Luke Monterosso
One of the biggest frustrations that senior commercial and financial teams have with marketing is their lack of accountability and vagueness when it comes to planning and ROI.
All too often, objectives are woolly and ambiguous, with no real clarity over what the expected outcome will be in a measurable and time bound fashion. This is where SMART goals can help build your credibility as a marketer and pull together your marketing activities around an overarching objective.
What Does SMART Stand For?
SMART goals are precise targets for your company to aim for. It’s an acronym to help you clearly define quantifiable goals for your business to achieve.
SMART stands for;
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R – Relevant, and
T – Time Bound or Timely
Why Should You Care?
We want to help you structure your goals in a way that helps you and your team achieve.
Let’s look at a few goals we often hear from clients and in the industry and what we can do to fix them.
“My boss wants our company to embrace digital to make our business more efficient”
SMART Goal: My boss wants our company to use marketing automation to reduce the time spent completing repetitive tasks by 30% within the next 6 months.
“We want to be the market leader in our sector”
SMART Goal: We want to increase our market share within the U.K. vinyl flooring sector by 15% within the next 3 years.
Use the above acronym to improve your goal-setting and ensure you don’t make the same mistakes.
What Are SMART Goals?
Specific
You’ll want to be clear about what needs to be achieved. An example of this in sales and marketing may be improving lead quality, content frequency or call-to-action conversion rates.
- What do I hope to accomplish?
- Why do you want to achieve this?
- Who is involved?
- Where will this goal take the business?
- When do you plan to reach it?
Measurable
Evaluate the progress you’re making towards your goal, measuring this can come in all shapes and sizes. Automating this process using live data will give you easily accessible reports at your fingertips.
- How will I know when it has been accomplished?
- What will I use to keep track of my progress?
Attainable
Make sure your goal can be reached. Finding the balance is key, it should stretch your abilities but remain achievable. Using historical data and analytics can be a great starting point for this.
- Do we have the necessary skills to achieve our objective?
- Is the goal realistic in terms of the resources we have available?
Relevant
This is about focusing on what matters to you and your company.
- If this goal is achieved what difference will it make?
- Is it aligned with your core objectives and values?
- Have you accounted for current trends in your industry?
Time-bound
Having a deadline to focus on will ensure that your team stays focused. Give yourself a number of days that the task should be started within. Aligning the goal with quarter ends can be a great starting point for when deciding a deadline.
- Is the time frame realistic for the scope of the effort?
- Does the time constraint create a sense of urgency?
SMART Goals You Can Use
If you’re looking to grow your business here are a few examples of SMART goals for your business.
Are you struggling to connect with potential leads?
Here’s a SMART goal your marketing team can use.
“Our marketing team aims to improve the average open rate of our email newsletters within the next 90 days”
For this, we’d recommend split testing to optimise subject lines. Did you know that only the first 50 characters of the subject line can be seen on mobile? That’s 3 – 4 words!
Still not sure? Chat with us and book in a free consultation below.
Do you have lots of visitors to your website but find that none of them are converting?
Why not set yourself a SMART goal like this?
“Produce, publish and promote a weekly blog post to increase our leads by 25% in the next 6 months”
Strategically placed call to actions on blog posts are a great starting point for this, better yet you could compile a selection of relevant blog posts into an eBook behind a gated download button.
Conclusion
SMART goals can help build your credibility as a marketer and pull together your marketing activities around an overarching objective.
Check if the goals you’ve either created yourself or been given are well stated.
Remember – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time Bound.
If you’d like to find out more, book in a free consultation and find how your business can utilise SMART goals in your growth strategy.
If you found the information in this post insightful, we recommend you look into some of the most popular articles in the Insynth Blog regarding sales! Our favourites are:
- 7 Reasons Content Marketing Helps Your Sales Team Succeed
- How To Turn Your Building Product Website Into A Sales Lead Machine
- A Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment In Construction
- Digital Marketing Tips To Improve Your Construction Sales Leads
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.