5 SMARTer Marketing Goals For The New Year

Happy New Year! At this time of year, many Americans set New Year’s Resolutions. However, while 45% of Americans usually set New Year’s resolutions, only 8% of people actually achieve them. In other words, most of us like the idea of resolving to achieve something, but we often don’t know how to set out to achieve that objective.

If you are like most people, you’re probably already evaluating your New Year’s resolution. Want to stick with it? Studies show that people who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions.

Marketing goals are no different. Explicitly set, measurable goals are key for marketers to be successful.

Why Measurable Goals Are A Marketer’s Best Friend

According to a study by MIT’s Sloan School of Business, 3 factors hold businesses back:

1. Lack of an overall strategy

2. Too many competing priorities

3. Lack of a proven business case or strong value prop

These 3 factors hold businesses back, and also hold back departments within the business (such as marketing). According to Content Marketing Institute 2014 benchmarks, 93% of content marketers use content marketing, yet only 42% of content marketers say they are effective at content marketing.

Of those marketers who consider themselves effective at content marketing, 66% have a documented content strategy. Among the least effective content marketers, only 11% have a documented content strategy.

The reason these marketers with a documented strategy consider themselves effective is because they have a plan in place. When you have a plan, you can clearly measure how you progressed with the plan. You are also able to handle the 2nd factor that holds businesses back — having too many competing priorities.

If there is one thing I’m sure we can agree about, it is that marketers are very busy. The proliferation of marketing channels has only made it more difficult to stand out from the competition, and 73% of B2B content marketers are producing more content than they did one year ago.

Marketers are also posting this content to more channels; B2B marketers are using an average of 6 social media platforms, up from 5 last year. The only way to cut through this noise, is to know what you are trying to achieve and then determine the correct course of action to execute on that goal.

How Marketers Should Set Goals

Now that we understand why goals are essential for marketers marketers, we need to understand how to set goals that will enable us to be more successful. As we saw with resolutions, people who explicitly make resolutions are 10x more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions. That’s the reason why, among the most successful marketers, 66% have a documented content strategy.

Dr. Edwin Locke’s research in the 1960s proved the importance of clear documentation as well. He found that specific and difficult goals led to better task performance than vague or easy goals. When it comes to marketing, I’ve learned from speaking with marketers day in and day out that marketer’s goals usually involve:

1. Building Brand Awareness

2. Generating High Lead Volume

3. Establishing Thought Leadership

4. Contributing To Revenue Generation

5. Increasing Brand Engagement

Determining your goals is just step 1. After you determine your goals, you need to determine your measures of success. Tom Landry said it the best: “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.”

What varies from marketer to marketer is how they measure these goals. Next year, what will make you say, “YES, I’ve achieved my goals”?

One commonly used framework for setting goals is the SMART criteria commonly attributed to Peter Drucker’s management by objectives concept. SMART is an acronym for:

Specific

Answer the who, what, when, where, which, and why. Ex: “Building Brand Awareness.”

• SMART Goal: Write 5 blog posts a week and share the posts on 2 LinkedIn Groups.

Measurable

Track it quantitative or qualitatively. Depending on the metric, manually or with marketing tools. Ex: “Generating high lead volume.”

• SMART Goal: Generate 300 marketing qualified leads over each quarter in 2014.

Attainable

Goals should be possible to achieve and you should establish a reasonable timeframe to achieve those goals! Otherwise, the goals could become too lofty and overwhelming, leading you to feel that it is impossible to achieve. Ex: “Establishing thought leadership.”

• SMART Goal: Create 1 Ebook on Corgis who can Market in 2014 and attain 1 press mention for the Ebook.

Realistic

Would you need to hire 3 people to achieve your goal? Remember the ideal vs. reality; unfortunately we can’t do everything! Ex: “Contributing leads that turn into sales.”

• SMART Goal: Generate 500 leads for a Demand Generation Rep to qualify and then convert 60% for sales opportunities.

Time-related

Set deadlines for when these goals should be achieved. Ex: “Increasing brand engagement.”

• SMART Goal: Get at least 5 Retweets per Tweet sent out on blog posts by March 1st, 2014.

Conclusion

Once you have your SMART goals, don’t forget the strategy at hand. Measurement is key! Do this yearly, quarterly, weekly, and get your entire team involved. Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which provide metrics to evaluate success factors enabling you to track progress.

This New Year, resolve to set SMART Marketing Goals. You’ll enjoy the success and remove uncertainty about where you stand to make 2015 the most successful year yet. So now, what Marketing goals are you setting for 2015?

If you liked this post, you might like Marketing Metrics Your CEO Cares About or 3 Forgotten Parts of Marketing ROI.