The Importance of Setting SMART Goals for Business Success

Goal setting keeps us motivated and guides us toward where we want to be. With this in mind, when was the last time you thought about defining and tracking goals for your business? If it’s been a while, you’re not alone. According to a recent Staples survey of 300 small companies, their business goals – and, unsurprisingly, 77% of them fail to attain them. 

Setting goals should be one of your biggest priorities and can potentially be the basis of your Inbound Marketing Plan that will likely make your business thrive. Yet knowing how to actually set, measure, and track these goals is crucial. In this article, we show you how implementing SMART goals can provide the best outcome for your business. 

What are SMART Goals?

The acronym SMART is described as specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The understanding of this acronym will guide you to create goals to have a successful business. 

1. 1. Specific: Use specific goals to clearly state what your goal is about, so you and everyone on your team can clearly understand the objective.

      Tip: Think about and state what you expect, who will do it, and make sure they are accountable for it. For example, you can state, “I want to generate a greater number of qualified leads from our blog for our sales team.”
      
      
   2. Measurable: Use measurable goals to describe how the objective will be calculated, being able to measure your goals helps you see if you are on schedule, making progress, and actually completing the goal you set.
      
      Tip: Write about the quantity of the goal, like “I want to grow the number of leads generated per month from our blog by 20%.”
      
      
   3. Attainable: Setting attainable goals is about looking at what you've accomplished so far and then adjusting your goals to be realistic and relative to what you want to achieve.
      
      Tip: Make sure you have the time, resources, and understanding of what it will take to accomplish your goal. It could be written like this, “Since we generate around 100 leads per month from our blog right now, I want to grow the number of leads generated per month from our blog to 120 per month.”
      
      
   4. Relevant: Use relevant goals to move your business in a direction that you want it to move in, the goal should be consistent, useful, and address the vision for where you want to be.
      
      Tip: Write something that is useful and will impact your business positively. For example, “I want to grow the number of leads generated per month from our blog to 120 per month because our sales team finds that blog leads convert to customers at 3X the rate of leads from PPC advertising.”
      
      
   5. Time-Bound: Use time-bound goals that allow you to set your goal in a set time period, which will motivate you to accomplish the goal on time.
      
      Tip: Write about when this goal should be completed. For example, you can write,  “I want to grow the number of leads generated per month from our blog to 120 per month because our sales team finds that blog leads convert to customers at 3X the rate of leads from PPC advertising. I'll reach 120 blog leads generated per month by 6 months from today.” 

What Kind of SMART Goals can you Set?

Understanding what SMART goals are in general, directly allows you to be creative and come up with concrete targets that will make a successful impression on your business. Here are some broad examples of what your SMART Goals could be based around. 

• Generating more Leads
• Increasing Sales
• Increasing Traffic
• Brand Recognition 

Now, these are just broad examples that you can use for your SMART Goals, ideally, you would want to make them more clear-cut. Also, keep in mind to not set your goals too high as it will be discouraging if you don't reach them, so consistently be able to make short-term, realistic goals.

Why do you NEED SMART Goals? 

These goals allow you as a business owner to increase your odds of success by having a framework and structure of where, when, and how you can grow your business. Creating and having marketing-based SMART goals will push your business toward higher leads, conversions, and overall traffic to your brand. 

SMART goals significantly help with the progress within your business through diligently planning out the objectives in an organized and easy to read manner. That will then help you stay on pace toward your long-term goals in regards to your content plan or inbound marketing strategy in general. 

For more resources to help with writing a SMART Goal!

Want more information on how to improve your marketing strategy? Subscribe to our blog and get the latest information directly to your email.