Online Marketing and SEO, Content Marketer, Trainer and Coach
How to Set SMART Marketing Goals For Success
It’s been said that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Given that, when you plan, what are you planning for? Success, right? Well, how do you know when you’ve achieved it? That’s where goal setting comes in. Furthermore, success means different things to different people.
Why SMART Goals?
When setting goals for your marketing and everything else in your business, it’s important to make them SMART goals.
SMART stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Time-bound
Here’s why:
You set them in small bites that you can handle.
They’re doable.
You know if you hit (or missed) the mark.
What use is setting a goal if you can’t know if you’ve reached it or not?
No matter what is going on, the good, old-fashioned marketing principles still apply:
What’s constantly changing is the media and the many marketing choices you have to reach your target.
Here’s how to make your marketing goals SMART:
Specific:
“Making more money” is not specific enough. Start with how much you want to make in the next year, then divide it by 12. Based on that number, how many new clients, repeat clients, and sales (whatever) do you need to reach that monetary goal each month? Here’s a sample of a specific goal:
2 new clients each month
Measurable:
Give your goal a set number. Continuing with the above goal, the question is: what do we have to do to get 2 new clients per month? Let’s say you need to start with 10 hot leads. Given a 1% acquisition or conversion rate from your website, you need to have…
1000 visitors to your website each month.
Attainable:
Are 1000 visitors to your website each month attainable? Sure, but you have to put in a lot of sweat equity. The more you blog, the more visitors you attract. That’s 250 visitors per week. If every time you post a blog post and share it on social media, you generate 100 visits to your site, then you need to publish…
OK. Now let’s get real. Can you manage to put out 2-3 blog posts a week? Yes. However, that takes time. But it’s time well spent if it’s going to attract the new clients you need to reach that monetary goal! In addition to blogging, you have to also be actively posting on social media.
Time-bound:
Now, you’ve got 30 days in which to reach your goal. Going month-to-month is way easier to handle than a whole year at a time.
Other goals you may want are:
100 followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter so you can start seeing insights and analytics
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