The Secret Behind Smart Marketing Goals
What’s the difference between a marketing plan that works and a marketing plan that doesn’t?
Lots of things, but one of the main differences is that good marketing plans have real goals that make sense, which means that they can be engineered to actually achieve them. Bad marketing plans frequently don’t. A large, amorphous blob of a goal – “get more sales, build more brand awareness” – will result in an ineffective blob of a strategy, without any real criteria beyond subjectivity and passive-aggressive shrugs as to whether or not it even worked.
It’s not hard to work out real, actionable marketing goals. You just need to use the SMART framework. A set of criteria you can use to turn your ideas from vague desires to highly-actionable strategic milestones, the SMART framework guides you through the thinking process step by step. Learning it could be the difference between money wasted and money invested – and it’s widely applicable beyond marketing strategy development.
The criteria are:
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Realistic
T – Time-bound
We’ll walk you through what each one means and how it works.
Exemplum
You’re working at a mid-sized company as their director of marketing. Suddenly your boss walks in with the quarterly sales figures. “These are garbage!” he screams between puffs on his cigar. “We need more sales or we’re going to go out of business! And it’s your job to bring them in!”
Ok. So. Don’t panic. Because you’ve totally got this. You take a deep breath, straighten your tie, and say “Ok, sir. We can do that. But we’ve got to start getting specific, because if I don’t know what we need, I can’t build a strategy that gets it done. So let’s figure out how we can turn ‘more sales’ into a real goal that we can make a plan to achieve. Let’s get SMART.”
Your boss is taken aback, but doggonnit, he likes your moxie. “Get on it,” he says, and huffs out.
It’s go time.
Specific
The first thing you noticed when Old Man Johnson came in screaming about the quarterly sales was that he didn’t actually have a real goal in mind; “more” isn’t enough information for you to work off of. You need something concrete. After reviewing the quarterly sales figures, you realize that the leads you’ve been pulling in haven’t been closing – and that your chief competitor is making inroads in Kingston Heights, a market your company has traditionally dominated.
Hmm.
So what do you do? It seems like restoring your market dominance in Kingston Heights is the way to go, because that's where you're losing money.
Well, you aren’t responsible for closing sales, but you are in charge of bringing in new leads. And since your business has a relatively quick sales cycle, a new lead could end up closing to a sale within a couple of months. So that seems like the most viable path – laying the foundation for sales by bringing more leads in the door. But how many? And by when? You need specific goals featuring specific numbers with specific timetables.
Measurable
Your goal, however, has to something you can determine if you failed or succeeded at. That means hard numbers that define something that can actually be quantified.
So let's think about leads, Since your business has a relatively quick sales cycle, a new lead could end up closing to a sale within a couple of months. That seems like the most viable path – laying the foundation for sales by bringing more leads in the door.
Taking a look at how much of the Kingston Heights market you’ve lost, you discover that the damage isn’t too extensive. “If we can just get 30% more business in the Heights,” you realize, “we should be able to shut the competition out entirely.” So what can you do to make that happen?
Here’s where you need to make sure that your goal is something you can actually measure. “More” is subjective, but “25%” has a pass/fail test built right in. It gives you something to work toward, succeed or fail at, and assess after the fact what your next steps should be. Past experience, considering your lead-to-close rate, indicates that you would need a hundred new leads to bring in 30% more business.
That’s a little high.
Attainable
A hundred new leads isn’t super realistic – not right away, anyway. 25-30 real sales-qualified leads per-quarter is pretty standard for your industry, and maybe if you really pushed you could do a solid 35-40 or so. But you definitely can’t bank on a hundred by any measure.
That is not in fact an attainable goal right now. Attainability is a key part of building a real SMART goal, because it gives you realistic guidelines that you can reasonably achieve and build off of. So a hundred is a little crazy in the short term.
But – it turns out that you can get there, slowly. You look at how you have been doing in the Heights, and it turns out that you’ve really only been pulling in 5-10 new leads there a quarter for the last year. No wonder you’ve been falling behind! So you set an attainable goal – 35 new SQLs per quarter for the next three quarters.
It’ll be tough, but it should get you right back to your old market share in a reasonable amount of time.
Realistic
Ok. Time to step back. If you don’t actually get those 35 new leads a quarter Old Man Johnson is gonna blow a gasket. So while it’s a totally reasonable number in itself, do you actually have the resources to refocus there? How realistic is this?
This is a really important question; you don’t want to commit to goals you simply won’t be able to dedicate the right people and resources to accomplishing. That’s intensely counterproductive, undercutting everything you’re setting out to do. After all, these aren’t SMAT goals.
Luckily for you, you shouldn’t have much difficulty pulling resources from elsewhere in order to shore up this effort; it means that you won’t be dedicating quite as much energy to expanding into new markets, which is probably a good thing all told if you’re actively losing the markets you already have. So yeah – a strategic retreat to regroup and take back what’s yours is something you won’t have a hard time selling.
Time-bound
We discovered above that 100 new leads isn’t really an attainable overnight goal. But building those up slowly actually is. You want your goals to be bound within a specific timeframe; it gives you an endpoint where you can assess success and failure, and prevents any plan from becoming something that extends endlessly into the future.
In this case, we’ve already gotten there; 35 leads a quarter for three quarters actually exceeds your goal, and gives you a little wiggle room. Pushing it ahead to the next four quarters gives you even more; if you don’t quite make it, you’ll still be in a much better position, and if you do, you dominate Kingston Heights more than ever before – after which you can pull back and rededicate yourselves to expanding into new territory.
And Old Man Johnson will love that.
So What's Our SMART Goal?
Retake the Kingston Heights market by generating 35 new leads per quarter in that market over the next four quarters.
It's Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. SMART.
By establishing SMART goals, you give yourself meaningful benchmarks to measure success by and specific metrics to try to improve. This allows for targeted, goal-oriented marketing plans that can really move you forward toward your business goals.
