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Digital Marketing - A SMARTER way to set your Marketing Goals

23.02.19 08:49 PM By Neil Cole

Focus on SMARTER goals

One of the first questions I ask clients when I sit down to talk about their digital marketing strategy is "What are your goals?". Inevitable, the answer is usually "More sales! More Traffic! More Engagement!" but when you dig deeper and "ask how much more?" the answers usually start to become a little less definitive. 

Why Digital Marketing?

Traditionally, marketing has been a necessary evil, something you have spend money on but it is difficult to say how effective it is. Yes, a newspaper advert may generate customers, but how many customers does each advert generate? Could the advert be tweaked to be more effective?  You can have a good guess but usually the results are rough and take time to collate.   One of the advantages of digital marketing is that it is a measurable process, you can tell which adverts generate the traffic, you can A/B test the effect of changing fonts, colours or images and this can be done real-time. You don't need to wait for a campaign to end to see if it had failed. 

How does being able to measure everything help?

If you are able to measure every aspect of your digital marketing activities then it stands to reason that you can tell pretty easily  if you are going making progress towards your goals or not. This does of course mean that your goals need to be measurable too. 

Making your Goals SMARTER

This may seem like "Business Planning 101, but for many small businesses, developing a plan is fairly low down on the todo list, particularly when things seem to be going reasonably well. Many businesses are seasonal in nature and so a month-to-month comparison is not really indicative of anything. When operating in such an organic fashion, often I will hear the terms, " good month", or "quiet month" with very little validation as to what that actually means. That is why it is important to have a longer term goal to compare your performance against. That is where SMARTER goals come in. 

SMARTER Goals? I thought they only had to be SMART

In November 1981, George T. Doran, a consultant, published a paper titled "There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives" If you have progressed through an educational establishment in the last 20 years you will most be familiar with the SMART acronym. 


The SMART acronym often varies a little but generally it is accepted that it stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-based. 


When writing SMART targets I have always had a little bit of a problem distinguishing between the Attainable and Realistic when writing goals. Aren't they the same thing? Apparently when George Doran proposed the concept, the "A" stood for Assignable - This makes more sense to me. 

So this is SMART

This leaves us with a definitive list for SMART


Specific: target a specific marketing goal for improvement.

Measurable: quantify, or at least suggest, an indicator of progress.

Assignable: specify who will do it.

Realistic: state what results can realistically be achieved given available resources.

Time-related: specify when the result can be achieved.


But this is SMARTER

It doesn't however close the loop. This is done by adding two further areas Evaluated and Reviewed


Evaluated: appraisal of a goal to assess the extent to which it has been achieved.

Reviewed: reflection and adjustment of your approach or behaviour to reach a goal.


By evaluating your progress on a regular basis, this enables you to see whether you are making the optimum progress against your goal. This is particularly true for those mid-term goals that at 3-6 months may be ignored, that is until they become urgent! Your review of these goals enables you to make regular adjustments increasing your chances of success. 

SMARTER goals let you know whether or not you have achieved what you set out to do and that to me has value. I like to know which activities contribute to the success of what I am trying to do and  I need a formal empirical system to do that. It turns out that most people need some kind of system to help them do it too. 


What about you?

In the end the SMARTER Framework is just a guide. I find that regularly reviewing a clearly stated, measurable goal makes it much easier to achieve . The regularity with which I review my goals, is a new COMMITMENT each time I do it to ACHIEVE the goal.  How do you go about goal setting in your business?