A SMART Goal Defined
SMART is an acronym used by businesses and individuals when it comes to setting goals. The acronym stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Timely
When you set SMART goals for your business, the goal is well defined making it easier to reach. If you want to move your business forward, you want to make sure all of your goals fit the criteria of a SMART goal.
Understanding SMART Goals
Before we get into actually setting SMART goals for your business and your marketing, let’s discuss what each letter stands for in the acronym.
Specific
Setting a specific goal simply means it’s very well defined. You need to answer the what, why, who, where and which questions when it comes to your SMART goals. This part of the goal will help you focus and give you a reason to achieve it.
For example, if you want to build your business to the next level, your specific goal may be to bring on a certain number of new clients every month to reach a certain level of sales/profits.
Measurable
Along with creating specific goals, you need each goal to be measurable. The easiest way to make your goal measurable is to answer the how much and how many questions. These questions will often give you a bar to measure your goal.
Building on the example above, setting a specific number of new clients and a specific level of sales/profit will make your goal measurable. It might look like this, “our business will add 15 new clients every month until we reach our goal of $100K in monthly sales.”
Achievable
Your goals must also be achievable. If you set a goal completely out of your grasp, it’s much easier to quit along the way. While it should stretch your abilities, you should still be able to achieve the goal for your business.
Using the same example as above, if you run a small lawn care business and you’re the only employee, it may not be achievable to set a goal to build your business to $100K in sales per month. However, if you have 15 employees, this may be a very achievable goal.
Relevant
Relevant goals allow you to keep control over them, but they matter and move everybody in the business forward. You will need to answer questions, such as:
- Is this goal applicable to our mission as a business?
- Is this the right time for this goal?
- Does the goal seem like it’s worth it?
While it may seem like a good idea to build your business to $100K in monthly sales, it may not be the right time, if you don’t have the infrastructure to support the growth.
Timely
The final part of the SMART goal is putting a deadline on it. Open-ended goals with no deadline don’t drive you forward. Instead, they end up getting put off over and over until you move onto something else.
When you make the goal timely, it will give you an end point. For example, if you know you need 60 new clients to reach your goal of $100K in monthly sales, and you plan to add 15 new clients per month, your goal should have a deadline of four months.
The final smart goal, for our example, will look something like this:
Our business will add 15 new clients every month for the next four months to reach our goal of $100K in sales per month.
Using SMART Goals for your Inbound Marketing Strategy
When applying SMART goals to your inbound marketing strategy, you will be able to move your business forward. Marketing depends on goals to help measure your efforts, make adjustments and move forward. As you set up your inbound marketing strategy, it’s important to set goals and make sure they are SMART goals.
Creating SMART goals for your inbound marketing strategy will help you to avoid looking back later to realize you haven’t reached any of your goals. Your marketing goals need to feed into your other business goals and they need to become a part of your overall plan.
If you want to build your business to $100K in monthly sales, what does that look like for marketing? Do you need to create a certain number of quality blog posts, add a certain number of new Facebook followers or bring on a certain number of newsletter subscribers?
After tracking your inbound marketing strategy for a few months, you may already know what it takes, on average, to gain a new lead/prospect. You may also know how many leads/prospects actually turn into paying clients. You can use these numbers to make sure your inbound marketing goals are not only SMART goals, but also line up with your other business goals.
Goal setting is vital for any business looking to grow and succeed. Making sure your goals are SMART goals will help to catapult your business forward. Use SMART goals for both your general business goals and your inbound marketing goals to motivate your team and move your company forward.
