The New Year is here, and if you haven’t yet created your 2011 inbound marketing goals, it’s not too late. Here are six steps to follow to lay the foundation for 2011 inbound marketing activity.
1) Identify how much new monthly revenue you want to acquire in 2011 on average.
2) Considering other marketing activity that you are doing including networking, PR, and events, figure out what percentage of new revenue you expect to come from in inbound marketing.
3) Look at your current set of customers and estimate average revenue per customer.
4) From your website analytics data, also find out the percentage of website visitors who have contacted you through your website. This is your Visitor-to-lead rate. If you don’t have this number, then choose 1% as a starting point. A high performing lead conversion rate is 10%.
5) Estimate your Lead-to-customer rate by looking at how many leads you were able to successfully convert to a new customer. In general, when beginning inbound marketing activity, your Lead-to-customer rate will be lower than other forms of marketing.
6) Using the inbound marketing calculator, enter the values you found above to create a baseline for your inbound marketing funnel.
The output from the inbound marketing calculator will give you:
- Monthly website visitors needed
- Monthly leads needed
- Monthly new customers needed
The two variables that can be directly influenced by your inbound marketing activity are Number of Monthly Website Visitors and Visitor-to-lead rate. Improving your Visitor-to-lead rate is the best place to start because each percentage increase in your Visitor-to-lead rate significantly reduces the number of Visitors that you need coming to your website. This can make a major difference when you are in a highly competitive search marketing industry or geography.
By going through this exercise, you can see what is required to achieve your 2011 revenue goals from inbound marketing activity. The budget (time and money) you will need to allocate to inbound marketing should now be more apparent in order to reach your 2011 goals.
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Free Inbound Marketing Calculator
Use the data from the calculator to plan how much time and money you should allocate to your inbound marketing activity for acquiring new customers.
