SMART Goals and Marketing Plans

Marketing Basics

Businesses, large and small, are nothing more than a name in the sand without strong Marketing Plans. Successful businesses take the time to perfectly engineer marketing goals, strategies, and tactics that burn their brand into the consumer’s memory so deep that the brand often lasts a lifetime. This level of success is not a piece of cake, however, it comes with a lot of hard work that involves time, critical thinking, research, measurement, and evaluation.

Goals, Strategies, and Tactics

You may be asking yourself, “What is the difference between marketing goals, strategies, and tactics?” Marketing plans are ever-evolving, multi-level projects that need to be monitored regularly for optimal performance. They involve goals, strategies, and tactics that resemble a pyramid, with your goal at the apex and your tactics at the base.

Marketing goals are broad short-term marketing intentions that are Specific Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely (SMART Goals). For example, a goal would be to increase website traffic by 30% by the end of the fiscal year.

Marketing Strategies are blanket objectives that cover your plan of action to fulfill your marketing goals. These are the ‘how’ of your marketing goals with objectives such as increasing website traffic, increase repeat purchases from customers, and increase in-store awareness of products.

Marketing Tactics are the specific actions taken to fulfill your marketing strategies. These actions include integrated marketing with multiple channels such as print, web, social media, digital media, in-store displays, etc.

Each of these levels should support the tier above them in the Marketing Plan Pyramid. For example, to fulfill a marketing strategy of increasing website traffic your business might take to a social media marketing channel such as Facebook to create an ad that has a link to your website and includes an offer of 25% off your first purchase made via the website. Social media ads allow you to serve the ad to individuals in your target market by choosing criteria such as specific interests, age groups, location proximity, and other businesses they follow for a set amount of time and budget. To increase in-store awareness, a direct mail piece detailing physical locations where a popular or new product can be found. This could also be fulfilled by adding extra signage in the stores themselves with tear-and-use coupons readily available to customers. Both of these examples are very measurable since Facebook conversions and coupons can be closely tracked and evaluated for their success.

(charlie, 2019)

SMART Goals

At a glance, SMART Goals are an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely goals. As words, these terms are fairly straightforward and understandable; however, fundamentally, their purpose and importance run much deeper and are an essential component of any marketing strategy from small businesses to multibillion-dollar corporations (Charlie, 2019). SMART Goals are objectives that are applied to your Marketing Goals, Strategies, and Tactics that guide you through making the right decisions to successfully execute your Marketing Plan. You can think of them as markers that will keep your marketing efforts on track, and, if adhered to, can produce great results.

Businesses often gloss over the SMART Goal component of their marketing campaign, opting for the “hitting the beach without sunscreen” strategy (Charlie, 2019). As we are almost all aware, this will result in a horrendous burn that will take weeks to heal. Do we learn our lesson? Some of us do, however, most of us do it time and time again. As a business, this results in ineffective business strategies that lead to financial losses and a floundering business image and marketing messages that fail at effectively engaging their target markets. SMART Goals are a great way to keep your marketing goals in perspective and your strategy on track.
Pro tip: Don’t go to the beach without sunscreen! I speak from experience.

A Closer Look

Let’s take a closer look at each component of the SMART Goal objectives.

Specific
Your marketing strategy and tactics should be specific enough to effectively execute your marketing strategy. If you are not confident that your choices are going to address the needs of your company or key staff members you need to hone in on the best solutions for any important issues your company may face.
Ask yourself: Are your efforts zeroed in on tackling your threats and opportunities?

Measurable
Your marketing tactics should have the ability to be measured, producing tangible data that can be analyzed. The ability to analyze marketing metrics gives your business the opportunity to see the efficacy of your marketing decisions. This helps to maximize the return on your investment.
Ask yourself: Do your marketing tactics have the ability to be translated into metrics that can be understood by key staff members?

Attainable
Your marketing goals should be created that are achievable and realistic. Setting goals that are ultimately too lofty can result in failed objectives and those metrics can damage your bottom line. Chasing after the bigger fish could alter the course of your marketing strategy leading to failure.
Ask yourself: Am I setting realistic goals that I can achieve with the resources that I have?

Relevant
Marketing strategies may often stray from your marketing goals, leaving you with results that may contribute to the bigger picture, but do not offer anything to your specific goals. If your strategies cannot be specifically applied to your goals, or are too overarching, you may have to rethink your plans with a more tangible approach.
Ask yourself: Are my efforts contributing to our marketing goals or the bigger picture?

Timely
Your marketing goals need to have a short shelf-life. This ensures that you will have a tangible set of metrics to evaluate your marketing plan and make any changes necessary for relevant and efficient marketing. If your marketing efforts are not producing winning results, it is time to revamp your tactics.
Ask yourself: Are my marketing efforts actually working? How can I improve them to meet my goals?

(Charlie, 2019)

Measuring Success

It is important to measure your success when you’ve gone to great efforts in outlining your marketing plan, researching your target market, and perfecting your Integrated Marketing Campaign (IMC) and engineered it to a ‘T’. Without evaluating your efforts your business will become stagnant, possibly irrelevant, wallowing in the danger zone of a ‘meh’ company. These metrics include KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators that are sets of measurable data that guide you through the performance of your marketing tactics. These metrics are chosen by you that best represents the data collected that is in line with your SMART Goals. Making sure you choose the correct metric is essential to keep your performance reports relevant to the goals for key players within your business from the executive director concerned with overall performance to the sales manager who needs a clear understanding of whether or not they will hit their projected sales goals (Marketing Metrics, n.d.).

From the hundreds of metrics available that are unique to each marketing channel, there are a handful that is essential for your business and choosing the right ones can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. Taking the time to do a little research can be the best way to understand what reporting metrics you will need. This starts with evaluating what is key staff members value most in terms of business: Is it website traffic or conversions? Or, perhaps both? Kipfolio outlined some metrics they consider important for modern business:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
• Funnel Conversion Rates
• Brand awareness
• Customer engagement
• Marketing spend per customer
• Return on marketing investment
• Lifetime value of a customer (LTV)
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Customer retention

(Marketing Metrics, n.d.).

Strategies such as increasing website traffic that is fulfilled using a social media tactic of a Facebook ad can be measured through a website analytics tool as well as Facebook ad analytics. Google Analytics’ acquisition metric collects detailed website traffic data, indicating referral websites detailing the number of visits from those websites. The Facebook Pixel is effective in collecting conversion data and users can set the pixel to collect detailed metrics of those conversions. The beauty of metrics is that they are always there for you, even if you change your mind, and are solid proof of your performance. They will never let you down.

The Takeaway

By design, marketing is a fascinating and complicated beast that is an essential component of any business, large or small. When done correctly, it can have a great impact on not only your bottom line but your brand as well, guaranteeing yourself a leg up on the competition and creating a legacy that’s worth remembering. Taking the time to research, measure, and reevaluate your marketing plan will align you and your business for success.