One of the biggest challenges that marketers face is creating goals that are both realistic and measurable. Some goals can span as short as daily and as long as a year from the planning period. One very helpful acronym is the SMART Goal acronym.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Realistic

• Time-bound

Setting up SMART goals will help you to set yearly, quarterly, monthly, and even daily goals that are both realistic and measurable. In order to show you how this can be applied to planning and measuring your marketing strategy, let’s break down each element.

Specific: Even though you can’t tell the future based on industry trends, case studies, or past data you can set a specific, numeric goal. The key here is not to over shoot or under promise. Use real numbers to create your specific projections. The more specific you are, you will find it much easier to pivot early on if need be as you will have a realistic guideline to measure your progress with.

Measurable: Once you have your specific numbers, you will need a way of measuring and monitoring the marketing effort’s performance. If it’s website traffic, does your website have the proper analytics software installed on all of its pages? If it’s conversions, does your website have the proper conversion goals implemented on its landing pages where traffic is being sent to? It’s sounds like a no-brainer but you would be surprised at how many campaigns get started without measurable tracking in place

Once you have verified that your tracking is in place and working properly, you will need to set up check-in points to monitor, evaluate your progress (based on your specific goal numbers), and pivot if need be.

Attainable: As your campaign progresses and you gather your data, you will begin to see if your specific goal is attainable based on your current efforts and progress. This will not only help you out with your current campaign but it will also help you out with future campaigns. That’s why it is so important to closely monitor and document your progress throughout the duration of each campaign.

When you are defining your specific goals, you really want to think about how attainable it is based on the data that you have before any campaign begins. This will also give you good insight as to how much effort needs to be put forth with each element of your marketing campaign and if this is even possible or if you need to re-strategize. It’s also important to think about any potential obstacles that may arise, how you will overcome them, and realistically if you have the resources to overcome them or not.

Relevant: Be sure that you’re on the right track. Your goals should be relevant to your campaign. This one falls hand in hand with your “specific” goal because as you narrow down your benchmarks, they will become more and more relevant to your overall goal.

Time-bound: Having a deadline is very important. The only way to measure of your specific goal was attainable or not is to set a deadline for achieving your goal. This deadline needs to be both realistic and attainable. All potential obstacles need to be considered and it’s a good idea to allocate additional time just incase an unexpected obstacle arises.

Setting SMART goals and benchmarks are an essential element to any marketing campaign. Whether you are creating a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly goal, SMART goals will allow you to measure your performance and enhance your further marketing efforts in a positive way.