Marketing goals keep you focused on success. They set objectives with achievable goals that propel you forward. Creating SMART goals challenges your marketing plan by setting a metric your team works towards. Each goal is well defined, so it is clear what everyone needs to achieve. When everything aligns with revenue targets, your goals become measurable.
As a result, you have a clear outline allowing your team to understand the tasks they need to perform and when. Milestones mark progress, while metrics provide targets that must be met by those dates. Each task is measurable, so progress is clear. Here we review how to not just set, but also hit your small business marketing objectives in 2022 using SMART goals.
What are SMART Goals?
Small business owners need benchmarks that make it easy to see where you were last year and where you want to be in 2022. SMART goals allow you to define specifics so you can increase revenue based on the following:
- Specific: Each goal must be well-defined, clear, and unambiguous so everyone understands what they need to achieve.
- Measurable: Setting specific criteria allows you to measure your progress toward the accomplishment of each goal so each goal remains tangible.
- Achievable: Each goal should be attainable and not impossible to achieve otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure.
- Realistic: Along with being achievable, your goals must be reachable, but also relevant to your business.
- Timely: Each goal needs a clearly defined timeline, including a starting date and a target date to create a sense of urgency.
With SMART goals you have something you are working towards and something to show for your efforts.
Reverse Engineering
Reverse engineering starts with your revenue targets to determine:
- How many sales you need
- How many leads you need
- What conversion rates you need from leads to sales’
- How many web visitors you need
From there you can outline specific marketing goals such as the number of leads you want by a specific date. This provides a specific, well-defined goal that is measurable against your revenue numbers. As long as the revenue number is realistic, it is achievable. You can set deadlines for reaching the numbers to maintain a sense of urgency to drive the numbers upwards to meet your goals.
Instead of wasting money on ineffective marketing, you have a plan to help you actually accomplish something. Your team understands what you expect, keeping you on point and providing quantifiable results in your small business marketing to produce revenue.
SMART Goal Structuring
As a small business owner, you might find it difficult to know what areas your marketing goals need to address. However, the following nine areas help you set up defined expectations and a plan for your marketing and sales team:
1. Positioning
Who is your ideal client? This is the information you need to create a targeted brand script for your overall company, as well as individual brand scripts for each product line, program, or department. When you know who your ideal client is you can define your differentiation points with their needs in mind. This defines your positioning so your marketing and sales team understands it, and can leverage it to set achievable, realistic goals.
2. Marketing Toolkit/Tech-stack
Most small businesses are operating using too many marketing and sales software tools. Assessing the tools you use allows you to look for integration opportunities to streamline information and reporting. This saves time and money, while also improving the customer experience. Map out your current customer journey from start to finish from the initial discovery of your brand until they are converted to a customer. What are the touchpoints and the platforms they interact with? How can you make this more efficient, engaging and less time-consuming? How much money can you save? How many more conversions can you make?
3. Website
Your website needs to earn its keep. How many organic visitors are you getting? How long are they staying on each page? Are they staying or bouncing as soon as they arrive? Is your website even converting new clients at all? If so, what is your lead conversion rate? The leads to sales rate? All of these numbers are measurable, providing an excellent way to set goals and follow progress.
4. Build Your Story /Content
Customers and prospects should be seeing suitable content that matches each leg of their customer journey. Once you map out your customer journey, you will better understand the different channels they interact with at each stage. You can then personalize your content for each channel and each customer interaction. The content your customers access at different channels of your marketing efforts must change depending on the stage of their journey. From awareness to consideration and from consideration to making a decision, your content strategy needs to answer the questions and meet needs at each of these stages.
What blog themes work at each stage? How do your email messages progress throughout your drip campaigns when it comes to nurturing, converting, or retaining customers? How can you leverage social channels? Where are you now with conversions and where do you want to be by the end of each quarter and for each content channel?
5. SEO
SEO is an ongoing strategy. There are very measurable benchmarks to target with SEO efforts including:
- # of Organic web traffic your SEO is generating
- # of Organic leads you are generating
- Lead to sale percentage
- The ranking for your top keywords
- How many of your website pages are ranking on the first page of search results?
- What keywords show your company on Google maps and which don’t/should?
These numbers help you measure progress when you ramp up your SEO strategy. Just keep in mind from an achievable and realistic standpoint, SEO is very slow-moving so timelines should be generous.
6. Social Media
Social media is your opportunity for meaningful interaction. You want to look at your reach numbers and see where you’d like to be and when. How is your engagement with shares, comments or likes? Are you generating any leads? How can you improve to see more leads? What is your lead to sale percentage for the leads you do get?
7. Reputation
Are you getting Google, Facebook, or community reviews? Are they helping with or tarnishing your online reputation? Can you automate your review collection and sharing system to encourage customers to post positive reviews? Can your sales team help?
8. Email
Set a target for how many contacts you want on your list. Also, set a timeline to clean up your current contacts to improve your number of leads created and lead to sales percentage. Try marketing tactics such as A/B testing for subject lines, content, links to landing pages, etc. to improve your open and link click rates. Set up your number of leads and lead-to-sale percentage targets.
9. PPC
PPC is important to boost your marketing efforts. Consider the number of leads, and in this case the cost per lead and compare it with your lead to sales percentage to see if your investment is paying off. What is a realistic target to set for your PPC improvements? How can you improve your PPC ads? Can you try A/B testing to perfect your ads?
Being SMART about your small business marketing goals is easier when you focus on these nine areas. You can define expectations and develop a plan for your marketing and sales team. When they have something to work towards each year, they are challenged to meet deadlines and come up with new approaches that improve results. Scheduled goals and metrics help produce results and improve your ROI. SMART goals can increase revenue for a stronger, more successful 2022.
If you want to make some strategic changes by implementing smart marketing goals for your business going forward, then let’s talk!
