How to set SMART Goals

What are SMART goals?

Before you create marketing campaigns, you need to evaluate what your company’s goals are. You may want to boost brand awareness, increase customer satisfaction, or increase conversions, but those hopes aren’t necessarily your goals yet. For them to be goals, they need some additional details and specifications.

When you set your goals, you’ll want to refer to the acronym SMART. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Ensuring your goals meet these criteria will help keep you organized, give you a sense of direction as you move through your campaigns, and provide you with a time frame to work within.

SMART considerations

To make sure your goals are SMART, consider the following factors:

Specific: What do you want to accomplish?

Measurable: What are the success metrics that will determine whether the objective has been met?

Attainable: Is this a realistic goal that you think you can meet?

Relevant: Is this specific marketing goal aligned with your company’s overall objectives?

Time-bound: What is a realistic time frame that this goal can be met within?

Example scenario

You’re a digital marketer for a photography and photo-sharing company. Users can upload their photos onto your website and, using your design templates, make scrapbooks and other items to commemorate events, trips, loved ones, and more. You are setting new SMART goals in preparation for the upcoming financial quarter.

You know the company wants to focus on increasing scrapbook sales for this next quarter, so you start thinking about goals. You decide to set a SMART goal to give you something to compare your progress against. You come up with:

We aim to increase scrapbook sales by 15% by the end of the next quarter through a robust social media campaign where we focus heavily on influencer marketing.

This goal fits all of the SMART goal criteria, which means you’ll be able to easily track your progress and make adjustments as the social media campaign progresses.

Key takeaways

This is just the beginning of your journey in learning more about setting SMART goals. For now, remember that SMART goals should always be: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.