Who doesn’t want to be smart? Whether you’re setting goals for your inbound marketing efforts or overall marketing performance, achieving success starts with SMART goals, an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-Bound. After all, what good are marketing goals if they don’t make you look as SMART as you really are? Here’s our take on establishing SMART goals to achieve success. 
S – Specific
Rachel
The first step in setting your marketing goals is realizing what exactly it is your business is looking to accomplish. When asked what successful end results look like in an inbound marketing campaign, many may respond with answers such as “ROI,” “more customers,” or “a larger number of brand impressions.” These kinds of goals are not specific enough to determine the best tactics to achieve success. Examples of specific goals that will help drill down your overall objectives may include “increasing sales by five percent,” “achieving 10,000 new website views” or “gaining three new leads through blogging efforts.”
The more specific your goals, the more organized your overall strategy will be. Putting a time frame on these goals is also an essential factor in specificity, which Hollie will be discussing below. Specific goals are easier to measure and to evaluate post-campaign. If you find yourself and your team around the conference table trying to determine if you successfully reached your goals, it’s time to redevelop them, including as many details as possible.
M – Measurable
Christy
When we establish goals for our inbound marketing, we focus on three primary elements: visits (traffic to our website), contacts (lead generation), and customers (new business). The HubSpot platform makes it fairly easy to center business goals around these three elements, and also allow you to focus on certain aspects over others.
For instance, if you’re just launching a website, focusing on visits might be most beneficial, whereas if you have great traffic to your website but aren’t converting good leads, you should focus on contacts.
There are several tools that help us measure these metrics, such as setting up campaigns in our HubSpot portal, monitoring our dashboard metrics, analyzing reports on a weekly and monthly basis, as well as tracking in our Google Analytics portal. No matter the method, just make sure you’re evaluating the right data to analyze your performance on metrics that actually matter.
The key is establishing granular metrics that gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, keeping in mind historical performance and business objectives.
A – Attainable
Paul
If you want to visit the South Pole, that’s a laudable goal. But obviously, some preparation is in order before you head off to the world’s most remote and inhospitable continent. Perhaps it’s a far-fetched example as you scratch your pencil (or cursor) through your marketing goals for the weeks, months or year ahead. Or is it?
Any goal is a great goal if you’re prepared to reach it. An attainable goal is one that, given the limits on your resources (money, people, time), you are capable of reaching. Frequently, potential clients will tell us they hope to “double our blogging this year.” And if they’re publishing one blog a week, that means they need to have someone able to write another blog a week. If that person isn’t on staff, and there’s no budget to hire a freelancer to write that second weekly blog, then how attainable is that goal? It seems to me, like the South Pole, that such a goal, while laudable, might be unattainable!
Don’t misunderstand me — an attainable goal isn’t one that you can achieve without much effort. We’re not talking about sandbagging goals or creating a number of easy layups. Attainable goals are those that you can stretch to achieve given your available money, people and resources. Someday, you may wish to run a marathon. But if you’ve never run anything more than a 5k, perhaps your first attainable goal should be to train and run a 10k, and then a half marathon before you attempt the 26.2 mile big run. After all, what is successful marketing but a marathon conversation with the audiences you need to engage? Make that conversation worthwhile by setting attainable markers along the way that ensure you finish the race.
R – Realistic
Jeremy
A goal’s attainability certainly has a close relationship to how realistic it is. Like a 10-year-old who believes he can gobble down a large pizza all by himself, sometimes an organization’s eyes are bigger than its stomach.
Many of our clients haven’t worked with an agency before, so they don’t know what they don’t know. We emphasize that PR is a collaborative process; it’s not something we do to you, but rather something we do with you. You can’t set and then forget your marketing efforts, especially in the B2B sphere where we primarily operate. Organizations in energy, technology, manufacturing, health care and professional services often have highly complex terminology and processes. We’re experts in positioning those processes and expertise to the audiences that a business is trying to reach. However, we need consistent access to the experts at an organization to move the needle. If you’re not available, then the goals you set aren’t attainable and therefore also aren’t realistic.
It’s also important to understand who exactly you’re trying to reach and what you’re trying to say to them. Depending on the actual appetite for your services in the marketplace, your organization’s appeal might be best positioned to a few very high value targets. As a team, WordWrite and our clients must consistently monitor and evaluate the spaces you occupy to ensure the strategy we establish together is the right path. Once we’re on that path, it’s always critical to course correct if necessary to ensure the goals we’ve set are in fact realistic. You never want to be nine months into a relationship before you determine the goals you’ve set are no closer to being met than on the day you first started the race. Effort doesn’t equal results if the results you seek aren’t realistic.
T – Time-bound
Hollie
If you’ve ever heard someone say, “I’ll get to it tomorrow,” you understand why such a statement is dangerous when it comes to goal-setting. Tomorrow is ambiguous and quickly forgotten in the midst of all there is to do TODAY. By the time tomorrow comes, most have already moved on to other priorities, which means those tasks have now moved to tomorrow — you know, the next day … and the next … and the next. It’s a vicious cycle that way too many of us fall victim to — and those tasks? Well, what tasks? Oh those … yeah, I don’t remember what they were either.
So, since we’re still in the New Year, let’s make a pledge to not say, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” Instead, be specific and realistic about when those tasks will indeed be a priority and make sure you follow through. For more forward-thinking goals, it might help to think in terms of what you can accomplish today, in six weeks, in six months and in one year. Put those down on paper (so to speak) and keep them handy where you can see them so you know what you’re shooting for. Perhaps you even include check in points along the way to see where you are against your desired goal and make any necessary adjustments.
Don’t set yourself up for failure by not putting a time-frame around your goal. If you do, the chances it gets lost in the pile of priorities today are extremely high and your tomorrow will never be what you had hoped.
Are your marketing goals for 2015 based around the SMART structure? Our friends at HubSpot created this marketing planning template to help you align your marketing efforts with SMART goals. Download it below!
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