How do you write realistic smart goals? Which is the best example of a smart goal?
You as a manager are planning ahead on a yearly, quarterly, and monthly basis. Determining where to go and what your department goals are based on the strategy and goals of the company. To ensure goals are more specific and achievable there is a methodology to describe your marketing goals
SMART. In order to rapidly manifest your needs, you need to get clear on paper exactly what it is that you want. We provide a SMART goal worksheet template, that can function as an action plan for your goals. This template will help you structure your thoughts in a professional way and enables you to create the goal according to the SMART format.
S.M.A.R.T. is a methodology that helps you establish concrete and achievable goals. SMART stands for:
- Specific,
- Measurable,
- Attainable (or Attractive)
- Realistic,
- Timely (or Tangible).
SMART more in detail:
Specific
When creating a goal, you want it to be as short, crisp, and specific as possible. Having "the best marketing year" isn't a reflection of what your company actually accomplished. Imagine that your boss is about to leave for a well-deserved holiday, and you have ahead of marketing have less than 60 seconds until he grabs the taxi to the airport, and all he wants is to quickly hear what next year's goal is. What are you going to tell him that concisely explains your plans?
Measurable
You are very lucky if you manage only to say they want to "increase their social media following." While that is a goal, it's not a trackable goal. If you start the new year with 100 followers and end with 101, technically you met your goal although if you afterward show the absolute growth to your CEO he will explode. It is important to make goals measurable, "We want to increase social media following by 20%," suddenly you can measure your progress every month to see if you're on track to ultimately jumping from 100 to 125 followers.
Attainable
Make sure to keep these goals realistic. If in your company history you've generated an average of 20 leads every month, jumping to 4,000 leads per month would be a drastic change. Many businesses do this to push employees and to "go as far as they possibly can." But in reality, all this does is discourage employees, as they can never actually be successful. SMART goals are goals that can be achieved.
Relevant
Why have a goal if the goal doesn't matter? Say you're a book business that, at maximum, can only sell 500 books per month. In this situation, your goal likely shouldn't be to "increase production of books from 500 per month to 1,000 per month." While it's great you have more books if your current distributors won't buy more, why bother? Your goal should be something along the lines of, "increase distribution channels by X%."
Time-Bound
While having all the aforementioned help develop a solid goal, you need to ensure you have a timeline for meeting that goal. Going back to the book business example, if you do decide your goal is to increase distribution channels, you need to know when you will accomplish this in order to know when to start working on a secondary goal of increasing teddy bear production. You don't want a situation where you end up with more bookstores taking your books, but no books to sell.
Take action and download this SMART Marketing Goals template in Excel now and start creating SMART Goals for yourself or your project directly or to increase the chance you will obtain the goal next time!