Building an inbound marketing campaign can often seem daunting and can easily fall apart if it doesn’t have a specific structure and clear direction. Setting and reaching your goals in inbound campaigns will go smoothly, if you follow these five simple steps.

During a recent HubSpot training class, I learned more about SMART goal setting. I believe this has been around for a long time, but it was my first introduction to the process for building inbound marketing goals. It struck me as a simple, but powerful method to define any inbound campaign structure. The concept is based around five concepts that you need to research, answer and define to map out your goal.

The diagram below illustrates the basic structure and thoughts behind the segments.

In this example, we can use the system to set a reachable goal to increase visits to a website. You’ll want to keep in mind the resources you have available in personnel, time, content creation, etc. to meet your specific goal.

I think you can agree that this system is a powerful method to build more clearly defined goals for B2B inbound marketing campaigns. Just follow the outlined structure, provide your own metrics, research your benchmarks and resources and you can come away with a great set of marching orders for you and your team.

In a future blog, I’ll show an example of how to build a basic framework that will map out the steps necessary to achieve your goals and get everyone on the same page.

What are some tips you can share for defining goals in B2B inbound marketing campaigns?