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In Part I, we discussed how to evaluate the success of your website using the SMART technique. In this series, we will further discuss the principles of SMART when measuring your marketing goals.

If a website doesn’t get traffic, then it will eventually get out of business. Growing your traffic will require you to create some kind of performance targets.

SEO

A website that is not found when Googled is bound to fail. This means, you must invest in SEOs. Keywords can be found from other high ranking competitive websites. SEO is not a one-time job, rather, you must continue to work on you SEO at all times.

Subscriber

Once visitors find your website, your goal is for a quick conversion if possible or at least for them to come back again. This an be accomplished by creating a subscriber list. List building is much easier if the signup page is placed at a visible location with in the website, and an incentive is given to the visitor to opt-in.

Inbound Link Building

Inbound link building definitely helps you to be SMART. Backlinks boost your SEO and increase traffic while creating great brand awareness. Achieving a huge number of backlinks might be very challenging, but if you put your efforts, you will be able to succeed.

Content Publishing

Search engines love fresh contents as do humans. Even though it might take up to 90 days or more for search engines to fully index your website, publishing high-quality contents and blogs on a regular basis will bring huge benefits. In addition to blogs, you can also publish some additional contents like ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and surveys.

Measuring Your Marketing Goals

Not everything needs to be measured. In fact, collecting all kinds of information might lead to complications when you evaluate the results. Having said that, here are some of the key metrics that you can focus on:

Total Visits: The total number of website visits is a direct representation of how well it’s performing.

Page Views: Page views help you understand which specific pages of your website are more popular than others.

Unique Visitors: Repeat visitors are not half as contributing to your business as the unique visitors. After all, every unique visitor is a potential customer.

Traffic Sources: It is important to check where most of your traffic is coming from. Are your visitors using desktops or smartphones? Where are they based in? These factors can help you in improving the marketing campaign.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is defined by the number of visitors that leave your website almost instantly. If you observe a high bounce rate, then you may want to check your website to see what’s causing it.

Backup Technology Limited (BTL) is always available to help its partners and resellers with their marketing needs. Please contact BTL at https://www.backup-technolo gy.com/about-btl/contact

So, you have set up a beautiful website that has powerful and informative content for your prospects and other relevant visitors. You have added contact forms, explained your services clearly, and added important links. This should do just fine, right? Unfortunately, the answer is “no”.

Your marketing efforts must not stop at merely creating and hosting a quality website. The Internet is a big platform where a number of IT companies are vying for the same spot that you are after. Thus, traffic gets distributed unevenly, and if you want more of that to reach your website, then you must establish concrete IT marketing goals, and measure them for evaluation.

An ideal website for an IT business must have SMART goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

Creating the SMART goals

With SMART goals you can cover all the major aspects of your marketing campaign, and make sure you are on the right track.

Specific

Goals that are vague have no value. Thus, if your marketing team needs to focus on creating a “good” website, and drive “excellent” results, then you must revise the entire strategy altogether. “Good” results don’t mean anything. Even if you want “good results”, you must be able to put it into numbers that define how “good” it is. Will you consider a 1,000 unique visitors per day good? Or do you need higher numbers to qualify as “good”.

Measurable

Borrowing the previous example, you must be able to measure your goals. This allows you to track your progress, and take actions accordingly. So, if it was your goal to convert at least 10 leads per week through your website forms, and if you are getting 5-6 leads conversions, you can make adjustments in your marketing campaign for improvement.

Attainable

It goes without saying that the marketing goals that you have set must be realistic and attainable. Goals that are not practical will not only waste time and resources, but also hurt the morale of the marketing team.

Relevant

A lot of thought and planning must go into creating the goals so that the team’s efforts are not in vain. For example, while a huge amount of brochure downloads might be good for business, but if the majority of these downloads are through bots, then you might need to revise the assets you have uploaded for downloads.

Timely

Each goal must have a fixed timeline. It doesn’t matter if a goal is to be attained within a month, a year, or more, a deadline is a must. This helps in keeping your team focused, and also increases the overall productivity.

To be continued in Part II.