A comprehensive digital marketing strategy is your golden ticket to achieving B2B sales lead generation. The key ingredient? Understanding your ideal customer to a tee, and creating a marketing plan to connect with them. If you are truly cognizant of your target audience, your marketing efforts will be worth every penny. This is why comprising SMART goals for your content marketing is important.
What exactly are SMART goals?
SMART is an acronym for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
SMART goals offer direction when making short and long-term business decisions. B2B distributor and manufacturer companies especially need this goal-oriented strategy to obtain high ROI. The reason is, digital platforms are oversaturated with millions of different brands, so separating your brand from the rest requires strategic planning and taking action.
Now that we’ve covered the why and the what, let’s go over how you can set SMART content marketing goals that improve sales and lead generation.
How to set SMART content marketing goals
First things first, you need to chop the fat. Niching down your target market and/or services will help you generate high-quality leads. By ensuring your marketing plan is clear and streamlined, you will have a much better chance of achieving your SMART goals.
A Guide to Generating Good Leads
Next, you need to review the data from your KPIs. This will give you a clear picture of how your current content marketing strategy is doing so far. Whether it’s expanding your digital reach or raising your conversion rate (or both!), obtaining this information will help you make data-driven decisions for your business.
Here’s the fun part – let’s break down the SMART acronym.
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S – Specific
Make a specific goal and take action. Ask yourself, what needs to be accomplished? Who’s responsible for this task? What steps need to be taken to achieve it?
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M – Measurable
Take time to quantify and measure your goals. This makes it easier to track progress and know when you’ve achieved your goal.
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A – Achievable
Make sure your goal is realistic and attainable. Communicate with your team to ensure the objective is something they can reasonably accomplish.
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R – Relevant
Have you thought about why you’re setting the goal you’re setting? Check in with yourself, advisors, and team members to make sure the goal you’re setting is relevant to your brand.
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T – Time-bound
Confirm with your team that everyone is on the same page regarding time parameters. This ensures the team stays on track!
Pro-tip: We recommend paying extra special attention to your KPIs and statistics over a predetermined time when setting SMART goals. For instance, if you’re setting a monthly goal, we suggest monitoring your KPIs every week to keep track of its success. However, examining your analytics this frequently on a regular basis is not advisable. Outside of experimenting with new marketing strategies, reviewing your KPIs twice a year is sufficient.
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What are SMART content marketing goal examples?
We’ve established that SMART content marketing goals are designed to improve brand awareness and generate leads. So, here are a couple of specific examples to help you see the bigger picture:
Example #1 – Boost Blog Traffic
- Specific: I want to create high-quality blogs to drive attention to our website. Instead of posting two blogs every week, I will now post four.
- Measurable: By posting regularly, I want to see a 5% increase in traffic. I will measure this by setting KPIs and benchmarks and communicating with my content writing team.
- Attainable: Based on previous stats, I know this goal is achievable. When I started posting weekly blogs, traffic grew by 3%, so upping my weekly content flow makes a 5% increase a reasonable goal.
- Relevant: Because my company is new, I need to ensure my target market gets familiar with the brand. More blog traffic will help us cultivate leads and increase brand recognition.
- Time-bound: By the end of the month, I want to boost traffic by 5%.
Goal: By publishing four blogs a week, I will boost blog traffic by 5%.
Example #2 – Expand Your Email List
- Specific: With the help of our in-house writers, I want to construct a list of email subscribers by developing two lead magnets.
- Measurable: By sharing our two lead magnets, we are aiming to gain 1,000 new subscribers.
- Achievable: After doing some research, I discovered that similar businesses typically acquire 1,000 new subscribers between one and six months. I know it is achievable for us to gain 1,000 new subscribers because our website already gets thousands of views.
- Relevant: With a list of subscribers interested in our services, we can develop and perfect our customer profile and share it with our sales team.
- Time-bound: I want to gain 1,000 new subscribers within four months.
Goal: By the end of the four months, I want to have 1,000 new email subscribers on our list. In the first week, I’ll appoint two writers to each produce a lead magnet, which I’ll then publish.
Benefits of SMART goals
Are you prepared to create SMART goals? It’s clear that using the SMART method can be an empowering tool for B2B distributor and manufacturer companies seeking high-quality leads and ROI. Incorporating these goals into your content marketing strategy can provide direction, help with organization, and allow you to reach your goals more easily. And perhaps what’s more enticing, this strategy is cost-effective, which is great news for small to medium-sized businesses looking to improve brand awareness. By creating specific marketing strategies with SMART goals, you can spend less time planning and achieve a better return on investment.
Create Your Action Plan
Now that you have a thorough understanding of SMART goals, it’s time to put your plan into action. And this is where we come in.
Ballistic Arts is a B2B lead generation agency that helps businesses create SMART content and video content marketing strategies. Consider us your go-to brand marketing strategist; we offer services to help B2B businesses achieve success by providing clarity and motivation for all digital marketing strategies. We specialize in digital marketing, design & branding, video production, and web development, all of which generate organic SEO and high-quality leads.
Our Digital Marketing Services
To summarize, before making your SMART goals:
- Make sure your marketing plan is clear and streamlined
- Review your KPIs
When making your SMART goals:
- Create a specific goal and take action.
- Take time to quantify and measure your goals.
- Make sure your goal is realistic and attainable.
- Ensure the goal you’re setting is relevant to your brand.
- Determine a time parameter for your team.
Don’t forget to stay on top of your KPIs to see how your new game plan is performing!
We’re here to help you define your SMART content and video content marketing goals. Better sales and quality leads are on the horizon.
