Marketing is all about setting and achieving goals that translate into success for the brand. However, setting goals can be tricky because marketers can easily get lost in the details and miss the big picture. This is where smart marketing adds value to campaign planning and execution.
SMART marketing defines a brand’s goals. They outline the marketing team’s intentions, provide clear direction for team members to follow, and offer executives information to review and support.
Smart Marketing?
SMART marketing goals are concrete targets that you strive to achieve over a specified period.
These goals should be meticulously drafted by an administrator, and his/her direct report to set them up for success.
“SMART” is an acronym that describes the essential characteristics of each goal.
When it comes to creating communities and retaining an audience, we don’t always see quick results.
As a result, it can be strife to prove that our efforts will provide an ROI.
But marketers know “the grind” too well. We’re accustomed to these kinds of occupational hazards.
And we know that the secret of genuinely spectacular marketing is well-founded and measurable goals.
So we’ve accommodated the SMART goal framework to support us in our goal-setting efforts.
We should be establishing SMART marketing goals. But…
What Are SMART Marketing Goals?
SMART marketing goals are a framework for a thriving goal perspective.
It stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely.
When it comes to gaining buy-in and winning over even the ordinary skeptical executive, the SMART goal framework can move masses.
More importantly, using it presents you the opportunity to define the purpose of your efforts.
Think through each part of the framework to identify your goals and how you’ll contain them.
Operating through this framework will also help you determine whether your goals are possible, and when accurately, it will be accomplished.
Every marketing force should come from your marketing goals.
And setting SMART marketing goals in buying is a great way to get started.
When companies are looking to get excited with creed marketing, they go through to the tools too frequently.
What are the most competitive keywords to rank for?
Should we advance in this trade display or sponsor that event?
Should we be composing content four times a day or fifty-seven times a month?
SEO, paid search, content, and social efforts are vital to a successful marketing approach that eludes siloing.
But they are simply tools.
Your troubles will be much more prosperous (and a whole lot more relaxed to get off the spot) if you start with goals and KPIs.
Preceding SMART Marketing Goals
So we’ve adapted the SMART goal framework to assist us in our goal-setting efforts.
We should be establishing SMART goals in marketing.
Here’s how we work through each step in the SMART goal framework, and to set goals for integrated marketing efforts:
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STEP ONE: Specific Marketing Goals
Define goals for both revenue and your brand
The goals you define for your company — both for your specific marketing initiatives and for your company as a complex body – set the tone. They communicate what’s a preference, and what you hope to accomplish and ensure accountability.
It’s crucial that when you’re setting these goals that you’re setting them both for revenue and the success of the brand.
STEP TWO: Measurable Marketing Goals
Determine key performance indicators (KPIs)
Defining success early on is crucial to estimate your ongoing progress. What criteria, or key performance indicators (KPIs), will you use to demonstrate that you’ve achieved success?
However, establishing KPIs for brand marketing goals tend to be a little bit more idiosyncratic.
Depending on the brand goals that you’re setting, key performance indicators in integrated marketing may include things like:
- increase in conversation, amplification & applause (on your blog and social media)
- increase in natural social shares of your content
- growth in the percentage of both branded and non-branded SEO traffic
- decrease in bounce rate
- increase in page depth
- increase in micro conversions/goal completions
- jump in the proportion of new visits to your website
- increase in form submissions
- increase (or perhaps decrease) in phone calls
- decrease in funnel abandonment rate
- increase in revenue
- increase in visitor loyalty
Matching both revenue and brand KPIs to your specific goals will make it much easier to measure your efforts, communicate success, and determine whether there needs to be an adjustment in your integrated marketing efforts.
STEP THREE: Attainable Marketing Goals
Assess the ability to accomplish your goals setting marketing goals is the natural part.
They are determining whether you can achieve what you’ve set before you is another story.
You certainly don’t want to set goals that are so steep you’ll never accomplish them, or are so comfortable that they weren’t worth setting in the first place.
Use data to figure out whether your goals are attainable.
One attainable marketing goal example: If you’re shooting for a 10% increase in subscribers and subscriptions have been steadily increasing by 6% over the last three months, getting to 10% with some additional efforts and new strategic direction is most likely attainable.
STEP FOUR: Realistic Marketing Goals
Verify that what you’re proposing is practical.
The Realistic SMART goal step provides an opportunity to chat with your team about whether the goals are realistic.
Is your team up for the challenge? Do they think it can be done?
Combined with a discussion about the time-sensitive nature of these goals (discussed in the step below), present your logic to your team and ask for feedback (and ultimately buy-in).
Once you’ve matched your goals and KPIs with actual time-sensitive expectations in the next step, you’re ready to develop a useful, goal-oriented marketing strategy.
STEP FIVE: Timely Marketing Goals
Designate short and long term marketing goals
How long will it take to reach the goals you’ve set forth? Match your goals to timeframes.
Let’s look back at the timeliness of our previous marketing goal example of increasing software subscriptions by 10%.
How long will it take to achieve a 10% increase in software subscriptions?
How much time is necessary to become a thought leader in your space? Discuss the reality of how long it will take to accomplish your goals early on.
This will make for a much more peaceful, integrated marketing adventure.
Inherently you’ll achieve some of your marketing goals in the short term (3/6/9 months), and some will require more time (12/18/24 months) to accomplish.
And that’s why it’s so important to address expectations of delivery as you’re setting goals.
Why Do SMART Marketing Objectives Signify?
SMART marketing objectives value because they support you in achieving your goals.
When you design goals that you can measure and are essential to your campaign, you’re more likely to achieve them.
These objectives assist you in creating a plan of action.
It permits you to generate a step-by-step-process to relinquish your bigger goals.
SMART marketing objectives contribute clarity and direction for your team.
If you have a goal to boost revenue by $100,000 for the month, your team won’t know where to begin.
Your team won’t know the best marketing techniques or approaches to reach those aims.
SMART marketing objectives split down larger goals.
Instead of looking at a significant purpose like increasing your monthly sales by $100,000, your team will look at more modest goals, like gaining 40 new leads.
It breaks down bigger goals and helps your team see themselves achieving those goals.
Who Delivers SMART Marketing Goals?
Before we jump on to talk about how SMART goal-setting can fit into a marketing plan workflow, consider a vital alternative ‘A’ pattern: Assignable.
Making a goal deliverable, we must realize people capable of accomplishing it.
That might mean studying within your own company’s staff, or it might mean commissioning an agency or freelancer to present their specialist work.
We value profiling the skill levels within your organization to determine whether you can accomplish a goal using an in-house talent or whether you’ll need to engage undeniable talent.
When to Use SMART Marketing Goal Planning?
A brand’s identity and goals should be based on a comprehension of the environment it is working in – especially in terms of the possibilities currently open to it.
This means we need to place an essential step before goal-setting in the strategy formulation process: a situational analysis.
One useful situational analysis tool is the SWOT analysis, which encourages marketers to think about Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Following the SWOT rule, you must use social media management tool like Social Champ, to keep your strategies up to date with your presence on social media!
Social Champ Features
How Do You Write a Smart Marketing Objective?
When establishing personal goals, specificity is power.
For example, just stimulating yourself to “do more work” is way too uncertain, as you’ve got no way of tracking your journey, and no endpoint.
Simply put, if your intentions aren’t quantifiable, achieving progress can be challenging.
SMART marketing goals are the key, as you can break them down into five quantifiable circumstances.
We’ll investigate this in more detail shortly, but before that, we’ll discuss more the significance of setting goals.
Then we’ll discuss how the building itself works and go over some samples of SMART goals.
Without a clear understanding of what you want your team to complete, it will be tough to quantify” success.”
Contemplate setting goals that provide value not only to the company but also to the team members working to achieve them.
Address the ‘what’ to be made, the ‘how’ and the ‘when’ for each goal.
We recommend addressing the ‘why’ too.
Show that accomplishing these goals will bring value to the organization and ‘in what ways’ team members will grow from reaching them.
When recognizing specific marketing objectives to support your long-term goals, it is common practice to apply the generally used SMART mnemonic.
You will know that SMART is used to assess the suitability of objectives set to drive different strategies or improve the full range of business processes.
5 Examples of SMART Marketing Goals You Can Put Into Action
Let’s take a look at some particular examples of SMART goals, concentrating on those you may set at business or clients.
Define a Specific Outcome
“Are our goals specific enough to achieve the coveted ends and challenge my team?”
Each goal must define a specific outcome.
The goal should include enough detail so that the people involved learn what results are expected.
Generalities only create uncertainty and lead to poor results.
Just having an objective to “get more business” is not necessary for anyone.
- Digital channel contribution objective. Achieve a 10% online revenue contribution within two years.
Defined Measurable Results
“Can your success be quantified? What does it look like?”
An objective without a defined, measurable result is like playing football and not keeping the score.
Numbers are essential for keeping track of your progress toward a goal and determining the expected outcome.
It is impossible to know if an objective has been reached unless it can be measured.
- Acquisition objective. Acquire 50,000 new online customers this financial year at an average cost per acquisition (CPA) of £30 with an average profitability of £5.
Be attainable
“Is your team qualified to achieve the goals set? Do they need more resources?”
Determine what it will take to achieve success… If that isn’t practical, then figure out how to modify your goals so that the ends are attainable.
Perhaps some talent needs to be outsourced so your core team can focus on their areas of expertise?
Goals Must be Realistic
“How does the goal fit into the bigger picture of the organization’s mission?”
Goals must be formed in the context of current economic conditions and realities of the business climate.
It would be unrealistic to set a goal of increasing sales by 25 percent when a recession is looming on the horizon, and when three new competitors just opened up down the street.
- Conversion objective. Increase the average order value of online sales to £42 per customer.
Deadlines to meet a Timely Goal
“Can your goal be achieved in a realistic timeframe?”
Experience shows that goals are not reached if there is no deadline specified. Efforts toward achieving a goal will meander if a time expiration does not exist.
- Engagement objective. Increase active customers purchasing at least once a quarter to 300,000 in a market (a hurdle rate metric)
More Specific Examples and Execution of Smart Marketing
Writing an E-Book
Writing a book is a moderately tall task. However, we’ve spoken about the benefits of creating an e-book previously, so it’s a goal deserving perseveration.
Reaching a Blog Earnings Milestone
Even when managing a WordPress platform, getting a blog to the tip where it earns your business needs a lot of work.
However, it’s also something you can turn into a SMART goal. Here’s how:
- Specific: Firstly, you’ll want to set a figure to aim for. This will be specific to you, although $100 for a fresh blog is a good start.
- Measurable: Of course, it’s easy to hold your success here since money is all numbers, and there are several associated metrics you can track.
- Attainable: As we said, it’s a sensible target for a somewhat new blog to bring in at least $100 per month.
- Relevant: This type of goal would be appropriate for many, including associate marketers, or someone looking to sell a product (such as the previous e-book example).
- Time-Bound: Again, this will be based on your organization, although we’d suggest a reasonable six-month window to complete it.
Improving Your Organic Traffic Figures
As you may be aware, having SEO expertise means the sky’s limit regarding traffic figures.
When you’re creating a new website, it makes sense to set a SMART goal explicitly related to this metric. Here’s an example:
- Specific: You can pick a figure that works for you here, although 1,000 visitors per month is a nice round number.
- Measurable: Keeping track of traffic is quite simple if you have access to an analytics tool.
- Attainable: 1,000 visitors per month are nothing to scoff at, and it’s also achievable if you have a decent grasp on SEO basics.
- Relevant: Traffic is one of the critical indicators for any website’s success. Once you have a decent baseline, you can move onto tracking conversions.
- Time-Bound: As you might know, it can take a while for new websites to gain traction. In our experience, you should give yourself at least six months of leeway before you expect any significant traffic.
Specific and measured goals are the core to success, no matter what you’re studying to achieve.
Three Challenges in SMART Marketing
Conclusion: From SMART to SMARTER marketing Objectives
Whether you go on and use SMART or any other goal-setting framework, the thing we want you to take off from this article is that active goals require particular thought.
Anyone can pluck a nice-sounding goal out of thin air – but beneficial goals, ones that can get completed, are a work of approach.
Regardless of whether your terminal aims are financial, personal, or even based singularly on metrics, using a structure such as the SMART specifications can help you succeed in what you set out to do.
By making sure the goals you set are followed with the five SMART criteria (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound), you have a hold on which to base all of your focus and decision-making.
Once you’ve completed a SMART goal, you can scale up and start again, safe in the knowledge there’s a solid backbone to your strategy.
The more time you put into setting your goals, the better you will be to bring them to fruition.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are the 5 smart goals?
2. Whats does smart mean?
3. What are the 4 goals of marketing?
Be Smart. Happy Marketing!
