5 easy steps to set SMART goals in marketing

Looking to set achievable marketing goals? Be SMART and follow these 5 steps!

Your product solves your customer’s problem efficiently. It looks good, it is easy to use and offers more value for its price than other available products. But your prospects don’t know that. Yet.

Now that your product is finished and ready to delight your customers, you need to do some marketing. Why? Because as sales expert Grant Cardone puts it, Best product does not win the game; best KNOWN product wins the game. If you want to learn more business takeaways from Grant, watch this 2-minute video.

Are you ready to start your marketing journey?

Let’s go!

First of all, we need to talk about marketing goals. There are many marketing goals you can set for your company depending on the stage you’re in.

Companies today don’t usually wait for the product to be finished, they begin to market the product while still in early development. It’s a smart move. What they are doing is building a tribe for their product and raising awareness for the company. The members of the tribe will be the first people to buy the finished product. They are more likely to become ambassadors for the product and the company can attract new customers from word of mouth marketing.

Marketing goals for this stage could be building an emailing list of enthusiasts interested in your product. These individuals would be your product’s die-hard customers and it would also be smart to find ways to get to know them and engage with them. And even ask for their ideas on features that could improve your product.

Once the product is finished, the company already has its first customers, it doesn’t start marketing from zero which could be a competitive advantage.

But if you’re company doesn’t take this build-it-before-it’s-finished approach, don’t worry, there are many other marketing goals you can set for your company.

Here are 6 marketing goals that you should set in 2021 to support your company to achieve its business vision:

1. Increase brand awareness
2. Empower your email subscribers
3. Build brand ambassadors
4. Boost your sales through referral programs
5. Identify customer behaviour change
6. Increase website traffic with guest content

If you want to know more about these six marketing goals, read this article where I discuss each of them in-depth.

Now that we’ve touched on the subject of marketing goals, let’s see what SMART and setting SMART goals in marketing means.

S.M.A.R.T. is the acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound and refers to business objectives.

Consultant George T Doran is credited with writing down the S.M.A.R.T. acronym and laying out the main principles of SMART goals in his 1981 paper, “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives”.

Although the SMART concept was created to support good management, setting SMART goals goes beyond that and can be used as a rule of thumb for setting goals in every area, business or personal.

What does a SMART goal in marketing look like?

You first start with a SMART business goal.

Here’s an example. Let’s assume you have an online ladies’ shoe shop. You want to grow your business.

A SMART business objective should be defined like this:

Spring is around the corner. I want to sell 15% more ladies’ shoes for spring. To achieve this I will invest $1000 in Facebook ads targeted at young fashion-forward professional women for a period of 3 months.

Why is this business objective SMART?

Because it is specific and measurable.

There are many ways in which you can grow your business (partnerships, investments etc), but you have chosen to focus on sales. You also narrowed down the sales offer to shoes for the springtime, not office shoes or running shoes. The 15% increase in sales is measurable.

Let’s assume your sales have grown by 10% last year, therefore, a 15% increase is achievable whereas a 100% increase in sales would not be achievable.

You have also decided to invest $1000 in Facebook ads to target a specific customer base comprised of young fashion-forward professional women. Once again, specific and relevant to your business.

Your Facebook campaign will run for three months so the business objective is also time-bound.

Now that you know what a SMART goal in marketing should look like, I’ve put together a simple template with 5 easy steps that you can use to set SMART marketing goals for your company.

5 easy steps to set SMART marketing goals

1. Link the marketing goal to a business goal

As you saw in the example above, marketing goals must be relevant to the overall business goals.

So the first step is to set a marketing goal that relates to your business goal.

It could be a short-term goal like increasing sales of a specific product or it could be long-term business goals like increasing brand awareness or share of voice.

To increase sales you could set several marketing goals like increasing the number of qualified leads or increasing the number of email subscribers. To achieve long-term business goals like brand awareness you could increase the number of brand ambassadors or increase website traffic.

2. Establish the benchmark

Pulling numbers out of thin air is not going to help you achieve your goal.

Perform a marketing analysis before setting a new marketing goal. Run the numbers and come to a conclusion with regard to previous results.

How much does it cost to get a new customer or a new email subscriber?

What is the average cost per lead?

What is the current landing page conversion rate?

Learn how to calculate them and other key performance indicators in this two-part article.

Only after you know these numbers ie the benchmark, you can set achievable marketing goals.

3. Write the goal using the SMART framework

Follow the example above and make your marketing goal specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

4. Design the strategic plan you will use to achieve the SMART marketing goal

The goal of a strategic plan is to provide you with a roadmap to achieve set marketing goals.

The plan outlines what (resources), how (specific tools, activities, platforms etc) and why (the reasons behind your choice of a specific resource or tool) the company will use to achieve this goal.

Referring back to the online ladies’ shoe shop and its goal to increase sales by 15% through Facebook ads, you need to establish who will design the creative concept of the Facebook campaign and who will write the copy.

What is the format of the campaign: video, image, link? Once the campaign is ready to be launched, establish who will set the campaign in your company’s Facebook Ad account and solve any problems that might arise.

Should the customers reacting to your campaign need the help of your customer support, how are they going to reach your company?

A successful campaign is an eco-system where every factor is aligned and working in perfect harmony.

5. Implement & optimize

Now that your campaign is ready to go and you have planned everything in detail, you can implement the campaign and optimize it if necessary.

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A New Year, A New Me – 7 Effective Steps To Achieve Growth in 2019

Picture your favorite tree. In order to grow tall and develop a rich and lush canopy, the tree needs strong roots.

It’s the same for your business. Your business’s development and ultimate success are linked to your own personal growth.

Growth is the conscious pursuit of expanding self-awareness, knowledge and improving personal skills.

Here are 7 effective steps to achieve growth in 2019:

1. Monitor your self-talk

According to Psychology Today, your self-talk combines your conscious thoughts with your unconscious beliefs and biases. It’s an effective way for your brain to interpret and process your daily experiences.

Acknowledge your self-talk and monitor it: what does it tell you?

Do you tell yourself you can’t do something, that you’re stupid, ugly or that you’re not good enough?

If you do, know you have a negative self-talk and you need to work on yourself to change it.

Is your negative self-talk self-grown or is it something that has been told to you repeatedly while growing up? If the latter is true, your negative and deprecating self-talk is not really yours so why carry someone else’s emotional problems? Let go! Seek professional support to help you get rid of your emotional burden.

Learn more about negative self-talk and how to improve your life:

Self-Awareness: 5 Tactics To Improve It

2. Improve your discipline by adopting a No. Excuses. Mindset

I’m tired…I don’t have any money… I’m too old to start a business of my own… It’s too cold outside to go running… I’m not ready…

Have you ever told yourself any of the above or something along the lines? Although you’ve set yourself on the path for achieving your goal, you find yourself making excuses for not doing the work you need to do.

Excuses are exits signs off the freeway of life. Every time you make an excuse you basically stop where you’re going and you’ve delayed that vision, that destination that you so anxiously wanted to get to. When you’re making excuses you’re exiting from your dream.

Johh Maxwell

Why do we make excuses?

The main reason is fear. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of changing our lives, fear of making mistakes while inertia and complacency get the better of us.

Do you want to stop making excuses?

Here’s one single argument that will surely drive you right back: regrets. Having regrets of not doing everything you could have done to reach your full potential is painful and emotionally tormenting.

This is the conclusion latest research has revealed: people regret not being all they could have been.

We have one life. Stop making excuses. Or else you will spend your twilight years feeling regret for not becoming the person you know you could have become if only you had tried.

[bctt tweet=”Growth takes time. It’s all on you. You may have people around you supporting your pursuit of growth, but you will do all the work.” username=”brand_minds”]

3. Read the right books. Educate yourself.

Once you have decided the area on which you need to grow (whether it’s improving your communication skills, soft skills, develop a particular ability or nurture your talent), make a list of all the books that can help you reach your goal.

The most successful entrepreneurs didn’t wait for school classes to teach them, they were self-taught. Elon Musk, Jan Koum and Stewart Butterfield learned how to program by reading books and manuals on the subject. All three of them are now running billion dollar tech companies.

[bctt tweet=”Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong. N. R. Narayana Murthy” username=”brand_minds”]

4. Exercise self-awareness

What is self-awareness? Search for an answer to this question on Google and you get 453 million results. It’s a huge number which shows high interest for this subject.

Here’s another interesting number: a 2011 report estimated that there are 8.7 million species on Earth. Out of which only eight have self-awareness. These species are: humans, bonobos, orangutans, dolphins, orcas, some elephants, magpies and trained pigeons.

You would think self-awareness is a common ability among humans, the most intelligent species on Earth. Actually as dr Tasha Eurich has discovered, self-awareness is on short supply.

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist and executive coach, with a 15-year professional experience witnessing the power of self-awareness in leadership. Dr. Eurich found a surprising discrepancy between believing to be self-aware and actually being self-aware: even though most people believe they are self-aware, only 10-15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria.

To achieve growth in the area of your choosing, you need first to know and understand your own self.

Self-awareness gives us power. We might not always like what we see, but there’s a comfort in knowing ourselves. There’s a ton of research showing that people who are self-aware are more fulfilled, they have stronger relationships, they’re more creative, they’re more confident and better communicators. They’re less likely to lie, cheat and steal; they perform better at work and they’re more promotable. And they’re more effective leaders with more profitable companies.

Dr. Tasha Eurich

Listen to Dr. Eurich talking about how you can increase your self-awareness with one simple fix:

5. Learn to set goals correctly

In his book, The Motivation Myth, author Jeff Haden shows that motivation is not the secret ingredient of success. In fact motivation is a result of the process which leads to success, not the cause. The path to success is not paved with motivation, but with goals. Only not everyone knows how to set goals correctly.

Here is how to set goals in order to achieve growth successfully according to Jeff Haden via his article:

• Make your goal tangible, specific and easily measurable;
• Make your goal meaningful to you, not to others;
• Make your goal a positive goal;
• Focus on the daily process.

[bctt tweet=”Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together. James Cash Penney” username=”brand_minds”]

6. Discover mentors online and connect with them offline

[bctt tweet=”If you ask any successful businessperson, they will always (say they) have had a great mentor at some point along the road. Sir Richard Branson” username=”brand_minds”]

We grow faster and become successful when we receive support and guidance from a more experienced person. Sometimes we cannot find the answer to our questions in books so a mentorship is the best solution.

Sir Richard Branson had Sir Freddie Laker, the entrepreneurs who revolutionized the airline industry by offering the first low-cost commercial transatlantic flights to guide him through rough times at Virgin Atlantic. The relationship between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett is well-known and both of them learned from each other. Mark Zuckerberg turned to Steve Jobs for advice on how to build the best team capable of changing the world.

There is a lot of information on how to choose the best mentor for your needs and where to find this mentor. You can also learn how to approach your chosen mentor and how to build a great relationship. You can start looking on LinkedIn or dedicated resources such as micromentor.org or going to industry events and conferences. You may not find your mentor tomorrow, but hang in there, my young padawan! If you are resilient you will find your Yoda.

Another way to grow is to become member of a mastermind group.

Napoleon Hill introduced the concept of mastermind groups in his 1937 book Think and Grow Rich. Mastermind groups are peer-to-peer groups whose members support, teach and help each other grow and solve problems. The appropriate mastermind group is very powerful and can take you to the next level.

Here are 5 benefits you can take advantage of when joining a mastermind group:

• High quality experience and knowledge;
• Support and advice provided by the group’s members;
• Collaboration between each of the group’s members;
• Extended network;
• New opportunities for business and for learning;
• No one is alone and we all grow faster with a little help from our peers.

[bctt tweet=”Surround yourself with people who are going to lift you higher. Oprah Winfrey” username=”brand_minds”]

7. Come to BRAND MINDS 2019 – The Central and Eastern-European Business Summit of the Year

If I were to compare BRAND MINDS to anything it would definitely be a famous rock band concert – packed venue, excellent performance on stage, everyone breathing in unison.

At the 2018 event we had 3000 attendees: professionals, high profile CEOs, media and online personalities. It was a huge experience for everyone attending the business conference. Every speaker gave 120%: they provided knowledge, actionable information, inspiration, laughter and answers to questions.

Ever since the first event six years ago, BRAND MINDS is focused on delivering the best growth experience to its attendees.

BRAND MINDS 2019 is certainly fitting this description. Our speakers are world-renowned experts in their fields: Yuval Noah Harari, Guy Kawasaki, Brene Brown, Robert Cialdini, Grand Cardone and Hitendra Wadhwa.

Make 2019 the year of your growth!

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