How Smart Goals Create A Smart Marketing Strategy

• By Amy Kenigsberg, CO2 and co-founder of K2 Global Communications

When only 61% of marketers believe that their marketing strategy is effective, and 58% of marketers are fighting to target or segment their audience, you should ask: How can marketers be smarter about marketing strategies?

The answer is goal setting, and more specifically – SMART goal setting. SMART means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound.

One of the most difficult marketing tasks, however, is an effort that can help marketers focus, be motivated to succeed, and prove how successful they are.

SMART Goals base your marketing hopes and dreams on reality, control your team’s work direction, and provide benchmarks for future marketing plans.

SMART is not just an acronym; It is a proven goal-setting framework that helps companies and individuals set and achieve realistic goals.

Does Smart Goal Really Work?

A survey by Clifford Chi on HubSpot cited a survey of 76 percent of participants who actually wrote down their goals, the steps they took to achieve those goals, and the weekly progress report states that the goals were achieved – 33 percent more than those who did not. More annoying to put them on paper. He also cited a U.S. survey of 300 respondents in which 52 percent said using a smart framework helped them achieve their goals more often if they did not use such a framework.

Here are ten reasons why SMART marketing goals are so effective:

• Build team coordination by working towards a unified objective.
• Provide clear direction and sharpen the 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 know how their personal efforts contribute to a larger goal.
• Find the right roadmap for your goal – and when / where the finish line will be.
• Save time because all activities will be goal-oriented.
• Evaluate your efforts and learning lessons in terms of strengths and areas for improvement.
• Avoid failure by setting very simple or very unrealistic goals.

Do’s and Don’ts to help you get started on your smart goals

Writers block can affect even the best professional wordmeaths, so here are a few pointers that will help you overcome that hurdle while practicing writing your smart goals:

Tax:

• Use active words that entice readers to work – such as words Start, distribute, cut, speed up.
• Give meaning and value to your smart goals for the customer.
• Be ambitious but realistic.
• Write smart goals that reflect where you want your brand / company to go.
• Be clear, specific and grainy, even if you have to overdo it.
• Include reasonable KPIs that are too high or too low.
• Align goals with excessive organizational goals.

Don’t:

• Use blurry, confusing, and large image language.
• Mix dreams and hard, realistic, measurable, time-based goals (or luck with real effort).
• Fear of failure to reach your goal; Instead, plan how you can get around the roadblocks.
• Confuse ‘desire’, ‘want’ or ‘desire’ with a goal that you clearly want to achieve.
• Make a goal too big or too wide – smaller, more specific objectives are more likely to be achieved.
• Lose sight of your core business.
• Forget the importance of priorities to avoid being overwhelmed.

Example: Five Smart Goals for Small Business

1. Increase positive customer reviews by 25 percent in 12 months.
2. Increase sales Cold Call by 5 percent in six months.
3. Create a marketing plan for a new product in 4 weeks.
4. Take control of the money by repaying 50 percent of the business loan in 24 months.
5. Increase the market share for your top product line in the NE market in 1 year by 10 percent

Example: 5 smart goals for business development

1. Reduce operating costs by ten percent by moving to a more affordable area.
2. Increase customer response time by 50 percent by increasing the number of trained staff from five to ten.
3. Improve operational efficiency by automating three major production processes.
4. Increase the potential bank customers by opening five new branches in disadvantaged areas
5. Reduce employee turnover from 15 percent to 5 percent through improved training and new rewards.

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

Smart goal	What does this mean?	Why it matters	Tip
Specific	Define your goals / s precisely.	It gives you a much greater chance of achieving your goal than your goal being vague, vague or obscure.	Answer your goal of who, what, why, where and when.
Measurable	Stick to your goals with specific success metrics.	It lets you know how you are progressing and if you are on track to teach your goals.	Ask yourself: How do I know when I’ve achieved my goal?
Achievable	Determine how you can achieve your goals with your resources.	It motivates your team and drives them to realize your goals.	List the knowledge, skills, and abilities you need so that your goals are not too simple or too unrealistic.
Relevant	Make sure your marketing goals align with the overall purpose of your business.	Excludes unnecessary or unnecessary work that may prevent you from being really important.	Adjust your SMART goal statement to reflect the company’s bottom-line goals – be it rebranding, increasing app usage, or increasing customer loyalty.
Time bound	Make sure you have a deadline for achieving your goals.	It inspires you and gives you a sense of urgency towards achieving your goals.	Set long-term as well as short-term milestones to help you see progress.

Bonus tips

It’s not enough to set smart goals; You also need to increase the chances of getting them.

Here’s how:

• Set goals that you can control – or at least control your category
• Make sure your goals adapt to changing market conditions or the business environment
• Track your goals and connect them to your team’s daily output
• Share your smart goals with other project and company stakeholders
• Set up regular problem solving meetings
• Create marketing goals that complement each other, not isolate
• Align your smart goals with your marketing budget
• Make sure your team members have the resources to achieve your SMART goals

Examples of smart living goals

If you’re still unsure how to adapt your business to the SMART goal framework – these examples – SMART vs. So-Smart Goals – might help:

Smart goal for your blog

So smart goal – increase blog readers.

Smart goal

Specific: Achieve a 10% increase in traffic by increasing the frequency of publication from three posts per week to five posts per week.

Measurable: Metric – Total visits to a blog post.

Achievements: Our blog writers can write three posts per week instead of two, while our editor can add two posts in his editing responsibilities.

Relevant: Our overall marketing goal is to create more sales leads for our new app. The more blogs that work with the benefits and uses of our app, the more traffic and sales opportunities.

Deadline: end of the month.

Smart goal for your customer support team

So smart goal – make more customers happy.

Smart goal

Fixed: Achieve 80% to 90% customer satisfaction rate in three months.

Measurable: Metrics – Customer Satisfaction Score, Post-Service Customer Survey.

Achievements: With a newly 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 retaining the customer and, subsequently, better sales.

Deadline: Three months.

Smart goal for your webinar signup

Ultra-smart goal – get more people to sign up.

Smart goal

Specific: Achieve 25% increase in signup through promotion on social media, email, website and blog.

Measurable: Metrics – The percentage of visitors to your social media / blog / website and email recipients who sign up in response to your marketing campaign.

Achievements: Signup has increased by 10% in previous webinars only through Facebook promotions.

Relevant: More webinar signups means more sales leads and potentially more close sales.

Deadline: Webinar day (two months).

Your Smart First Step: Sign up with a proven-successful marketing company

Marketing strategy is the heart and soul of your campaign – it directly affects the way you run your business and the overall direction of your marketing efforts. It needs to be focused, well-planned, well-known, comprehensive, measurable and medium to long-term. The important first step is to identify your goals.

Simplify your work 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 make sure they meet SMART criteria for goal setting – specific , Measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-limited.

About the author

Amy Kenigsberg is the COO and co-founder of K2 Global Communications, an introvert content, PR, and social media marketing agency. His intuitive perception of technology and his underlying perceptions of technology allow him to translate how and why he translates solutions in a clearly focused “what for me” communication.

He spent the first part of his career as a journalist, so he understood the need for media. Nicknamed ‘The Bulldog’ by a client, he is famous for his determination to reach your target audience. While out of the office, she reads, exercises, and manages a family of five. Amy holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MBA from the University of Kansas.