Before getting started with marketing, it's important to formulate a goal, but there are different ways in which you can do that. By the end of this video, you'll have a blueprint for formulating your marketing goals in a way that sets you up for success. Let's look again at Imre's flower business Calla & Ivy. Imra's handbound flower bouquets are very popular, but after having run the store for about three years, Imra realized that she could only reach people who live close enough to bring her flowers home. She decided to set up a website, to offer her flower bouquets to people throughout the country, she found a reliable way to ship bouquets. Now she needs to make sure people who don't know about her store get to know Calla & Ivy, and start purchasing flowers online. Goals can help you stay focused on what you hope to accomplish with your marketing efforts. In Imra's case, she wants to get the word out about her new website so people who are not near the store can purchase flowers from her. Having clear specific goals will, help her in our team stay aligned and focus their marketing activity to ensure that they're spending their marketing budget wisely. As you think about your own marketing goals, it helps to make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound, in other words, SMART. Let's take a closer look at each element of the SMART acronym. Your goal should be specific, and you should be able to write or say it in a way that anyone could understand. After all, you want to make sure that there's no confusion about what you're trying to achieve. You could say for example, sell 100 products, get 200 new subscribers, or generate 20 qualified leads. Your goal should also be measurable. You should be able to evaluate, whether you achieved your goals in a quantifiable way, like for instance, number of sales, revenue, or number of visitors to a website. Your goal should be something that you can achieve, be realistic, set goals that are feasible for you and your team and that you believe are possible, with your available resources. Setting goals that are unrealistic can be really demotivating. If you have a lofty goal in mind that may not be immediately achievable, break up your goal in a few sub goals or milestones that you can reach. When you set your marketing goals, you also want to think about their relevance. Will they help achieve the bigger business objective? It's important to make sure your goals align, with your greater business strategy. Your goals should have a start and an end date. That way, you can track against the milestone and you know when it's time to measure the outcome and evaluate whether you were successful. Let's look at Calla & Ivy again and Imra's initiative to create a website where people can buy her bouquets. As a first step, Imra wants to make sure people get to know her business, and discover her website. She's planning some marketing for the site, and at the start of the year sets herself the following goal. Get 10,000 website visits during the month of May. Imra's goal is SMART, it's specific and clearly states what she wants to achieve. It's measurable, she can track the number of visits to her website, with the software she uses to create her website. Given the success of the story in Amsterdam, Imra feels that this goal is challenging, but achievable. And the goal is relevant after all, it's her intention to sell flowers online, so getting more visitors, will ultimately help her to sell more flowers. And it's time bound, she set herself a deadline by the end of May. Imra knows that she will have to build up her audience, but by May, she hopes to have a total of 10,000 visits over a month. We discussed that it's important to write your goals down. Here is a very simple template to help assure your goals are SMART. We've added a few questions to guide your own goal development. Let's check our goal one more time in this template. Get 10,000 website visits during the month of May. Yes, this is specific, we know what needs to be done. It can be measured, the website software will tell Imra how many visit she got. It's achievable, Imra believes it can be done. And it should be done as part of the bigger business objective to sell flowers, so it's relevant. And finally, it will be done by the end of May, so this goal is time bound. Let's look at one more example. James manages a social media marketing, for DCB Cleaning. The company focuses on cleaning services for small and medium sized businesses. They take the headache out of managing, cleaning, and janitorial services for small businesses. In DCB Cleaning clients use an app that let's them manage the cleaning service they need, and pick and choose from a list of tasks the cleaning crew can focus on. No need to call or talk to anyone, and everything gets taken care of, with a smile. Now DCB Cleaning is introducing a new service called DCB Snackwall, where businesses can set up a snack wall at their office, and DCB keeps the snack wall stocked. Clients choose the snacks through the app, and they can change their selection at anytime. For the initial rollout, DCB will only provide a snack wall to their current clients. James boss told him that she would like to see a social media marketing plan from him to help her achieve a 25% client enrollment in Snackwall. James is very excited about the new product, and he can't wait to set up the new campaign. Before James get started, he asks his manager when she hopes to achieve the 25% enrollment. It turns out the company wants to achieve this milestone, within six months as they plan to decide on a bigger roll out then. With this information in mind, James can formulate a SMART goal. Let's look at his goal in our template. The goal reads, enroll 25% of the DCB Cleaning clients in Snackwall in six months from now. The goal is specific, it's measurable, James can count the number of subscribers. James is confident that this goal is achievable, and he knows it's relevant to the company's efforts to expand in this new product line. And the goal is time bound, he has six months to meet it. In short, it's a SMART goal. You now know how to formulate SMART goals, it's a very important starting point for your marketing efforts. Now let's turn our attention to the M in SMART. In the next video, you learn more about the measurement part and how to define the metrics that really matter.
