Before you can set goals, you need to highlight and understand what to measure. The SMART business analysis is a marketing tool that helps entrepreneurs to define their goals and how to better achieve their objectives. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Aspirational, Realistic and Time bound.
How to define your SMART and incorporating it into your business.
1 Specific: Your goals must be specific. Before launching a new project, write down the goals you intend to achieve before, during and after launch. Highlight the niche and basic demographics such as- location, age, gender and job tittle of your target audience once your goals has been put in place.
Here is a quick example of this. Amanda has a hair extension company. They offer a wide range of services centered around human hair. She plans to expand her business by launching a new type of human hair that is straight and silky with different lengths.
-Specific goal: launch new hairline.
-Highlighted goals: Hair awareness, Quality and unbeatable services, Availability in market, Controlled and successful sales, better brand visibility e.t.c
-Niche and demographics: Fashion, beauty and lifestyle. Age [18-40]. Gender [females]. Location [ Lagos, ogun, Abuja]. Job title [ entrepreneurs, corporate workers]
2 Measurable: while setting goals is important, your KPIs and channels you intend to adopt to measure your goals are more important. This right here will help you keep track of your goals and identify your loopholes if some objectives are not meeting up. Identify your marketing channels, (the channels your target audience are most frequently on) ascribe a certain scale of measurement to your goals and input factors to these goals (poor, fair, good, excellent) to record your progress.
Continuing with Amanda’s business, here’s what her metrics will look like:
Goals will be measured through increased brand awareness, customer feedback, conversion rates, market demands e.t.c.
Her marketing channels includes- Social media marketing, digital marketing [ sponsored ads and influencers marketing] and sponsorships.
Her scales will include- [1-3 = poor], [4-6 = fair/good] [ 7-10 = excellent].
3 Aspirational: Be as positive as possible when highlighting your goals and channels. Write down as many as you can but keep in mind that you need to define each objective for the goals you have highlighted.
While Amanda clearly has specific goals, she can however add as many goals she intends to achieve with the new project launch.
4 Realistic: As much as you can opt for a wide sparse of goals and objectives, do not stretch your resources too thin that they cannot accommodate or completely cover your objectives. Be direct and rule out the goals you can reasonably finish with the resources available to you.
Amanda definitely understands that her goals and objectives has to be in sync with her resources to ensure that her results are not strained beyond measures.
5 Time bound: Every goal and stated objective must have both a start date and a finish date. The period of this span is to help you keep track of your goals, monitor your progress and results achieved. This metric will help you clearly define your strengths and weaknesses.
The most important metric for Amanda’s launch will be to keep track of time. The start date and end date should be documented. The beauty of this is that it helps to understand areas of strength and weaknesses with marketing and customer relationship between Amanda and her clients.
