How to set SMART marketing goals

Goals are a great way of helping to drive your business forward. It’s often said that just the act of writing a goal down can make it much more likely to become a reality.

But it’s important that you set realistic goals that you can actually achieve (and that will help grow your business in the way you want). There’s lots of insight and research done into goal setting, but our favourite as to be the SMART goal structure.

SMART marketing goals are:

• Specific,
• Measurable,
• Achievable,
• Realistic, and
• Time scaled

So lets break this down

Specific

Your goals must include some sort of deadline or numbers (or both). For instance, saying you want more website visitors isn’t specific enough. But saying you want to increase website visitors by 15% within six months is.

Measureable

By stating that you want to increase visitors by 15%, you’re giving yourself a very clear mark of success. Using a package like Google Analytics will help you track your progress.

Achievable

Think about how you’re going to achieve your goals. If you’re not currently using social media or Google AdWords, then if you employ these tactics there’s a very good chance you’ll be able to increase website visitor by 15%. However, if you’d set the target to 90% or only gave yourself one month, you might find you’re set for failure before you’ve even started.

Realistic

Think about the resources you have in place. If you plan to start using Google AdWords to boost website traffic, think about who is going to manage this. Do you have the in-house knowledge and time, or is this something you’ll have to outsource? If you plan to outsource it, you need to think about the cost involved in this.

Timescaled

Finally you need to make sure you have a timescale in place. You can’t have an open ended goal. This goal sets the increase in traffic to come within six months. After six months you can review your progress. Hopefully you will have achieved it and can move onto your next SMART goal. If not, think about why you failed. Was it that you didn’t sufficiently work towards achieving it, or was it not so SMART in the first place?

As you can see, SMART marketing goals are a really quick and easy way of making sure your goals are relevant and achievable. Have a go at setting some today and see how quickly they can help give your business a boost!