How To Set Goals That Align With Your Marketing and Sales Funnel

For many, goal setting happens at year-end, as the holiday season approaches when your thoughts are consumed with to-do lists and last-minute shopping. However, evaluating performance and setting accurate goals isn’t something that has to wait until the end of the year. So, no matter if you’re reading this deep into the fourth quarter of the year or during Christmas in July—here’s how to set goals that align with your marketing and sales funnels.

Many of us are familiar with SMART goals, which help us identify Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based activities. Yet, many professionals looking to align their business objectives with key performance indicators fail to appropriately set and measure goals that result in effective marketing. 

So, we ask, what does effective marketing look like? Hint: it’s not only retweeting celebrities on Twitter or posting videos of the latest TikTok trend. 

Creating a marketing campaign (and tracking its successes) requires your goals to align with your marketing and sales funnel. This is done by ensuring your business objectives complement your key performance indicators and measuring against them. 

Now, let’s take a look into how you can create effective marketing goals so that this holiday season you can spend more time getting holly-jolly and less time doing worky-worky.

How do you create an effective marketing campaign?

Create an effective marketing campaign by starting with the identification of your basic goals. For example, if “increase sales” is at the top of your list, you’ll need to build out smaller measures of success. In order to measure those smaller wins, we determine key performance indicators (KPIs), or easily identified values, like “complete five sales each week.” The KPI here is the sale. By completing five each week, you’ve calculated you will in turn increase your sales overall. 

Now, to set the goals that align with your marketing and sales funnel you’ll need to be cognizant of the three funnel types, or as HubSpot refers to them—“stages of the buyer’s journey”:

• Top of Funnel (Awareness Stage) - This is where every potential customer begins. These activities help create awareness of your product or service.
• Middle of Funnel (Consideration Stage) - These activities help build the relationship with your potential customers by engaging them and building trust.
• Bottom of Funnel (Decision Stage) - This is the sweet spot! The bottom of the funnel is where you want your leads to be, as it's where the customer decides whether or not to partake in your services.

Each funnel has activities that can ultimately help you achieve your goals. TOFU (Top of Funnel) activities include blogging and social media marketing, which are ways to drive traffic to your website and turn users into leads. MOFU (Middle of Funnel) is where marketing and sales meet. Activities in this stage may include nurturing leads with an email newsletter, webinars, and downloadable resources. Once the user becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL), your marketing team can get to work providing customized content to the lead specific to their pain points and desires. 

As the lead reaches the bottom of the funnel, they become poised to most definitely require your services. Once hitting certain qualifying criteria set by your marketing and sales team, the lead will transition to a sales-qualified lead (SQL). The direct sales push begins now, hopefully providing fruitful results—meetings, purchases, you get the drift. This is where your big goals are fueled! 

How do you create goals that align with your funnel?

Just as marketing activities need to be personalized to a user’s position in the funnel/buyer’s journey, so do the KPIs and goals you’re tracking towards.

For TOFU activities where the goal is to increase awareness of your company or products, tracking metrics tied to website traffic and new leads will be the most accurate. This may include a look at overall traffic numbers, such as sessions, pageviews, and users, as well as the sources of your traffic.

When developing KPIs related to users within the middle of the funnel and consideration stages, you’ll want to set goals around behaviors that indicate a deeper interest in your business. Two of the best metrics to measure at this stage are the number of form completions and conversion rate from lead to MQL. 

Lastly, creating goals for users at the bottom of your funnel should be tied closely to sales. Tracking the number of contact form submissions (such as a Request for Quote), meetings set with your sales representatives, and conversions to SQLs can provide a realistic picture of success in this stage.

How do you track the success of a campaign?

Tracking your performance can be done in many ways. We suggest using one of the many helpful tools available online, including HubSpot, Google Analytics, and other marketing performance technology such as Databox. Once you input your newly strategized goals into these tools, leverage their automated emails and notifications to stay up-to-date on your progress and successes.

Overall, setting goals that align with your marketing and sales funnels begins with understanding your prospective customers’ questions, wants, desires, and needs. When you understand the content you need to produce in order to meet your KPIs, your goals will soon follow. 

Ready, Set, Goal

Tracking your marketing campaign is easy with useful tools like HubSpot and those mentioned above. But, it’s even easier when you partner with a team like Ready North, where we offer business-to-business solutions delivered exclusively on HubSpot. 

If your business is looking for a marketing partner to help set goals that align with your marketing and sales funnel and monitor the success of the campaign, we can help! Schedule a no-obligation consultation today.