In a recent post, Let’s Talk Goals: Know the 5 Categories, we discussed the 5 categories your marketing goals generally fall into:

1. Brand Development
2. Lead Generation
3. Revenue
4. Cost Savings
5. Customer Support

Hopefully you agree that every marketer needs goals to help stay focused and prove our worth. And, if you read our first post in this series, you should have an idea of the kinds of goals you can develop. But all of these goals are worthless if they aren’t rooted in the reality of what can – or should – be accomplished with any project.

At CPV, we use SMART goals as our reality check. SMART goals are:

• Specific
• Measureable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

Let’s look at this in a little more detail:

Specific: Before anything else, your goals need to be specific. And they should have numbers with deadlines, so there is no doubt whether or not you reached your goal.

Measureable: If you can’t measure your goal, what’s the point? Make sure you set goals that can be measured, then work toward them and adjust as necessary.

Attainable: Who wouldn’t want to increase their revenue 100% in six months? But for most of us, that isn’t going to be attainable. You need to set challenging, yet achievable, goals. 

Relevant: In the same vein as being attainable is being relevant. Just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean it’s important to your business. Make sure you set relevant goals that move your business forward.

Timely: Every goal should have a timeline attached to it. Deadlines have a way of pressuring us to move toward a goal more quickly.

Tell us about your success with SMART goals in the comments below.