How SMART Goals Make for a Smarter Marketing Strategy

Written by Consuelo Reinberg | Jul 12, 2023 8:59:00 AM

When only 61% of marketers believe their marketing strategy is effective, and 58% of marketers are struggling to target or segment their audience, it behooves you to ask: How can marketers get smarter about marketing strategy? The answer is goal setting, and more specifically - SMART goals setting. SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.

One of the most difficult marketing tasks, it is nevertheless the one effort that can help marketers focus, get motivated to succeed, and prove just how successful they are.

SMART goals ground your marketing hopes and dreams in reality, control your team’s work direction, and provide the benchmarks for future marketing plans.

SMART is more than just an acronym, It’s a proven goal-setting framework that helps companies and individuals set and achieve realistic objectives.

10 reasons why SMART marketing goals are so effective:

Create team cohesion by working toward a unified purpose
Provide clear direction and sharpen focus
Determine which data collection protocols to use to reach your marketing goals
Prioritize tasks and increase team productivity
Help your team become more organized and make their progress more trackable
Achieve clear communication and a more aligned and motivated team who knows how their individual efforts contribute to a larger goal
Know the exact roadmap toward your goal - and when/where the finish line will be
Save time because all activities will be goal-oriented
Evaluate the success of your efforts and lessons learned in terms of strengths and areas for improvement
Avoid failure by setting too-general or too-unrealistic goals

Here’s a simple SMART goals template to make goal setting easier (and effective):

SMART Goals	What It Means	Why It’s Important	Tip
Specific	Precisely define your goal/s	Gives you a far greater chance of achieving your goal than if your goal were vague, unclear, or imprecise	Answer the who, what, why, where, and when of your goal
Measurable	Tie your goals to specific success metrics	Lets you know how you’re progressing and if you’re on track to teaching your goal	Ask yourself: How will I know when I’ve achieved my goal?
Achievable	Determine ways you can realize your goal, given your resources	Gives your team the encouragement and drive to realize your goal	List the knowledge, skills, and abilities you’ll need so your goals will neither be too easy nor too unrealistic
Relevant	Make sure your marketing goals align with your company’s/business’s overall objective	Eliminates unnecessary or immaterial work that could detract from what’s really important	Adjust your SMART goal statement to reflect the company’s bottom-line goal - whether it’s rebranding, increasing app usage, or increasing customer loyalty
Time-bound	Make sure your goal has a deadline for being achieved	Motivates you and gives you a sense of urgency toward achieving your goal	Establish long-term deadlines as well as short-term milestones to help you see your progress

Bonus tips

It’s not enough to set SMART goals; you also have to increase the likelihood of achieving them. Here’s how:

Set goals you can control - or at least ones your department can control
Make sure your goals can adapt to fit changing market situations or business environments
Track your goals and connect them to your team’s daily output
Share your SMART goals with other project and company stakeholders
Establish regular problem-solving meetings
Create marketing goals that complement, not detract from, each other
Align your SMART goals with your marketing budget
Make sure your team members have the resources to achieve your SMART goals

SMART goal examples to live by

If you’re still unsure how to adapt the SMART goals framework to your business - these examples can help:

SMART goals for your blog

Specific: Achieve a 10% increase in traffic by increasing publishing frequency from three posts per week to five posts per week

Measurable: Metric - total visits to a blog post

Attainable: Our blog writer can write three instead of two posts per week, while our editor can add two posts to her editing duties

Relevant: Our overall marketing objective is to generate more sales leads for our new app. The more blogs dealing with our app benefits and uses, the greater the traffic and sales opportunities

Time-bound: End of the month

SMART goals for your customer support team

Specific: Achieve an 80% to 90% customer satisfaction rate in three months

Measurable: Metrics - customer satisfaction score, post-service customer surveys

Attainable: With a new approved budget, we can add two more members to our customer support team and increase training

Relevant: Increased customer satisfaction promotes the company’s stated goal of customer retention and, subsequently, better sales.

Time-bound: three-month timeframe

SMART goals for your webinar signups

Specific: Achieve a 25% increase in signups via promotion in social media, email, website, and blogs

Measurable: Metrics - percentage of your social media/blog/website's visitors and email recipients that sign up in response to your marketing campaign

Attainable: Previous webinar saw a 10% increase in signups with a Facebook-only promotion

Relevant: More webinar signups mean more sales leads and potentially more closed sales

Time-bound: By the day of the webinar (two months)

Your SMART first step: Sign up with a proven-successful marketing agency

The marketing strategy is the heart and soul of your campaign - directly impacting the way you run your business and sets the overall direction of your marketing efforts. It needs to be focused, well-planned, well-informed, comprehensive, measurable, and medium- to long-term. The critical first step is identifying your goals.

Make your job easier by partnering with a marketing expert who can help you align these goals with your overall business objectives, super-target them to make it easier to measure success, and ensure they meet the SMART criteria for goal-setting – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-limited.

View full post