Setting SMART Goals for your Business

As a business owner or marketing manager, you already know the importance of setting goals for business. Setting SMART goals for business is nothing new to many of us, but we often forget how important each component of the SMART acronym actually is. Once you’ve nailed this down for your overall business goal, the next step is to ensure employee goals are appropriately aligned to help the business grow over time.

Whether setting SMART goals for business is brand new information or if you’ve been using this method for some time now, my hope is that the summaries below will help you plan your year for your business and its individual employees as we dive into 2021!

Specific

Your goals need to be specific for everyone on your team to have a clear path of where they are headed.

WRONG: Increase leads

BETTER: Increase leads by 5% over last year

BEST: Increase Product X leads by 2%, Product Y leads by 2%, and Product Z leads by 1%

Measurable

When the time comes to evaluate your goal, you’ll need a way to track your progress. In the example above, tracking the progress will be easy – just look at the number of leads in various product lines.

Where this can get tricky is if the goal isn’t associated with numbers, such as “become known as the expert in our industry” or “expand into a new industry.” Both of these will have a lot of planning involved so you may choose to set smaller goals to reach the larger goal. Another solution is to find a way to assign numbers that relate to your goal, for example:

Expert in your industry: Track brand awareness (impressions, search volume for your brand name, social media following, and engagement, etc.)

Expand to a new industry: Track leads and closed sales in the new industry

Attainable

The next piece essentially comes down to “do you think you can do it?” If your goal is to launch a new product by next quarter, but the last product you launched took 14 months to launch, you may need to re-evaluate the timeline or other aspects of your goal.

Relevant

Always, always, always be sure your goal is relevant to where your business is headed. We’re all guilty of getting carried away with great ideas, but they may not always be relevant to where your business is currently at.

Timely

Deadlines! Before you call it quits on setting your goal, be sure you know the deadline.

Now that we’ve made it through setting SMART goals for your business – it’s time to share the business goals with your entire team. Following that, the next step is to set SMART goals for employees that align with the overall business goals. This way everyone is a part of contributing to the overall goal.

When you’ve reached the deadline of your goal, you can turn to the SMARTER goal model. Here’s where the bonus E and R come in:

Evaluate

How’d did you do? Evaluate the good and the bad of the goal from start to finish. What went well? What didn’t go well? What challenges did the team have in reaching the goal? What did you learn from working toward this goal?

Reset

After evaluating how it went, reset the goal. If you reached your goal, great! Now, how will you take it to the next level? If you didn’t reach the goal or only reached a part of the goal, that’s ok too. After you’ve evaluated what you could do better, reset the goal to try and reach the goal again – maybe with a few tweaks this time.

When it comes to incorporating marketing goals to your overall business goals, Top Floor is always here to help guide the way. We’ll align your SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Email goals in a way that makes sense to your business.