How

to

set

SMART

Marketing

Goals

The start of the New Year is a great time to re-evaluate your progression and set brand new marketing goals. Setting practical and achievable goals is essential to any business, and SMART marketing goals can help you to achieve just that. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound but how do you actually use this?

Specific Goals

Make sure your goals are well-defined, specific goals are much more likely to be accomplished than a generalised goal. For example if you set your goal to something such as ‘Get more business’ you are not sure when it is achieved and you may be not as focused achieving this goal as opposed to a more specific one.

Measurable

Referring back to the specific goals, a goal without an outcome is like a football match without a referee, you are never quite sure who has won. This can be applied to business, in that you must always set goals which can be measured, this will keep you focused on the target.

Attainable

Rome wasn’t built in a day, so don’t aim too high. Goals should push you to achieve them but not stretch you beyond your limits. A good idea would be to have a look at realistic growth within your industry so you know where a good aim would be.

Relevant

Will achieving your goals help you to grow your company? Will they help you to achieve your long term goals? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when setting goals. Essentially the most important question would be – Is this relevant? Or will this goal benefit the business in the long term?

Time-bound

When setting a goal, setting a time frame in which to achieve this goal is essential to the success of your marketing efforts. Having a time frame will push you to commit to your goals and achieve them as soon as possible.

A good example of a well thought out SMART goal would be; ‘Achieve 20 social media leads this month’ this goal meets all of the SMART points.

Specific Goals: it is giving a specific number of leads they would like to achieve

Measurable: Goal will be achieved when they reach 20 leads 

Attainable: after reviewing previous performance this is attainable 

Relevant:Yes! Target audience uses social media often so performing well in that section is important

Time-bound: They have given themselves a month to achieve this goal

SMART goals are an essential tool used when working within the Inbound Methodology. Download our guide to learn how it can help you grow: