For years, the SMART acronym has been used to help corporations and businesses set strategic goals for their business. These same core principles work perfectly for setting marketing goals that will propel your business’s marketing plan. Marketing experts like Hubspot use this goal setting formula in their inbound methodology.
Before developing a marketing plan for your business, its critical to first set goals for yourself and for your success. The SMART acronym is a great tool to use to enhance your marketing goals. The acronym stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely.
Specific
When setting marketing goals, its important to develop a specific goal instead of a general one. You want to pinpoint what is important, what is expected, and what you want to achieve. Do you want more visits to your website? Or do you want more leads or customers?
Measurable
Once you have developed a specific goal its important to give that goal a number. You want concrete criteria that can be measured toward attaining your goal. Measuring your progress helps you and your team stay on target to reaching your specific goal.
Attainable
Its good to develop specific and measurable goals, but you also want to check that your goals are realistic and reasonable. Ask yourself: Will we be able to meet this goal? Attainable goals help identify previously overlooked opportunities and bring you closer to achieving your goals.
Relevant
Relevance deals with the importance of your goals. Your goal is relevant to your business if it will help it grow, develop, and succeed. If your goals meet all the criteria above but aren’t relevant to the success of your business then the goals aren’t worth pursuing.
Timely
Last but not least, your goals need a time-frame and a target date. Having a deadline encourages you and your team to accomplish your goals before the target date, and prevents goals from being overtaken by the day-to-day crises that arise in organizations.
The Next Step
If you’ve developed SMART marketing goals, and you’re interested in more ways to optimize your marketing strategy, check out our free eBook:
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