A wise man once said, “don’t dwell on the past”, and this is great advice for marketers. Of course, looking back at the progress you have made has value - you need to know when things aren’t working - but focusing on the future and what you want to achieve is just as important.

The SMART marketing strategy

How can you measure your success if you don’t know what you want to achieve? Smart marketers have their eyes on the future using the SMART marketing strategy; Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely to define Marketing Goals to help their business succeed. If your goals do not consider these factors they are not smart!

Goals vary from business to business, but they must be fully aligned with your company’s overall objectives. This will also help make sure that your boss and the wider business support your marketing efforts.

Download our free template for defining your SMART Marketing goals

Every business wants more leads and more customers, but to achieve this a tangible plan that details how you will achieve your goals is required. You need to know:

  • who your target audience is;
  • what tactics you will use to reach them;
  • what messaging you will use.

The majority of marketers have shared aims, focused around three main areas: visits, contacts, and customers.

Set manageable goals

Goals may be set on an annual, quarterly, or a monthly basis, but it is important to make sure goals are manageable! For example, if you have set a goal to get 150 leads per month, break it down into weekly targets that seem more achievable, allowing you to track your progress and change your strategy to ensure you are still able to achieve your goals while you still have time to do something about it!

To help decide and achieve your goals you should categorise them. You may want to focus on visits in the early stages of your website if you are already getting good conversion of visits into leads and leads into customers, but desire additional visits to increase volumes. If you are happy with the amount of traffic to your content, but you are not getting enough leads for sales, then the focus should be on contacts. If you are satisfied with the volume of traffic to your content, or your website visitors are converting by filling in forms but the leads are not turning into customers, your focus must be on customers.

Once you have decided on your goal and category you need to set the value of that goal, deciding both a timescale and also how much each goal is worth to your business, for example how much a lead is worth.

With any business objective there will likely be obstacles to success and your SMART marketing goals are no different. But by planning ahead and setting out the obstacles that you may experience you can prepare strategies to reduce the risk of these affecting your goal success.

To help set your SMART marketing goals, download our SMART goals calculator to start preparing the objectives for your business. The tool will help you to create your goals and allow you to demonstrate tangible results.