2017 is moving right along. Have you made progress on creating actionable and helpful marketing goals?

When dealing with something as complex as the B2B hospitality buyer’s journey, it’s useful to have goals you can measure. ROI is difficult to determine when a potential customer might access six pieces of content before talking to anyone in your company. That’s why, when creating and following your goals for 2017, you want to have SMART goals.

SMART goals are talked about a lot in terms of goals you can measure. Let’s discuss what this really means.

Specific

Any and all marketing goals need to be well-defined. Stating you will ‘improve content marketing’ isn’t useful, to you or your company.

How will you improve your content marketing? Will you…

• Start a blog?
• Create more thought leadership pieces?
• Improve your social proof through testimonials and case studies?

When you create a specific goal for your B2B hospitality or travel company, you create an idea about your ROI. If you will improve your content marketing by starting a twice monthly blog, that creates a measurable ROI, which brings us to the next part of the SMART goal system.

Measurable

The first step to achieving a goal is to define what you’re measuring. More importantly, determine if what you’re measuring is valuable to you. Let’s look at social media.

Most companies gauge whether or not their social media is successful based on likes and shares. The social media networks already have algorithms in place to measure these, so that’s what companies use. Do those likes and shares result in sales? Do they lead to new customers?

In terms of likes, probably not. When scrolling through feeds, it’s easy for people to accidentally like something. Or people like your tweet, but aren’t interested in your company.

Shares are more useful than likes; they expose your content to more people. If someone takes the time to share something, they’re showing their followers your content is interesting. With the larger audience, you increase your chances of reaching someone who wants your product.

The best ‘measurable’ goal, in terms of social media, is clicks. The link directs a person to your own page. You can potentially capture their email address. Anyone who visits your site is much more valuable than someone who likes a post on social media. Measurability is a key part of the SMART goal system.

Attainable

It doesn’t help you, your company, or your sales if you create goals you can’t meet. You need to be realistic about improving your marketing. Let’s say you plan to increase site visitors through the use of a blog.

If you have 100 visitors a day, increasing to 300 a day after three months might be attainable. Expecting a blog to bring in 3000 a day after three months is most likely not attainable. When you have unattainable goals, you set yourself up for failure.

Relevant

How will your goal improve your company? Will it result in more site visitors? Improve ROI?

Whatever the result, make sure your goal is going to improve your circumstances in some way. If you decide to increase the number of case studies you produce in a year, for example, what will that do for your company?

Tie any goal you have to improving the company. Determine how it will accomplish that and the results you need to achieve that. Most marketing goals are relevant, but you want to define how they are relevant in terms of your company specifically.

Just because everyone else is using a new marketing channel, doesn’t mean it’s right for your company.

Timely

Set an end date for your goals. When you set a deadline, it makes you take a real look at the progress of your goals. When you need to achieve something by a specific time, you start to take steps to make it happen.

If you don’t have an end date, it tells your mind there’s time later to achieve something. An end date also tells you to take small steps to accomplish that goal.

Are you ready to meet your goals for 2017? Contact us for a free 20-minute consultation where you can learn about SMART goals