How to Apple SMART Criteria When Setting Goals

Every journey starts with a map. Or at least it does if you want to reach your destination. Your strategy and the set of objectives are in a way your roadmap. A good and well-thought-through plan can do miracles for achieving your goals.

A SMART approach has proven to be a very effective way to add structure and be realistic about your aims. It is a very common practice for every second performance based marketing company to evaluate objectives using this approach before moving forward with the strategy.

It is extremely important to think whether your goals are actually essential and needed. Remembering the SMART acronym can help you focus on the right things and add structure to your plan. The acronym is quite famous among marketers, but in case you didn’t know or forgot, according to the SMART approach, every goal has to be:

• Specific – what exactly are you aiming to improve;
• Measurable – how can you measure your movement towards achieving it;
• Assignable – you have to select who exactly is responsible for the objective;
• Realistic – do you have what it takes to achieve your goal;
• Time-related – be specific about time;

The interpretation of SMART differs from person to person, but it is a more or less common perspective.

To get a better understanding of what this acronym means, have a look at the infographic by Smart Insights:

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A SMART objective could be reaching an average order value of 50$ during this year. Or it could be acquiring 30,000 followers on your social media channel within three months. You may also set the goal of reaching some level of engagement or revenue contribution as well.

While filtering your ideas and objectives with this approach, you might want to avoid some common mistakes. There is one thing you should remember here: every goal has comply with every heading of SMART. You cannot just create a separate goal for measurable, then think of one for realistic. No, it’s not how it works.

Every objective must be SMART.

Also, it’s not uncommon when people create a whole unstructured bulk of objectives. Try to think of some sort of system or logical grouping. It will help to make it both more understandable for other people when you would want to present your list and it would be easier to implement actions and achieve those objectives. You can think of a strategy, of an order of things. Just try to imagine that you are seeing the list of objectives from someone else’s perspective. Make sure everything is logical and in order. It can help you achieve better results and plan your time and resources more efficiently.

Additionally, you can use these tests for your metrics. They are applicable to digital marketing promotion and other types of marketing. These are some questions that you might discuss with your team while developing your key performance indicators:

• Is this the right metric for measuring performance?
• Are you measuring exactly what you aimed from the beginning and just that?
• Does the measurement worth resources required for the process?
• Can you clearly measure what you want or is there a degree of ambiguity?
• Can the measuring process cause behavior or actions that you might want to avoid?
• Is it possible to ensure consistency throughout the process when it’s not just one person involved?
• Is it possible to get the data you need within the required period of time?
• Do you have easy access or any access at all to the data you will need?
• Is the data actionable?

The questions will help you in selecting the most effective measures.

Also, there is more than one interpretation of what SMART can mean. Some even introduced SMARTER approach for objective evaluation. There a few ways to interpret SMARTER as well, and we are going to share some possible variants here:

• S – instead of specific can be read as simple or sustainable;
• M – instead of measurable: manageable and motivational;
• A – instead of attainable: achievable and adjustable;
• R – instead of relevant: realistic and results based;
• T – instead of time bound: trackable and tangible;
• E – can stand for ‘evaluate, as well as ethical and evidenced;
• R – can either mean ‘reevaluate’ or reviewed;

So, as you can see, there are many ways to evaluate your objectives and choose only the right ones that will encourage your growth and will be realistic. Whether you are offering a website promo or working on promoting your online store, your strategy can be improved a lot and show some amazing results, if you adhere to the SMART approach while setting your goals.

You can look at your set of goals from the perspective of this approach, and it will probably inspire some new insights that you haven’t thought about before.