What milestones does your company need to reach in 2019?
As marketers and SEO professionals, charting the path toward our goals is one of the exercises we should be mapping out at a minimum each year.
Here’s a three-step framework for setting SEO goals and developing a plan to achieve them:
- Measuring targets: Where do we need to be?
- Establishing SEO benchmarks: Where are we now?
- Developing an action plan: How are we going to get there?
1. Measuring Targets
Every marketer on your team should be able to answer, “What does success look like 3/6/12 months out?”
Are we looking at revenue growth from new customers, existing customer account expansion, retention, and/or lowering churn?
In consulting with teams over the last decade, it’s often only the most senior person on the team who knows this answer.
In order to get your entire team on board with your marketing plan, every teammate should know the answer to this question.
Revenue targets (or lead value via a specific quantity/quality of leads) are the most common type of goal that marketing departments are tasked with achieving.
Revenue figures can then be translated into the number of new customers you need to bring in monthly based on average order size. Here’s the equation:
Number of new customers you need to acquire = Revenue needed / Average order size
Once you understand the number of customers you need to acquire, you can work backward to figure out the number of opportunities, SQLs, MQLs, leads, and website visitors you need to bring in to hit your goals. This is all based on conversion rates.
Your CRM and/or marketing automation platform should be able to provide these conversion rates across lifecycle stages and channels (organic vs. paid vs. referral).
Here is a helpful calculator your team can use to figure out these metrics. – Read more