Every business has goals and every department within a business has goals too. The purpose of inbound marketing is to help you to achieve your goals whether you are a CEO/business owner or a marketing manager.
If one of your goals is to generate more leads then inbound marketing can see a lead growth by over 30x.
Leads is not the only goal that inbound marketing can help you achieve. A sales director and business owner’s goals are different, where a business owner is more focused on revenue, a sales director may be focused on closing more leads and let’s not forget the marketing manager’s goal is to send better quality leads to the sales team.
So what goals can inbound marketing help you achieve?
I want to increase my number of leads
The first goal that inbound can help you achieve is to generate more leads, but first you must attract the traffic to turn into leads. The goal of inbound is not to send you any old traffic, it is focused on sending you traffic that is most likely to convert, the people who are interested in the problems your product or service solves.
When your prospective leads do a search on Google (is there really an alternative search engine these days) for questions they have related to your services or products, then your business needs to be showing up as answering these questions.This is basically how you attract your leads to your website.
When HubSpot asked its users about how much their traffic had increased after implementing their inbound marketing software 29% said it had increased their traffic by over 100%.
I want to improve the quality of my leads
If you are a sales director then you will know that not all leads are of great quality and some are not sales qualified, so when you contact the leads that are not ready to buy this can result in a waste of the sales team’s time.
If your goal is to increase the quality of leads then inbound marketing is a great way to help you achieve this goal as it can send the leads to your sales team that are sales ready. Segmenting your lists to only send sales ready leads to sales is a massive time saver and makes your sales team more efficient with their time and can result in them closing more leads quicker.
When HubSpot asked its customers what their leads to sales conversion rate was after using their software, a massive 49% said they closed at a higher rate.
I want to align my sales and marketing teams
Aligning sales and marketing is a big challenge for a lot of businesses so if your goal is to align these two important departments then inbound marketing can help. The first thing to do that will help with this is to create a sales and marketing service level agreement that will help each department understand what is expected of them.
By using inbound marketing software like HubSpot you can create closed loop marketing so your marketing team can send higher quality leads to sales and sales can close more leads quicker.
This will also help communication between the two departments and increase transparency.
I want happy sales teams
I’m sure we all hold the goal of having a happy sales team and if they are happy they will enjoy their job more and perform better. It is scientifically proven, just ask anyone!
If your sales team is closing more leads because the leads inbound marketing is generating are of a higher quality, then they will be happier.
Although I think there should always be an element of pressure for everyone, if your sales team knew that when they arrived at work that it was within them to achieve their sales goals, then they will be a lot happier and be under far less pressure.
I think that a lot of the time knowing how to do something, no matter how hard it is, makes achieving it all that easier. There is nothing worse than the unknown.
I want to put smiles on my customer’s faces
We all love happy customers and I believe how happy your customers are is a great indication of how well your business is doing and being perceived by your prospects and customers.
This is a subject that is very close to my heart. So much so that I wrote this post a while back Why You Should Measure Customer Satisfaction and Ways to improve it. If you are interested in this subject I recommend you check it out.
Personally, I think the UK has a really bad record of customer services and we could learn a lot from the Americans.
But how does inbound marketing help you to create happy customers?
Inbound is all about being helpful, answering customer questions and creating content that helps your customers instead of being pushy for a sale. Using social media means you can connect with your customers in ways you never could before. So if this is your goal then inbound can help.
According to The Institute of Customer Service, good customer service does affect companies bottom line. Learn more in the short video below.
I want to increase referrals
If you have happy customers then your goal of increasing referrals will be made a whole lot easier. I know a lot of businesses rely very heavily on referrals and if you are not getting any then this may be an indication of unhappy customers.
If you have a happy customer then they will most likely recommend you to a friend and with social media that can quickly become a lot of referrals.
Social media can also help with customers that are not happy. Mistakes are inevitable and it can be hard to please everyone.
There is nothing better than turning an unhappy customer into a happy one and social media can help you to identify these unhappy customers and delight them.
I want my business to be seen as an authority
One of the most popular goals I hear from businesses is they want to become an authority within their industry and become a great resource. This is an excellent goal to have but achieving this does take time, hard work and a lot of effort.
However the rewards are massive and inbound is the perfect way to achieve this. As you are creating content that is helpful to your audience you are building your website up as a great resource for everything about your industry, product and services.
Not only will your prospects see you as an authority so will Google and if Google sees you as an authority then your content will rank higher and more often.
I want to justify the ROI of my marketing
Everything should justify ROI and the fact that inbound marketing is an excellent way to do this will be music to a lot of businesses ears. With closed loop marketing and inbound you can track the ROI of every campaign you do.
By being able to track what is working you can focus on these activities and stop wasting time on things that don’t work.
I want to motivate my team
If you are sending more qualified leads to sales and sales are generating more customers from these leads, and don’t forget creating more referrals and happy customers, your staff will be far more motivated to do a great job.
These employees will know what they are doing is making a difference and are part of something special. What better motivation is there?
Conclusion
Inbound marketing starts and ends with your goals and you can see that inbound marketing can help you to achieve a lot of your business goals, from increased leads and sales to generating more referrals and happy customers.
With a lot of hard work and belief in inbound marketing, you can go a long way.
Now it’s your turn
What are your business goals? Let us know in the comments below.