach your targeted revenue can help you adjust your required overall leads to reach your revenue goal. SQL’s are ones that are ready to be passed to your sales team, while MQL’s require more lead nurturing before they’re sales ready. As attracting traffic to leads is always the hardest part, calculating your traffic to lead conversion rate is beneficial to see how many website visitors you need. Each of these measurements are important when looking to create the SMART goals you need to generate revenue.

Implement benchmarks and budgets

Placing emphasis on other business goals is also important to make sure your overall business strategy is aligned with the marketing and revenue goals you’ve been working so hard to establish. Increasing customer retention, enhancing revenue from existing customers, and downloads of a high lead-to-customer converting offer are all tools you can look to when cementing your SMART goals. Implementing a budget for these marketing goals along with quarterly benchmarks are also great ways to analyze how your marketing efforts are going and if you need to adjust your goals.

At Hughes & Co., we are goal-oriented to ensure our customers are satisfied with the end result. Goals help establish a timeline, and a base that can be analyzed and adjusted when need be. The end goal for your business is to generate a profit, and we can help you reach that goal with our inbound strategies.