Why SMART Goals Are Necessary for Every Marketing Campaign

How is your business benefitting from your marketing campaigns? Whether it’s generating leads, increasing revenue, or something in between, it’s crucial to set up SMART campaign goals and to measure them accurately. Not only will you know how effective your marketing efforts are, but you will be tracking the impact they have on your business.

Why You Need to Set SMART Campaign Goals

Aside from understanding how your marketing efforts impact your business, setting SMART goals is important because it provides a clear outlook on the campaign for your whole team. A SMART goal is:

• Specific - Describe exact numbers and timeframes for your goal
• Measurable - Create goals that are quantifiable
• Attainable - Make sure your goals are challenging but realistic
• Relevant - Create goals that are consistent with your business’ higher-level goals
• Timely - Provide an adequate amount of time to collect accurate data

By creating clear, quantifiable goals, you will be able to keep track of your campaign’s success accurately.

The Importance of Short-Term and Long-Term Goals

When you are setting SMART goals, it’s essential to make sure you create both short-term and long-term goals. If you only set long-term goals, they will seem so distant and you may become discouraged and start to veer away from your game plan.

To avoid that, you need to set short-term goals within your campaign. These will help keep you on track, but if your results aren’t what you were expecting, you can optimize and adjust your marketing strategy. These goals are smaller and within a shorter timespan that ultimately work towards your long-term goals.

SMART Goal Examples

In this example, a company is launching a campaign to increase their blog subscribers so that they can reach a bigger audience with their content. In order to do that, they’ll need to create engaging blog posts that make people want to hear more from them.

They’ll focus on creating quality blog posts and promoting them on relevant platforms. To help guide their marketing efforts, they’ve set a short-term and long-term SMART goal.

Short-Term SMART Goal for Audience Engagement: We want to see a 20% increase in blog traffic and a 25% decrease in blog post bounce rate by the end of this quarter.

How it’s SMART:

• Specific: They specified the exact metrics we want to see an increase and decrease in so that they can see an increase in audience engagement with the business’ blog content.
• Measurable: The blog traffic rate and bounce rate are measurable metrics.
• Attainable: They chose a reasonable percentage goal in an attainable timeframe.
• Relevant: The overall goal is to reach a bigger audience. However, the first step is to attract visitors to the blog and have them engage with the content. Therefore, it ties back to the business’ higher-level objectives.
• Timely: 3 months is a good timeframe to collect accurate data and measure success.

To make sure that the blog visitors are engaging with the content, the company made sure to track the bounce rate. They will evaluate their initial goal at the end of the quarter, and tweak the existing goal if necessary for the next quarter.

Long-Term SMART Goal for Reaching a Bigger Audience: In six months, we want to have 30 new blog subscribers.

How it’s SMART:

• Specific: They provided an exact timeframe and type of contact.
• Measurable: The number of new subscribers is quantifiable.
• Attainable: If the short-term goal of an increase in blog traffic is met, then an increase in blog subscribers is attainable.
• Relevant: Expanding the company’s reach is an overall goal for the business.
• Timely: Reviewing the goal in six months is long enough to see how effective the campaign and marketing efforts were.

Getting quality blog subscribers isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s a gradual process that requires consistent content to be produced.

By setting short-term goals for each quarter, the company can assess how on track they are to hitting their long-term goal. More importantly, they can make adjustments to their campaign sooner to help them achieve their overall objective.

Online Tools for Measuring Metrics

Before you start your campaign, you’ll need to make sure you have the right tools to collect and analyze your data to stay in line with your goals. Here are some of our favorites:

• Google Analytics

Google Analytics is extremely helpful in tracking your marketing efforts. You can see what platforms led users to your website or landing page and many more insights.

• HubSpot

Through HubSpot, you can create blogs, landing pages, social media posts, and emails and track all of the data from that in one spot. The metrics they can measure ranges from views, visit duration, sources, and more. You can also use HubSpot as your CMS, which allows it to supply similar information for your website.

• Facebook Insights

If social media is playing a big role in your campaign, you are going to want to look at the insights of that specific platform. Facebook Insights are very helpful in showing how many impressions you made and what actions were taken on your content. You can access it through the social site’s dashboard.

• Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an automated email service that provides detailed tracking and reports. These reports are ideal for obtaining revenue and email data for your campaign.

By making your campaign goals SMART, you are increasing the chances of achieving it. That’s because you have created a clear vision for your whole team and know exactly what metrics to analyze. Creating goals should be the first step in your marketing strategy so that you can align your marketing efforts to achieve your overall objective.

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