SMART Goals Ahead

As you long time readers know I've been combining my personal blog with my homework assignments for the past couple of years. Well anytime there is a blog post assignment. It lets me keep a record of where I am now at this point and time in my work and in my personal life, which lets me know how far I have left to travel on this journey.

This assignment if for Integrated Marketing, which so far has been a pretty interesting class even though it's only week three. I'm to describe SMART goals which stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Then write about what role they have in marketing campaigns.

Then in another prompt I'm to write about the difference between goals, strategies, and tactics.

Well let me begin by explaining the difference between goals, strategies, and tactics. The goal is what you get up in the morning for. It's the prize at the end of the rainbow, the surprise in the bottom of the cereal box. How do you get to this goal?

Through a strategy! A strategy is a road map to the goal. You'll have to eat all the cereal to get to the plastic diving submarine that's powered by baking soda. If it's a huge box you'll need a tactic to get through the road map faster! This is where tactics come into play, it's how you get over the obstacles in order to implement your strategy to get to your goal!

So in this example you'll open your box of Lucky Charms to get to the submarine (goal) then you've got the problem of going through all the cereal because Mom won't let you have the toy until all the cereal is gone (strategy). So you've got an obstacle to overcome (tactic) and recruit your little brother to eat as much cereal as he can while you eat the rest! BOOM! Goal, Strategy, and Tactics accomplished and now you've got the baking soda powered submarine in your hands and ready for bath time!

You can map out your strategy a bit more by using the SMART acronym to help you out!
If your strategy specific? Yes! You need the toy!
Is your strategy measurable? Yes! You seen a known quantity of cereal to be consumed before getting to your toy!
Is your strategy attainable? Absolutely! You can practically see the little green submarine wrapped in clear plastic!
Is your strategy realistic? Sure is! You could cheat and reach into the box and get it but Mom is watching soooo, you got to play it straight!
Is your strategy timely? Yes! The box isn't the Grand Canyon! It's a cereal box and in a few short mornings your goal will be accomplished!

My next prompt is to explain how marketing tactics align with strategies! This is actually pretty easy if you think about it! So say you've got a client and that wants a thousand new clients knocking on their door in a year. They are a new business and have no client base at all.

They call you up and explain what they are after. You device a strategy of gaining your new client a thousand new clients! You do a SWOT, you find out what they are selling and who would benefit from what they are selling, in short you find the target audience that your client is after. Once you determine that audience you devise your tactics!

So perhaps your target demographic is aged eighteen to thirty nine, male and female. So you know people of this age group are pretty tech savvy and feel like an organic social media campaign is the way to go but you don't want to put all your eggs in that basket completely. This is where you also think about radio ads to reach your audience for example. Just to make give your client added value you also start a Facebook ad buy! You are confident in the next year these tactics will fulfill the strategy and accomplish the goal of gaining your client a thousand new clients!

What is also very important about all three of these advertising channels is that they are measurable using key performance indicators or KPI for short. KPI is likes on Facebook, or as you sift through the click through numbers on your ad buy, you can tell exactly how many people are seeing the new ads and who is clicking and how much time they are spending on your client's site.

This is just one form of a myriad of indicators such as subscribers on YouTube, Follows on Twitter, impressions, click through rates, ratings from radio advertisements, and a hundred more measurable indicators to tell exactly how you are reaching your audience. This is important as you might not be gaining any traction from one channel and can save money there by taking those resources to another channel that's got more promising indicators!

This is how tactics align with a strategy in marketing!

A few years ago I was hired by a local marketing firm to film some short videos with a couple of hosts and start a channel on YouTube for consumption. We did quite a few videos together around town to promote various things. After a few months I started watching the viewing numbers and they just weren't there. This was the YouTube of maybe ten years ago so it was a bit more primitive than it is today but I also knew the videos would soon be coming to an end because the KPI just wasn't favorable anymore. In today's more modern YouTube we could have done a lot of different things and gotten a lot of subs and views but it was a lot of fun for a while!

Well my friends this should complete the assignment and look for another blog post coming this week as my other course, Consumer Behavior requires one as well! So stay tuned! Same BluChannel, Same BluTime, by the Same Blugill!