What Are SMART Marketing Goals?

Marketers often focus on measuring the results achieved from their marketing efforts by looking at historical performance. However, one area a lot of marketers fail to focus on is setting SMART marketing goals for their inbound marketing campaigns. By using the SMART philosophy below, this can be a way to help combat this issue by helping you to create scalable and achievable goals for the marketing team to work to and be accountable for.

Whether you are creating yearly, quarterly, monthly or even daily goals for your marketing team, consider using the SMART process to establish what your focus and results should be.

By keeping this acronym in mind when preparing your objectives, your team will have a much better chance of sticking to and achieving your business goals. But what does SMART Marketing mean?

Specific

Creating general goals such as “increase our social media following” just isn’t enough if you want to be SMART. It is vital to think about how you will achieve your objective by setting concise goals that sum up what you want to achieve, how you will get there and by when.

Measurable

Goals can only be productive if they are measurable. Following on from the above example, with a  goal to simply to increase followers without a clear figure to aim for, there is no way to know when you have increased your social media followers by a significant enough amount to claim you have reached your goal. Instead consider how much you want your social media following to grow and include a figure that you feel comfortable with, however it is still a challenge to push your team to excel.

Attainable

Sticking with the example above, it may be nice to aim to double your social media following in a month, however is it actually attainable? Probably not, by being realistic when setting your goal you will be able to stay motivated to reach your objective by your set deadline.

Relevant

When setting out your objective it is key that it is something that will actually benefit your company. There is no point in focusing your efforts on an area of the business that is already working at capacity. No matter how short or long term your objective may be, unless you can see the relevance in improving this area, do not include it in your SMART marketing plan.

Time-Bound

So you have thought about what you want to achieve and created an attainable, measurable figure, which you can aim for now you need to make sure that you set a deadline that you will stick to.  You will also need to make sure that if your goal will have an impact, or be reliant on another aspect of your company, you will need a secondary goal in place to cover any influx of work that may be an outcome to your primary objective.

Download our SMART goals calculator to start preparing the objectives for your business. It will  take you step by step through creating your next set of goals to allow you demonstrate tangible results.