How to Set the Right Lead Gen Goals for Your Marketing Team

As inbound marketers, we all know the value and importance of measuring, tracking, and reporting on key metrics and goals. Let's take the data you collect around your lead generation efforts, for instance. If you know what your marketing team can generate for new leads, and you also know your average lead-to-customer conversion rate, your business can actually predict future sales! And with closed-loop marketing in place, you can even track the revenue generated from the leads that were influenced by various channels or marketing events.

That's a lot of meaty data, but how do you take that information and apply it to setting a lead generation goal that helps you meet your business objectives? Your effectiveness as a lead generator hinges on your ability to generate both the right amount, and the right type of leads. Establishing the right balance for your business is crucial, but tricky -- luckily this post will explain exactly how you can do it! Here are 4 simple steps to set effective lead generation goals for your marketing team.

Step 1: Determine if you want to measure quantity, quality, or both.

The first step to setting goals for your marketing team is to figure out what you want to measure -- remember, you can't determine whether you met your goals if you aren't measuring them! Most marketers have traditionally measured themselves on the quantity of leads they produce each month or quarter. This is easy to do if you have inbound marketing software, which allows marketers to track their lead generation progress across every campaign. For example, in HubSpot's software, all you have to do is input your lead generation goal, and easily track the number of leads you generate each day, week, month, or year!

View the Original article

How to Select the Right CTA for Every Page on Your Site

The call-to-action (CTA) is an important tool for promoting your marketing offers and making sure your lead gen engine stays humming. In fact, we believe that your CTAs should be on just about every page of your website. After all, if you're putting all that hard work into creating stellar marketing offers and building the landing pages to house them, you need to let your website visitors know they exist. CTAs are a great way to do that.

But surely there should be more of a science involved than just slapping a CTA button on any page on your site willy-nilly ... especially if you've been building out your offer backlog and have several of them at your disposal. So how do you know which offer's CTA button to put on what pages of your website? Here's an easy step-by-step guide to make it easy to decide.

Step 1: Map Your Offers to Stages in the Sales Cycle

Before you do anything else, you need to conduct an audit of all the marketing offers you have at your disposal. Create a spreadsheet, and list all of your offers in column A. It's also a good idea to list their corresponding landing pages in column B, if only to have a record of all your offers and their URLs in one place.

Next, identify the various stages in your sales cycle. This may be different from business to business and industry to industry, but just so we're all on the same page, we'll go with the three most widely recognized stages: awareness, evaluation, and purchase.

Awareness: Prospects have either become aware of your product or service, or they have become aware that they have a need that must be fulfilled.Evaluation: Prospects are aware that your product or service could fulfill their need, and they are trying to determine whether you are the best fit.Purchase: Prospects are ready to make a purchase.

Identifying the stages in your sales cycle is important, because not every offer will be appropriate for prospects in every stage of the sales cycle. For example, if you sell personal tax software, a website visitor in the awareness stage might have found an article on your blog because they were looking for information about how to do their taxes by themselves. In this case, the best offer for them probably isn't a free trial of your software, because they may not even know you sell software or that they need software to solve their problem. For this new visitor who knows nothing about you or what you offer, an educational ebook called something like "10 Common Mistakes People Make When Filing Their Taxes" would probably be a much more suitable offer. That free trial, on the other hand, would likely be something you'd offer to a prospect in the purchase stage.

Once you've identified the various stages in your sales cycle, add a third column to your spreadsheet, and categorize each of your existing offers by these stages. The diagram below will help you determine which types of offers typically map to the three main stages in the sales cycle.

View the Original article