let's pretend that you ran a twitter campaign and you were able to generate five million followers. That's amazing, right? Five million followers is a ton of followers. If you hadn't set a goal in the beginning of the campaign, it would be hard to tell whether or not you actually achieve the goal. So if your goal was to achieve five million followers, you've done it. Congratulations. But if you were trying to generate $5 million dollars in sales, then having those five million followers that might not have bought anything doesn't actually help you to achieve your goal. This is why it's important to set it up front so that as you're rolling out the campaign and executing on it, you can really track to make sure that you're prioritizing your efforts to grow in the areas that are going to serve the business overall. One of the hardest things about setting goals is articulating a goal in a way that does fit this smart framework. Sometimes it's not very easy to figure out how exactly what y...

ou're measuring or what time period you should be looking at. And so something that I provide to my clients is a very easy framework. It's actually a mad lib where all they have to do is fill out the sections of this framework and that mad lib help center to identify the timeframe That they want to achieve this goal in the metrics that they are impacting with their marketing plans and exactly how that then impacts the business. So, I'll give you an example, a smart goal could be our goal this quarter is to increase social media engagement by 15% in order to increase website traffic to promotions and offers this goal articulates what time period we want to do this in which isn't within the quarter, it articulates exactly what our KPI S R or the metrics that we're tracking will be and those are going to be social media engagement and website traffic. And it also indicates that what we're trying to do is drive people directly to promotions and offers. So by setting this goal, now you become really clear as a marketer that your job is to use social media dr people onto the website, get them to look at these promotions and offers and to engage with the business on a deeper level. And it also allows you and your client to get on the same page with what you're trying to do together. What is a smart goal. Well, a smart goal is one that's specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound and it's just an acronym. It's not that they're dumb goals but a smart goal is specific, meaning that it's focused on just one thing. So a really strong goal is completely centered upon one metric or one core priority that you want to achieve at the end of the campaign the second and probably the most critical part of a smart goal is that it's also measurable, which means that it has to be tied to a number many times people think about brand awareness as a smart goal and although awareness overall can be a goal or a priority for a business, brand awareness is very hard to measure, meaning there isn't an actual metric on a social media platform that allows you to measure awareness. There are awareness related metrics such as reach or impressions that are tied into brand awareness, but in that case you should organize your goals so that you're trying to achieve reach and impressions instead of brand awareness. A third attribute for a smart goal is that it's attainable, meaning that it's realistic and achievable. So if you're a brand new business and you're coming in and you say three months into launch, you want to generate a certain amount of sales or maybe generate a certain amount of traffic to your website, make sure that number is realistic being a brand new business. On the flip side, if you've been around for a very long time, you've launched products before and you have a benchmark of what may have worked in the past, make that goal related back to that benchmark so that it is attainable and realistic and you're not setting the bar either too high or too low. Another attribute of a smart goal is that it's relevant. So it should be related back to your business goal or your service. These goals should all be working together to serve the greater picture and the bigger picture of helping the business to run more efficiently. And then finally, the smart goals should be time bound, meaning it should be related to a timeframe, Whether that's this quarter, we're about to achieve x, y and z, or this month our goal is to achieve this, or perhaps we'd like to increase traffic 10% week over week, whatever those time frames are, make sure that they're also part of your goals so that you can accurately track those as the campaign goes on as well. So, for example, if we went into a social media campaign and at the end of the campaign, we discovered we had five million followers. That seems like an amazing achievement. Having five million followers on a twitter campaign over the course of maybe three months is something to definitely celebrate. But what's difficult to tell, even though that was a measurable achievement is whether or not the campaign actually worked without setting a crisp smart goal, it's hard to tell if the campaign move the needle on anything else besides followers. So did it truly work for the business? Did it fail? And what were you trying to achieve? And so therefore, by articulating a smart goal in the beginning, you'll know whether or not the five million followers was directly related back to the business. One of the hardest parts about setting smart goals is to actually be able to crystallize them and articulate them in some way. And so one thing that I do is I create a mad lib for my clients where they just have to fill in the blanks and here's an example of it on the screen. So it's already built in is the timeframe. It's also indicative of what you're trying to achieve over that timeframe, whether it's increasing or decreasing a specific metric of the business and then it gives a reason of why you're doing that. So a typical smart goal framework is something like this. Our goal this quarter, month or year is to increase or decrease x whatever that is by or two and you plug in a specific percentage or number in order to do blank. So a different way of articulating this or in a specific example could be our goal this quarter is to increase social media engagement by 15% in order to increase website traffic to promotions and offers. So based on this goal, in the way that we've articulated it, we now know that we need to focus our efforts on one social media engagement. We want to increase that by 15% within the next three months in the next quarter. And secondly, we want to increase website traffic to the promotions and offers that are being featured on social media. And so therefore we know that those two things are the KPI S or the key performance indicators to let us know that we are tracking towards our goals. Being clear on your goals, allows you to then monitor and measure the marketing impact that you'll have on everything listed in the goal. And in this case it would be social media engagement again, as well as website traffic, specifically to promotions and offers.

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Sharon Lee Thony

Expert digital marketer with 15+ years of experience building global brands & creating award-winning marketing campaigns

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

What is a SMART Goal

What is a SMART Goal

Lesson Info

3. What is a SMART Goal

Lessons

Course Overview

Why Are Goals Important