Today is January 1st, 2015. Where has the time gone???
Are you ready for your best year ever? I know I am.
To get ready for the New Year and purpose to have my best year ever, here are some things I have done that I hope can be a help to you.
1. Clean off the desktop / laptop / phone etc. One of the first things I do is create a folder on my computer called 2014 Files. I then pull ALL my files from the last year into that folder. I then create new folders for 2015 and anything that I know is relevant I pull it into the folder or as I use it I pull it into the 2015 folders. This insures a fresh clean start each year without having to delete files. I also don’t have to waste hours going through my files and deciding which one’s I should delete or keep. Since I have Time Machine enabled on my mac if my computer ever does get too full, I can easily delete the older files as well.
2. Set Goals. I will say that I am a goal orientated person. If I don’t have a goal, I feel lost. There are so many programs out there teaching you on the importance of setting goals and how to make sure you stay on track to achieve your goals, so I won’t go into that … today.
What I do want to discuss is the three main goals you should set for your online marketing.
The three big goals are:
- Revenue
- Leads
- Prospects
…and if you wanted a fourth one, you could add “Traffic” to the list!
Goal 1: Revenue
First set a revenue goal. Look at what your online marketing generated last year and set a goal for the next 12 months. I like to break it down into monthly because then it is easier to measure throughout the year.
For example: if last year you generated 120K of total online revenue, that works out to be about 10K per month. Let’s say that your goal for 2015 is to double that so your first goal would look something like this:
Revenue Goal: Generate 20K of monthly revenue by the end of 2015.
Goal 2: Leads
The next step is to figure out how many qualified leads you will need to generate your revenue goal. In our scenario if you want to generate 20K per month and your average transaction size is 2K, then you will need to generate 10 clients that will pay you an average of 2K per month.
If you know you need 10 clients, the next step is to think about your sales process. How many people do you have to talk to to be able to acquire one client? In other words, what is the conversion rate of your sales process. If you have to talk to 10 qualified people to get 1 client, then you will need to talk to 100 qualified people to achieve your goal of 10 clients.
Since this would be your yearly goal, then you would take the number of 100 and divide it by 12 months. That would put it around 8-9 sales conversations but there is another factor to consider.
Client Retention. In order to reach our goal you need to consider the lifetime value of your clients. How long do your clients generally stay onboard? 3 months? 6 months? 18 months? If it is less than 12 months, you will need to acquire more than the 10 clients to meet your yearly goals. Let’s not get bogged down in the math and just say we need about 120 qualified leads over the year to achieve your revenue goal.
Your goal might look like this:
Leads Goal: Generate 10 qualified leads per month that result in 10 sales conversations and 1 client.
Goal 3: Prospects
The next thing to consider is how many people that opt-in to your email marketing list are qualified and ready to make a purchasing decision. If you are capturing leads from your site (like you should), how many of those prospects are qualified and convert to leads.
There are ways to improve this metric but to start, think about what your average was for the last year. How many people opted in to your email marketing list? How many sales conversations did you have with the prospects from your list? How many prospects will you need to generate the 10 qualified leads? Let’s say that only 5% of the people that opt-in to your email marketing are qualified, that would mean that you will need to generate 200 prospects per month to achieve your leads goal.
Prospects Goal: Generate 200 opt-ins to email marketing list per month.
Bonus Goal: Traffic
The next step is to consider how to reach the 200 people to opt-in to your email marketing list! Some people think that there is paid and free traffic online. In reality, all traffic is paid traffic. There is a cost to anything you do online to create traffic. Traffic can easily be purchased with ppc ads or it can be earned with an Inbound Marketing strategy. Either way, there is a cost to implement.
Let’s say you are depending on SEO (search engine optimization), to drive traffic to your site. If your opt-in rate is again about 5% then you will need to generate about 4000 unique visitors to your site each month.
Traffic Goal: Generate 4000 unique visitors to site per month.
There you have it! Three Big Goals for your online marketing for 2015.
In our next blog post I will go into how to map out your different strategies on how to reach your yearly goals!