Before getting started with marketing it's important to formulate a goal, but they're 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 Imran's Flower, business Calla and Ivy, Imran's hand bound flower bouquets are very popular. But after having run the store for about three years, Imran 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 reliable way to ship bouquets, now she needs to make sure people who don't know about her store get to know Calla and Ivy and start purchasing flowers online. Goals can help you stay focused on what you hope to accomplish with your marketing efforts, in Imran'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 and her 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 off this 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, sad goals that are feasible for you and your team, and that you believe are possible with your available resource. Setting goals that are unrealistic can be really de motivating 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 a milestone, and you know when it's time to measure the outcome and evaluate whether you were successful. Let's look at Callan, Ivy again and Emeralds Initiative to create a website where people can buy her book case as the first step in Emmra wants to make sure people get to know her business and discovered 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 Mount off me, Emmra's goal is smart, it's specific and clearly states what she wants to achieve, it's measurable. She contract the number of visits to her website with a software she uses to create her website. Given the success of the story in Amsterdam, Emmra 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 me, Emmra knows that she will have to build up her audience, but by May she hopes to have a total off 10,000 visits over a month. We discussed that it's important to write your goals down, here's 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 Mount off me, yes, there's a specific, we know what needs to be done. It can be measured, the website software will tell Imran how many visits she got, it's achievable, Imran 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 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. And DCB cleaning clients use an app that lets 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 Snack Wall, where businesses can set up a snack wall at their office and DCB keeps the snack while stocked. Clients choose the snacks through the APP, and they can change their selection at any time. For the initial rollout, DCB will Onley provide a snack wall to their current clients. James is 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 Snack wall. James is very excited about a new product, and he can't wait to set up the new campaign before James get started, he asks this manager when she hopes to achieve the 25% enrollment. Turns out the company wants to achieve this milestone within six months as they plan to decide on a bigger role out, then, with his information in mind, James can formulate a smart goal. Let's look at his goal in our template, the goal reads, enrolled 25% of DCB cleaning clients in snack wall, in six months from now, the goal of 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 effort 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 matrix that really matter.
