Having a clear well thought out marketing strategy is a must in order to achieve successful marketing campaigns and increased sales.  You need to know what you are working towards and what goals you want to achieve.  Successful businesses have clear, measurable goals and objectives, they know what they want and how to go about achieving it.   An efficient method used by many performance managers is through SMART targets and is particularly effective when applied to social media marketing.

So what is SMART and how can you implement it?

The term/acronym SMART was given by George T Doran in an article produced for Management Review and has extensively been used in business to enable management to define goals and objectives in a structured and effective manner. There are different interpretations as to the exact definition, however they all stress the importance of planning and goal setting.

S – Specific  

     M – Measurable

   A – Assignable

R – Relevant

       T – Time related.

Let’s look at each section in more depth

Specific

Focus on an area of improvement, be specific don’t generalise.  Decide on what the end result is going to be, and  what you want to achieve?Think about how you will use social media in order to reach your objective. Which platforms will you us to reach your target market? Decide on who is involved and make sure that they are all aware of their roles and individual objectives and how they fit into the overall scheme.

Measurable

Create a system where you can track progress and provide focus as you work towards your final objective/goal. Without setting targets it’s not possible to know whether you are progressing. Analytical tools  are a useful means by which you can track the success of your social media campaigns and can provide a wealth of information on such areas such as, engagement, and provide a variety of statistics on public interaction.  This knowledge will help you fine tune your campaign and understand more about what is successful or not, enabling you to meet your goal more efficiently.

Attainable

Give yourself something to work and strive towards but don’t have targets that are unobtainable, don’t be too ambitious, be realistic.  Having goals that are unobtainable lead to demoralisation and the feeling of failure .  Its good to be stretched in such a way that there are rewards for all the hard effort. I know being realistic is a difficult term to define,  some people are more confident than others, the road to reaching your goal may be one of new discoveries and opportunities, but primarily the main aspect of having achievable goals is to know your industry well and be well informed.

Relevant

Take into consideration current markets and is your goal relevant in the current market situation, therefore timing is so important.  Also is it relevant to what your brand promotes and what you have done previously, this will also relate to having the relevant skills and resources to be able to move forward.

Time Related

Don’t drift, set time related goals and a sense of urgency, so that you are more driven.  Without time limits complacency can set in and other things take preference. Deadlines provide focus and efficiency.