SMART Marketing Strategies That Lead to Positive Results

May 08, 2020 ● 4 min read

As we all know marketing is an integral part of business development, which is why advertising expenses can easily spin out of control. Unfortunately, not every marketing campaign is a success. In fact, its effectiveness can hardly be measured in many cases.

This is why it’s often regarded as a gamble, but it doesn’t have to be that way. SMART marketing is a new buzzword in the world of business development, and it is worth looking into. 

What is SMART marketing?

In this case SMART is an acronym: S stands for Specific, M for Measurable, A for Achievable or Actionable, R for Realistic or Relevant, and T for Timely.

Your objectives and goals should be set following these guidelines. Let’s analyze these elements to find out what each one implies: 

• Specific outcomes. Before you begin working on your marketing strategy, decide on what you want to achieve specifically. Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Or, you’re looking to boost your sales? Perhaps, you’re losing customers and want to increase the retention rate?
  
  Each of these categories requires a somewhat different approach. Hence, you should set specific goals that can be broken down further.
  
  For example, you’re looking to increase sales by 10% until the end of the year. It either means launching 1200 new products in twelve months, or 100 new products each month. 

• Measurable results. Your objectives should turn into results you can measure and milestones you can track. This way, you’ll get a picture of your progress. 
  
  One of the easiest ways to measure how far you’ve come is to use Whatagraph, a marketing data reporting tool. With Whatagraph, you can get visualized marketing reports periodically: set how often you want to get your reports and keep your team constantly updated.
  
  If your efforts aren’t paying off, perhaps consider revising your strategy and try a different approach. Or, try identifying the flaws in your current strategy and plan on fixing them. 

• Achievable goals. Setting clear and realistic goals will help your team stay motivated and work hard on achieving them. If your team is struggling, it indicates either the set goals are unrealistic or your members simply don’t grasp the strategy.
  
  Make sure you explain the plan thoroughly during team meetings and answer all of the questions. And, if someone has well-justified misgivings about the plan, do your best to address them – there’s even a chance you overlooked something.  
• Realistic expectations. Once you set the goals, you can prove they’re achievable basing your expectations on true facts. Explain what the current business climate is like, or elaborate on why you believe the demand for your business will grow. Data analysis can help you back up your beliefs and make sure that the data is presented in a way everyone can understand. 
• Timely deadlines. Setting deadlines play an important role in a well-thought-out plan. Even the most ambitious objectives can be achieved if they are broken down elaborately. Segmenting your entire strategy into pieces gives more structure to your plan. Working towards your goal step-by-step will help your team stay motivated.
  
  Planning on making 1,200 new sales in a year may seem daunting. But, the goal of making three new sales every day doesn’t sound so unreal, does it? 

SMART marketing objectives or goals

As you see, the SMART strategy is all about project management. Just by understanding what the SMART abbreviation stands for, you get the general idea of how you should frame your goals. 

Instead of saying “We need a strategy on how to increase revenue this year”, let’s brainstorm and try to be more specific. You can instead say “Let’s boost our profit between 10% and 15%”, then follow up with more measurable metrics.” 

For instance, state that saving on cost centers is currently not an option and that sales should be responsible for increasing your revenue. This way, your team will consider increasing revenue through sales as the only option. 

Besides, you can boost your sales by creating innovative customer or employee incentives. 

Now, let’s take multiple aspects of making a customer think your offer is attention-worthy. 

In other words, get a 5% increase in sales by boosting the motivation of your sales team, the other 5% by organizing large sales, and another 5% through increased brand awareness. Once that’s done, create another SMART plan for each of these to make them more actionable.

First of all, plan to make large sales in a timeframe you actually remember making a profit. Then, do extensive research on your core user personas - this way, you’ll narrow down the marketing channels you should put the most effort in. Finally, find out what perks motivate your employees to come up with incentives.        

FAQ

What are the 5 SMART goals?

5 SMART goals are:

1. Specific numerical target;
2. Measurable results or KPIs;
3. Actionable plan or achievable results;
4. Relevant inputs or realistic expectations based on historical data;
5. Well-formulated deadlines that mitigate the possibility of scope creep. 

What are the examples of SMART goals?

Examples of SMART goals would be getting 10 more clients within the next 3 months. Or, ensuring that daily, weekly or monthly outreach to new potential users is increased, using previous conversion rate and user feedback as a basis for the target goal premise.

Written by Mike

Former data analyst and the head of Whatagraph blog team. A loving owner of two huskies, too.