Do you have SMART Objectives?

How many times have you launched a marketing campaign with the goal of creating brand awareness or even without having a well-defined concrete goal? And subsequently failed to really prove the impact of this campaign?

Creating brand awareness or buzz around a new product or service is not a quantitative goal that will help you prove the success or failure of your marketing efforts.

So how do you prove the effectiveness of your Marketing work to the Administration?

Defining SMART goals.

What are SMART goals?

They are quantitative goals that should define for any project in your company, whether it be a marketing action, sales, communication, management or any other area or department.

What does it mean?

S = Specific

M = Measurable

A = Attainable

R = Relevant

T = Timely

How to create a SMART goal?

Here are 5 steps to creating a SMART goal for your next campaign:

Step 1: Be specific and define what metric you want to measure. Visits to the website, the number of leads generated, new customers, increase the value of existing customers?

Step 2: Define the quantity. How many more visits do you want to attract to the website? How many leads do you want to generate? And customers?

Step 3: Analyze if it is realistic. You should base your values on your company history or industry benchmarks. If by default you generate 30 leads per month, it probably will not be very realistic to set 300 leads for the next month.

Step 4: Check if it is a relevant objective for the project and important for the company. For example, if your contacts do not open your newsletters, it will not make sense to set a goal for them to click on the content that is available to them, as first of all you need to ensure the increase in the opening rate and only after the clicks.

Step 5: Set a deadline for achieving your goal. Until the end of next month? Before the 2nd semester? Setting a deadline for achieving the goal is absolutely essential.

Example of a SMART goal:

Increase leads by 50% (from 100 to 150) with the promotion of the online event until May 31, 2019.

Specific = What? = The number of Leads

Measurable = How much? = 50% (100-150)

Attainable = Is it realistic? What data did I use to reach this number? = Based on internal benchmarks

Relevant = Does it make sense? Is it relevant to the project? = It is related to the ultimate goal

Timely = How long do I have to achieve these results? March 31, 2017

Setting SMART goals will make it much easier to figure out what the end goal is, measure progress, and define the success or failure of your marketing initiatives.

How to guarantee the fulfillment of the objectives?

We share some tips that you can implement with your marketing and sales teams to ensure the goals are met:

1. Share the defined goals

Sharing the objectives to be achieved will allow all stakeholders to have a clear idea of what is the ideal outcome of their work and effort.

By sharing the objectives you will have the opportunity to listen to the opinions of your colleagues regarding their validity and there may even be other projects in the company that can help in the fulfillment of your goals.

2. Be transparent with your results (especially if you fall short of your goals!)

Analyzing the progress of any project is good practice and something essential to ensure the success of the project. So if, when analyzing your results, you realize that you are on the right track, you should share this with your team so they realize they are doing a good job. If it falls far short of the expected results, it is even more important to communicate and discuss this with your colleagues as it will help you to define a new strategy so that the desired results can still be achieved.

With a Marketing Automation platform, you can communicate results and goals to your team in an automatic and very simple way. Depending on the duration of your project, you can even set automatic weekly or monthly reports.

If you do not have a platform at your disposal, you can always create an excel file and share it with all stakeholders to be populated every week with the results from the previous week. This will help implement a routine of analysis and constant evaluation of results.

3. Schedule brainstorming sessions

Promoting a brainstorming and planning session in the middle of a project can be exactly what will make a difference between meeting or not meeting objectives.

If you are not achieving your goals, arrange a meeting with your team to review what is being done, what the results have been and what new action plan to follow in the coming weeks.

4. Take lessons for future

After the completed project analyze what went well and what could have been improved. You should meet your team and discuss all of these points together to ensure optimization of future projects.

The idea here is to realize which points still need to be improved and what worked well in terms of marketing actions, team organization, and ideas that were put into practice and which had a positive impact on the project.

5. Create benchmarks

With all the projects carried out and recurring marketing actions, you will certainly already have an average number of visits to the website, leads generated and the number of new clients that you can raise per month.

These are internal benchmarks of your company that you should never neglect because it will be based on these data that will create your SMART goals and verify their validity.

If you do not have access to this data, search online for benchmarks in your industry to have benchmarked as your starting point.

And remember that your goals should always be realistic. It is no use defining megalomaniac goals if you know at the outset that you will never reach them. This will demoralize your team and make everyone feel that nothing is being achieved. To the same extent, they should not be unambitious as this is not challenging their team and it will be too easy to achieve the defined objectives.

The original text is posted in Youlead PT Blog post.

If you want to know how an Inbound agency can help you achieve your SMART goals, please see our E-book