How many times have you launched a marketing campaign with the goal of building brand awareness —or even without a clearly defined objective? And later, were you unable to truly measure the impact of that campaign?
Creating brand awareness or “buzz” around a new product or service isn’t a quantifiable goal that will help you prove the success—or failure—of your marketing efforts.
So, how can you prove the effectiveness of your marketing efforts to management?
By setting SMART goals.
They are quantitative goals that you should set for any project in your company, whether it involves marketing, sales, communications, management, or any other area or department.
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Relevant
T = Timely
Here are 5 steps to create a SMART goal for your next campaign:
Step 1: Be specific and define which metric you want to measure. Website visits, number of leads generated, new customers, or increasing the value of existing customers?
Step 2: Define the quantity. How many more visits do you want to attract to the website? How many leads do you want to generate? And customers?
Step 3: Assess whether it’s realistic. You should base your numbers on the company’s history or industry benchmarks. If you typically generate 30 leads per month, it probably isn’t very realistic to set a goal of 300 leads for next month.
Step 4: Check whether it’s a relevant goal for the project and important for the company. For example, if your contacts aren’t opening your newsletters, it won’t make sense to set a goal for them to click on the content you provide in them, since you first need to ensure an increase in the open rate—and only then focus on clicks.
Step 5: Set a deadline for achieving your goal. By the end of next month? Before the second half of the year? Setting a deadline for achieving the goal is absolutely essential.
Increase the number of leads by 50% (from 100 to 150) through the promotion
of the online event by March 31, 2017.
Specific = What? = The number of leads
Measurable = How much? = 50% (100–150)
Attainable = Is it realistic? What data did I use to arrive at this number? = Based on internal benchmarks
Relevant = Does it make sense? Is it relevant to the project? = It is related to the ultimate goal
Timely = By when do I need to achieve these results? March 31, 2017
By setting SMART goals, it will be much easier to understand what the ultimate goal is, measure progress, and determine the success or failure of your marketing initiatives.
Here are some tips you can implement with your marketing and sales teams to ensure these goals are met:
1. Share the defined goals
Sharing the goals to be achieved will give everyone involved a clear idea of the ideal outcome of their work and effort.
By sharing the goals, you’ll have the opportunity to hear your colleagues’ opinions on their validity, and you may even discover other projects within the company that could help you achieve your goals.
2. Be transparent about your results (especially if you’re falling short of your goals!)
Reviewing the progress of any project is a best practice and essential to ensuring its success. Therefore, if, upon reviewing your results, you realize you’re on the right track, you should share this with your team so they understand they’re doing a good job. If, on the other hand, you’re falling far short of expected results, it’s even more important to communicate and discuss this with your colleagues, as it will help you define a new strategy so that you can still achieve the desired results.
With a marketing automation platform, you can share the results and corresponding goals with your team automatically and very easily. Depending on the duration of your project, you can even set up automatic weekly or monthly reports.
If you don’t have a platform available, you can always create an Excel file and share it with everyone involved so they can fill it out each week with the previous week’s results. This will help establish a routine of constant analysis and evaluation of results.
3. Schedule brainstorming sessions
Holding a planning and brainstorming session midway through a project can be exactly what makes the difference between meeting or missing your goals.
If you’re not managing to achieve your goals, call a meeting with your team to review what’s been done, what the results have been, and what new action plan to follow in the coming weeks.
4. Learn lessons for the future
Once the project is complete, analyze what went well and what could have been improved. You should gather your team and discuss all these points together to ensure future projects are optimized.
The idea here is to identify areas that still need improvement and what worked well—both in terms of marketing efforts and team organization—as well as ideas that were implemented and had a positive impact on the project.
5. Create benchmarks
With all the projects you’ve completed and recurring marketing efforts, you likely already have an average number of website visits, leads generated, and new customers acquired each month.
These are your company’s internal benchmarks that you should never overlook, as it is based on this data that you will set your SMART goals and verify their validity.
If you don’t have access to this data, search online for benchmarks in your industry to use as a starting point.
And remember that your goals should always be realistic. There’s no point in setting overly ambitious goals if you know from the start that you’ll never achieve them. This will demoralize your team and make everyone feel like nothing is being accomplished. Likewise, they shouldn’t be too unambitious, because then you aren’t challenging your team, and it will be too easy to achieve the set goals.
If your goal is to increase the number of visits or leads on your website, I suggest you watch the video recording of our webinar on “How to Turn Your Website into a Lead-Generating Machine”: