smart goal examples

Examples Of How Smart Goals Should Align With Your Business Goals

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One of the most important things a company can do is set regular business goals. They point the business in the right direction and keep activities focused on achieving specific objectives. Now, writing down a general goal is a good start, but to make them happen, you must take action. And that is why your SMART goals must align with your business development goals. You have more than likely heard of SMART goals. They are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. Here are a couple of SMART goal examples to get you started.

5 Smart Goal Examples For Business Development

Example #1: Expanding your wedding business’s regional footprint

Let’s say you want to expand your wedding business’s geographic footprint to open up new markets and to increase revenues. Here is an example of how a SMART goal would align with this business goal.

  • Specific: I will lease a 2000 square-foot storefront in downtown Chicago.
  • Measurable: The lease will be signed no later than January 15th.
  • Attainable: I will contact three leasing agents who specialize in storefront properties in downtown Chicago and make a trip specifically to the area to find the ideal property.
  • Relevant: I have bridal customers and consultants from the Chicago area asking if I would open another location in their area to make it easier for them to shop. This opens up a new market and customer base, with a high probability of successful growth.
  • Time-Bound: All of this must be done by January 15th, to allow for the store to open in early February, near the start of the Spring bridal season.

Example #2: Lower Shipping Costs

Let’s say you want to lower your shipping costs but want to do it without lowering customer satisfaction. Here is an example of a SMART goal that aligns with this business objective:

  • Specific: I will switch all of my shipping from UPS to Fedex.
  • Measurable: I will complete the transition to Fedex by July 1st.
  • Attainable: I will contact Fedex and set up a new merchant account to start the process. I will also order the appropriate labels and software updates to make this transition as easy as possible.
  • Relevant: Fedex’s rates for shipping to the region of the country where most of my customers are is 20% lower than UPS. They also deliver within 3 to 5 business days, which is the same as UPS. The lower cost and same delivery time should maintain customer satisfaction levels while lowering costs.
  • Time-Bound: I will make the change by July 1st to coincide with the beginning of the new quarter to allow clean tracking of the impact this change makes to shipping costs and customer satisfaction.

These SMART goal examples should help you develop your own. When you align your actionable goals with your broader business goals, you will see progress. Can you give any other SMART goal examples that align with your business objectives?

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers
Interactive Marketing Examples

How Interactive Content Can Boost Your Inbound Marketing Efforts

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Marketing has changed drastically over the years, and as a result, marketers are finding new ways to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive landscape. The need to catch the audience’s attention has never been more intense. One technique that has proven quite effective is using interactive content to drive up inbound marketing efforts. In the sections below, we’ll discuss how interactive content works, its benefits, and some strategies you can implement to boost your marketing.

What is Interactive Content?

Interactive content is an engaging form of content that requires the audience to participate. That means instead of just reading or watching something passively, the audience must interact with the content somehow.

This particular type of content is so effective because it creates a more immersive and personalized experience for the audience. With this type of content, your audience isn’t just consuming the content but being an active participants. This makes the content more memorable and enjoyable.

So, what are some examples of interactive content? Well, if you have ever been on your favorite social media platform and seen a post that compelled you to engage in one way or another, that is one perfect example. More often, this content comes in the form of a survey, social media polls, quizzes, games, or interactive maps.

Why Invest in Interactive Content?

Modern-day marketers leverage interactive and personalized content everywhere, from landing pages and blog posts to social media channels. Here’s how using this content will enhance your marketing plan:

Better Insights into Consumer Preferences 

With interactive content, you can leverage the data obtained from quizzes, polls, and surveys to understand your audience’s engagement rates. This understanding helps you tailor your content to your audience’s preferences, resulting in more effective marketing and lead nurturing.

Boosts Conversion Rates

Since interactive elements demand user engagement, your target audience is more likely to take action. Brands like IKEA and Facebook have used interactive elements, such as virtual and augmented reality, to increase their reach and achieve higher click-through rates. If implemented correctly, interactive content can also be useful in your senior living marketing campaigns.

Unleashes Creativity 

The opportunities for creativity with interactive content are limitless. With these elements, you can create a unique brand experience that sets you apart from the competition. Many interactive and evergreen content pieces have reusable value, meaning consumers may return to engage with the content multiple times, driving continued engagement.

Improves Audience’s Experience 

Interactive and highly personalized content can enhance a prospective customer’s experience by providing useful information or tools that can help solve their problems. By providing valuable interactive resources, you can strengthen your authority in your industry and build a more loyal audience.

Better Brand Awareness

Interactive, branded content can help drive brand awareness by providing viewers with a unique, memorable experience. As more people find value in your content, they’re more likely to share it on social media, generating word of mouth and referrals.

Levels up Your SEO Game

Interactive content can help improve your website’s SEO by encouraging visitors to engage with it. As a result, the time visitors spend on your site increases, signaling to search engines that your content is engaging, informative, and of high value.

Interactive Content Strategies to Consider

If you want to enhance your inbound marketing strategy, tap into the various interactive content strategies. From polls to interactive landing pages, these strategies can help engage consumers, collect information, and increase sales. Here’s what to implement and how:

Quizzes/Surveys 

Quizzes or surveys are fun and engaging forms of interactive and personalized content that are becoming increasingly popular in inbound marketing. They are commonly used to educate, engage and entertain the audience, and when done creatively, they have a good chance of going viral.

For instance, social media polls and surveys offer an effective way to encourage audience participation on a given topic. The quizzes can capture valuable insights into the audience’s maturity in the subject matter and can help boost your inbound marketing strategies.

Interactive Infographics

Approximately 1 in 3 marketers admit that attracting user intention is their biggest marketing challenge. That is why interactive infographics have become increasingly popular in recent years. Unlike static or traditional infographics, interactive types use buttons, statistics, and quizzes to grab the audience’s attention and engage them deeper.

These infographics keep the readers on your site longer, increasing the chances that they will convert into leads or customers. The interactive elements also make your content more shareable, which can lead to increased brand awareness and improved search engine rankings.

And while creating interactive infographics may require more time and resources than traditional infographics, the benefits can be worth it. By providing an immersive experience for your audience, you build a stronger relationship and stand out in a crowded digital landscape.

Interactive Landing Pages

In today’s highly competitive digital landscape, interactive landing pages have become a crucial element of inbound marketing. The goal of a landing page is to generate conversions. Adding interactivity to landing pages can trigger a visitor’s desire, increasing engagement and the likelihood of conversion.

Interactive landing pages enable visitors to engage and participate, creating a unique user experience that differentiates your website from competitors. Thoughtfully incorporating visual and animated content will enhance your landing pages. This increases click-through rates and ultimately generates more leads.

The above techniques are a few interactive content marketing strategies you can implement in your business. Other options include the use of interactive tools such as calculators, interactive PDFs, interactive videos, interactive presentations, etc.

Bottom Line

For the longest time, inbound marketing has become integral to nearly all major businesses and industries. The simple reason for this is that, unlike advertising, inbound marketing focuses on creating value for the prospect and building long-term relationships. However, competition is quickly catching up, and marketers turn to interactive elements to make their marketing techniques more creative and innovative.

When creating interactive content, it’s vital to take a customer-centric approach. That means understanding the audience’s needs and preferences and creating content and experiences that speak directly to them.

50 Most Powerful Call-to-Action Phrases

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Are you looking to increase your conversion rate? Call-to-Actions are an essential part of the conversion process, but what kinds of Call-to-Actions should you put on your website? CTAs should be simple yet effective, and should catch the attention of your visitors. The formula for a successful CTA page title consists of combining such sales buzzwords as “free,” “discount,” “offer,” “gift,” “guarantee,” with action-oriented words like “click,” “download,” “request,” and “send.” Listed below are 50 powerful Call-to-Action phrases that visitors can’t resist clicking on.

50 Powerful Call-to-Action Phrases

  1. Download now
  2. Click here
  3. Join now
  4. Download here
  5. Start now
  6. Click here for details
  7. I urge you to…
  8. Get a free…
  9. Talk to an expert
  10. Immediate download
  11. While supplies last
  12. Money back guarantee
  13. Money back guarantee, no questions asked
  14. Get it now!
  15. Act quickly
  16. Free shipping
  17. Shipping discount
  18. Come in for a free consultation
  19. Come see us today
  20. Reserve your spot now
  21. Come in today
  22. Start your trial
  23. Start your free trial
  24. Offer expires…
  25. Satisfaction guaranteed
  26. We’d like to hear from you
  27. I can’t wait to hear from you
  28. Limited availability
  29. Limited time offer
  30. Best value
  31. For more details call…
  32. Please don’t hesitate to call
  33. We’re waiting for your call!
  34. Send for our free brochure
  35. Send for our free catalog
  36. Subscribe to our email list
  37. Subscribe to our newsletter
  38. Send in your application today!
  39. Apply here
  40. Order now and receive a free gift
  41. Tell us what you think
  42. Take our quiz!
  43. Sign up online at…
  44. Get started today
  45. Request your FREE quote today
  46. Just reach for your phone
  47. Members only/Subscribers only
  48. Contact us
  49. It’s important that you respond promptly
  50. Download our eBook for more information

Click here to learn more about powerful CTA phrases that increase clicks!

Now that you know what attention-grabbing Call-to-Actions look like, you can implement your own. Don’t just copy and paste the CTA phrases from the list above. Tweak the CTA phrases so that they apply specifically to your company and your products and/or services. For example, instead of just saying, “Start your free trial,” you can say “Start your free trial with (insert company name here) so your CTA is more personalized. Use these phrases/Quotes as a template for your website’s CTAs, sit back, and watch the clicks roll in!

25 Website Must Haves

Digital Communication Tools to Help Build a Human Brand

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Whether you’re a brand looking to establish a human connection with your audience or an individual seeking to engage with peers and build professional networks, leveraging these digital communication tools will undoubtedly enhance your ability to connect, collaborate, and succeed in the digital age.

The success of your brand depends on much more than just convincing a potential customer to try your product. While in the past the customer experience has been based around the product being offered, these days, you need to look at the big picture. It’s not just about the customer experience in regards to your product. It’s about the emotional connection that they are able to form with your brand.

Customers don’t just want a product, they want a relationship with the brand that is selling them that product.  You need to focus on fostering an emotional connection instead of just trying to build awareness for a certain product. Fortunately, building an emotional connection with your audience is easier than ever before with the number of digital communication tools that are at your disposal.

The Importance Of An Emotional Connection

Customers are human beings. They have hopes, dreams, and feelings. In a world where their product choices are practically limitless, they will want much more out of a brand. They do not want to engage with a corporation. Customers want to engage with a brand that’s relatable on a personal level. Their desire for connection in such a world is not surprising. A brand that is able to touch them emotionally is going to make them more engaged.

There are many ways that you can do this; reinforcing the beliefs or perspective of your audience, supporting the goals or perspective of your audience, or challenging your audience to do greater things.

Creating a Brand with Social Listening and What Tools To Use

How Digital Communication Tools Can Help Foster An Emotional Connection

Engaging on an emotional level with your audience is easier than it’s ever been, as long as you make the effort to do so. The following are just a few ways that digital communication tools can help you to connect with your audience emotionally and to build meaningful relationships with them:

  • Video content – When it comes to content, few other forms are able to engage audiences on an emotional level like video content. There are numerous reasons for this. First of all, people consume visual content much more easily than written content. Secondly, you can use actors or even real figures that audiences can relate to on a personal level. Thirdly, you can emphasize certain emotions much more effectively through the production of video, from the look of how it was filmed to the type of music that’s used to how the video is edited.
  • Segmentation – Segmenting your leads and customers based on the data you’ve collected (via opt-in forms, surveys, and more) will provide you with valuable insight into who your audience is and how you can connect with them. It also allows you to personalize your content much more effectively, which will make it easier to drive engagement.
  • Social interaction – The use of social channels makes it easy to engage with your audience directly. Direct interaction makes it easier to build meaningful relationships. You’ll have a bigger emotional impact on those who witness the interactions on social media as well.

How to Improve Your Social Signals for SEO

Building a human brand will help you build long-term relationships with your audience based on real emotional connections. Use the digital communication tools available to you to emphasize emotion in your marketing efforts. Doing so will help your audience relate to you on a more personal level, thereby driving engagement with your brand.

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Web Design

6 Web Design Principles to Increase Conversions

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Putting thought into your web design is a must if you have any ambitions to grow your business. While the content that you host on your site and the strength of your SEO strategy will help you attract leads, your web design will play a big part in your ability to convert leads. Keeping that in mind, the following are six web design principles for conversions:

1. Use A Responsive Design

If you’re not using a responsive design, it means that although your website may load properly on desktops, it may not be displayed correctly on smaller screens, such as those on smartphones and tablets. If your website doesn’t load properly on a smartphone, it will require the user to not only scroll up and down but also left to right — and to zoom in and out. Few mobile users will have the patience to deal with a site like this, which will lead to a significant bounce rate. Use a responsive design so that you don’t lose your mobile leads.

2. Ensure That Your Pages Load Quickly

Even if your site does load properly, few visitors will have the patience for pages that load slowly. It should take no more than one to two seconds for your site to load. If it takes three or more seconds, you’re in trouble. Leads will get frustrated and will likely abandon your site. Test your page speeds to ensure that they load quickly.

3. Don’t Include Too Many Choices

Too many choices can make it difficult for visitors to figure out what they want or to find what they’re looking for. For example, a navigation menu is a great addition. It lets visitors find your blog, contact page, product page, etc. However, if you fill up that navigation menu with dozens upon dozens of links, it becomes overwhelming. Not only will it actually be more difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for, but too many choices requires them to commit more of their time to make a decision. To capture leads, you need to help guide their decision making–offering too many choices does the opposite. Keep it simple.

Why are call-to-action phrases so important? Learn more by clicking here!

4. Use Negative Space

The visual design of a page should be kept relatively simple to prevent visitors from becoming overwhelmed. The last thing you want is a page covered in text, links, images, videos, and more. This makes it hard to find anything amidst the clutter. To avoid this, make sure that there’s plenty of negative space throughout each page. Negative space helps reduce clutter, gives your site a clean and elegant look, and makes your page easier to scan.

5. Choose Colors Carefully

The way you use color is psychologically important. Colors evoke different emotions and reactions from your visitors. For example, blue indicates trust, which is why it’s a color often used for CTA buttons. However, the colors you choose should reflect the content on your page as well as your brand in general. Just make sure you keep your colors consistent and that you don’t go overboard using colors. You should stick to a few main colors and their variations. Typically, it’s best if you choose one color along with a second that offers some contrast.

6. Use An F-Layout

Studies have shown that the attention of users is focused in an F-pattern. This means that when they first come to a page, they will be most focused on the top left and top right parts of your page. This slowly diminishes as they work their way down, which means the bottom right of a page gets the least amount of attention. Designing your pages so that they display information in an F-layout is therefore a good way to ensure that the information you want to convey is consumed by your visitors. For example, having the bulk of your content on the left side, positioning important links on the top right side, and then adding your CTA to the bottom left will create an effective F-layout.

The design of your website is essential to not only keeping your visitors engaged, but to keep them on your website for as long as possible. The longer you’re able to keep your visitors on your site, the better of a chance you have of converting them. These are six web design principles for conversions that you should consider implementing.

Website Redesign Checklist
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Vital Factors to Consider When Implementing a Growth Driven Web Design

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A well-designed site is vital to the online success of your business. Recent studies show that at least 94% of respondents rarely trust websites with poor designs. On the other hand, a growth driven web design is intuitive and positively impacts brand perception and lead conversion.

Growth-driven design is a revolutionary approach to creating high-performance websites founded on analytics and designed with specific objectives for continuous improvement.

Here are some important considerations when implementing a growth driven website design.

1. Customer Needs and Wants

Develop a clear picture of your target audience’s needs and wants, and determine the best way to fulfill them.

This sets the essential foundation for a growth driven web design. Start by developing a clear, focused strategy that pivots on the needs and wants of your ideal customer. While your website will launch with a simple version, focusing on customer needs helps you plan future updates and the continuous process cycle.

Understanding your customer needs requires creating accurate buyer personas. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers and website users. They help your team determine the best ways to communicate with empathy and personalize customer interactions.

In addition, a persona establishes a common messaging tone among your marketing team since they have a clear picture of your website’s end user.

You can start by running internal and external interviews to gather information from employees and past clients representing your ideal audience. Email surveys and phone calls are common when gathering information to finetune your buyer persona.

2. Customer Journey

The customer journey charts the road map for your website users and customers seeking solutions to their problems. Growth driven web design makes it easy to identify different stages of the customer journey and provide appropriate tools and solutions to help customers make quick decisions.

Determining the exact stage in the customer journey is essential in determining appropriate offers, website features, and supporting content for optimum conversions. The goal is to get a comprehensive view of your customer’s actions throughout your sales funnels and ensure satisfaction.

3. Fundamental Assumptions

In growth driven web design, fundamental assumptions are like the foundation for a house. Therefore, you must determine the aspects that exert the most weight on the foundation.

Establishing a strong foundation is essential to ensure the website is versatile and long-lasting. Ideally, ensure the design is aligned with your goals and has the right content to guide your team.

You can accomplish this by combining personas, customer journeys, and analytics to develop fundamental assumptions to guide your design and marketing approach for the best results.

4. Short-term and Long-term Goals

This stage involves establishing goals based on buyer persona data and customer research. Each goal is anchored in business metrics and analytics to ensure the website has all the necessary features. However, it’s essential to know what you want to achieve with your growth driven design web. Your overall business objectives guide the process by creating a clear road map.

In addition, you can brainstorm a wish list of things that might improve your website’s impact on your business and customers. Think about additional integrations, modules, features, and functionality.

This process starts by identifying elements that create the highest impact. Typically, it involves identifying the must-have and nice-to-have elements so you can cross out anything that can be added later. This process allows you to identify the core purpose of your website.

Most importantly, it helps finetune your strategy blueprint for the perfect design based on your business needs. However, your team’s collaboration between the strategist, designer, and project manager is essential to ensure the strategy aligns with your business objectives.

5. Content Development

Effective content strategy is among the key elements of a robust online presence to achieve business goals. While the minimum viable design aims at launching a functional site, it’s critical to determine the ideal content to answer user queries and move customers through the sales funnel. Ideally, you should create memorable content that connects with users and solves their problems.

ReportsThe information should be simple, well-organized, and easy to understand. Visual hierarchy helps in content structure to ensure it’s logical and meaningful. This ensures that important information gets the most emphasis while less important information gets the least emphasis.

You can achieve content hierarchy by implementing visual techniques like contrast, color, white space, size, movement, and alignment. Content hierarchy improves information digestion and guides users to find important information quickly to fulfill their intentions.

6. Process Cycle

Once you’ve launched the website, it’s important to review its performance to determine the impact on your business goals. The process involves stakeholder feedback to gain insights into traffic sources and visitor behaviors. Real user data is invaluable at every stage as it gives you a clear picture of website activity.

Depending on the analysis results, you can determine the next action based on the items on your wish list.

Possible actions may include:

  • Improving conversions by influencing users to take specific actions
  • Boost the user experience by enhancing user interaction with the site to ensure easier navigation. Periodic updates are necessary to streamline the design and content.
  • Visitor personalization by leveraging user data to implement changes that suit evolving needs, including content offers and calls to action.
  • Integrating marketing assets like signup forms, social platforms, resources, and tools to provide more value to users and enhance engagement

7. User Experience

Regardless of your site’s design and the available information, user experience determines its success. You might have invaluable resources on your website, but if the user experience hardships navigating and finding what they want, you risk losing valuable prospects.

While outstanding website usability may go unnoticed by the users, poor usability has immediate impacts. Therefore, your website design must be intuitive, navigable, mobile-friendly, and accessible. Ideally, you should anticipate visitors’ actions and help them achieve their goals effortlessly.

While visual aesthetics are essential across multiple devices, upholding a consistent brand image is critical. The website should represent your business fully and create a strong connection with users.

The Bottom Line

Most businesses are shifting from traditional designs and moving towards growth driven web design. Besides enjoying additional flexibility, the companies experience more success in lead conversion and user experience.

Instead of redesigning and launching a new website every two years, growth driven web design creates an upgrade-ready design that evolves with your business. Moreover, decisions are based on data analytics to ensure upgrades are based on real customer needs.

Creating Creative Video Campaign

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The Super Bowl is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated sporting events. It can draw millions of viewers across digital channels and traditional TV platforms. This one-day event with a history of high-profile commercials often means a lot to marketers and business owners. And while many wait a few weeks before the Super Bowl to begin working on their video campaign idea, it’s best to prepare early enough. To create the best video campaigns for the next Super Bowl, you’ll need to review and learn from previous events. That means exploring various video marketing campaigns, including the best and worst Super Bowl commercials.

In the sections below, we’ll discuss a few Super Bowl video marketing ideas and how you can use them to improve your overall video marketing campaigns.

Create a Memorable Pre-game Teaser

You’ve probably watched those super bowl ads that went on to feature in every article for the rest of the year and attracted lots of social media attention. And perhaps you know of some big-time super bowl advertisement fails. The difference between these two sets of video commercials may not be so pronounced and could lie in the finer details.

Making a thirty-seconds pre-game teaser memorable takes a lot of expertise and some trial and error. It also requires understanding emotional advertising, creativity, and proper timing. Sometimes the best ads turn out to be a complete flop, so only after testing them can you confirm the ads will work for your specific audience.

Before consolidating your resources to create a pre-game teaser, you want to focus on delivering the right message in the shortest possible time. A rule of thumb is to be unique while driving the point home. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

  • Ensure your video is relevant to the event. Super-bowl is highly anticipated; you want to capture the thrill and excitement. Everything about your video, from the visuals to the sound, should be engaging, dynamic and compelling.
  • Use suspense. There’s a lot to fit in a 30-second pre-game teaser, and your video should convey just the relevant information without being deemed boring. You can use the various elements of suspense, such as conflict, empathy, and anticipation, to drive the point home.
  • Make the video shareable. Your pre-game teaser won’t be as impactful if it’s not optimized for sharing. Consider promoting your Super Bowl teaser across various social media channels. You can leverage influencers to share your teaser and invite your audience to share their thoughts.

Utilize Humor to Make an Impact

There’s something about humor that makes it irresistibly powerful, especially in the video marketing niche. People anticipating the super bowl want to share in the fun and excitement of their favorite team engaging in a competitive sporting event that’s deeply rooted in their culture. What you don’t want to do is bring in some dull vibes and spoil their uplifted spirit.

Besides making your brand and message more memorable, humor also connects with the audience personally, making them laugh and feel good and relaxed. It also keeps viewers wanting more, it makes your super bowl commercial more sharable across social media and other platforms.

And while everyone knows that humor is critical to a successful viral marketing campaign, most marketers are yet to leverage this low-hanging fruit. But the problem isn’t using humor for video marketing, but how well to integrate humor into a 30-second commercial.

The common mistake many people make when incorporating humor into their marketing is being insensitive to their audience. A good old joke you often circulate in your department can be offensive to certain groups of people. This often comes with a hefty price and could quickly damage your brand’s reputation. Many marketers try to copy past commercials or successful Super Bowl ads, and they end up hurting their image. As much as you want to add humor to your commercial, try not to overdo it.

Leverage Social Media

Not so long ago, Super Bowl ads were meant for the big screens. Large media houses had the monopoly of showcasing whatever ads were lined up during the commercial breaks. This, however, is no longer the case. Nowadays, millions of people watch the Super Bowl from the comfort of their smartphones.

For video marketers, this means a lot as far as video marketing ideas are concerned. Instead of designing Super Bowl ads just for the big screens, you want to design them for social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Before creating a Super Bowl ad or teaser, you must carefully plan the delivery. You must also ensure the audience can easily share the video across all social media channels. Most Super Bowl commercials that go viral are well-optimized for social media. They are short and visually stunning and appear on various social media platforms, encouraging people to share the videos and discuss what they think about the game and the video commercials.

The other video marketing ideas you can implement are: posting some sneak previews and behind the scene-videos of the ads on social media. You can also source user-generated content by developing a social media challenge relating to your ad where you invite users to edit the videos for sound and graphics, with the best editor earning some prize, e.g., branded merchandise, the next super bowl ticket, etc.

Make Video Marketing Work for You

Creating an effective video marketing campaign takes a lot of practice and expertise. Unless you can create an informative, visually appealing video that speaks to your audience, you’ll have difficulty selling your products or services. Whether you are a marketer, a business executive, or a business owner, it’s crucial to understand the basics of video marketing. Combining several video marketing ideas and seeking expert advice could mark the difference between failed branding and a golden opportunity to create a memorable ad that steals the show and gets the attention you’ve been longing for.

smart goal examples

5 SMART Goal Example For Business Development

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A smart goal is basically what the acronyms from the name suggest. It is specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant and time bound. The Smart Goal process provides a frame where you can create a long term goal. It also provides a time limit for you to work on the same goal. By doing this business’ are 70% more successful in achieving their goals thanks to regular check-ins, updates and group accountability. Below are a few smart goal examples for business development that will help you understand the system better and enhance your business.

Smart Goal Examples for Business

  • “I Want To Increase My Profits”
  • “I Want To Improve My Response Time to Customer Complaints”
  • “I Want To Improve My Employee Retention”
  • “I Want To Be More Efficient In My Business Operations”
  • “I Want To Grow My Business Operation”

“I Want To Increase My Profits”

smart goal examples
Specific: I will increase revenue while cutting down on expenditure. Moving to a more affordable premise that will cut my rent by 7% will reduce the operational costs.

Measurable: I will increase sales over the next 3 months by signing in 5 more potential clients.

Attainable: I will improve my current customer relationships and promote the business through referrals, networking and through social networks. This will help me find more leads and therefore see to an increase in revenue for the business.

Relevant: moving to a cheaper establishment will reduce the operational cost of my business and therefore give room to the growth of profits.

Time-bound: I will have increased my profit by the end of the coming three months.

“I Want To Improve My Response Time to Customer Complaints”

smart goal examples
Specific: I will improve the response time to customer complaints by increasing my customer service staff from 3 to 8 in the next one year.

Measurable: the increase in customer service staff is scheduled to take place within one year. It should bring the number to a total of 8.

Attainable: as I plan on moving to a new establishment I will ensure the place has enough room to accommodate the additional staff members I intend to have in the next one year.

Relevant: I will find ways to manage the complaints meanwhile in order to maintain the customer base I have and strive to grow the client base even further to match the additional customer service staff.

Time-bound: I will have hired the customer service staff by the end of one year

Learn how to maximize your marketing budget

 

“I Want To Improve My Employee Retention”

smart goal examples
Specific: I will improve the employee turnover by 15% in 90 days by putting up training for the new employees to let them know what is expected of them and have a program for them to get used to the operation systems. I will also have one-on-one meetings with employees so that I get to know what challenges they could be facing.

Measurable: the improvement in employee turnover is scheduled to be by about 15% and should take place within 90 days.

Attainable: trainings and one-on-one meetings will ensure the employees are prepared for what is expected of them when they get into production. It also give me a hint of what’s on their mind concerning general operations of the business.

Relevant: outstanding employees will be put up for a reward system. For the ones that might be having a difficult time, there will be motivation trainings for encouragement.

Time-bound: employee turnover will have improved within 90 days

“I Want To Be More Efficient In My Business Operations”

smart goal examples
Specific: I will improve my efficiency in business operations by challenging my sales department to increase their closing ratio from its current 45% to at least 60%. They could also work on improving the delivery time from 72hours to at least 12hours maximum.

Measurable: the sales people are supposed to increase their closing ratio from 45% to 60% and the delivery time improved to 12 hours from the initial 72hours

Attainable: I will conduct a survey to find out what both the clients and the sales team think about the idea. I will implement it as soon as the idea passes as valid.

Relevant: increasing the number of motorbikes and pickups that will do courier services for us will help make the plan a success

Time-bound: this should happen in one year.

“I Want To Grow My Business Operation”


Specific: open three more branches countrywide within five years

Measurable: the objective is to increase operations and revenue for the business. This will, in turn, facilitate the growth to three more branches.

Attainable: increasing my current selling space by 25% will mean more production. This can help me save for the planned growth to 4 branches countrywide.

Relevant: increasing production, operations and revenue will mean a larger client base thus the need for more branches will not be a wasteful idea after all.

Time-bound: establishing the branches should be within the next five years.

How Smart Goals Should Align With Your Business Goals

As much as an organization will work to ensure that its business goals are smart, they will never be flawless. It is, however, essential to ensure they give their teams tasks within their capability and make decisions using accurate data from their past operations while setting new smart business goals. The rest will work out just fine.

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Using HubSpot Lead Flows To Improve Conversion Rates

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There’s a common misconception that some businesses that pop-ups are always a bad idea. While it’s true that pop-up ads can be annoying, especially if they are disrupting the visitor’s website experience, they can also be very effective if you know how to implement them properly. For example, you’ll want to refrain from having pop-ups on every page of your site as this will probably annoy your visitors.

However, a strategically placed pop-up can actually make it easier to convert your leads. In fact, a recent study showed that pop-ups convert 1375 percent better than traditional opt-in forms. If you do decide to use pop-ups in an attempt to convert leads, then you should be sure to use HubSpots’s Lead Flow feature.

What Is Lead Flow?

Lead Flows are HubSpot’s version of pop-up ads. Lead Flows can be accessed in both free and premium versions of HubSpot and allow you to create custom pop-ups that will help you to engage visitors, increased web leads, and reconvert returning visitors. Not to mention that through the use of Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to collect contact insights and analytics, making it easier to nurture the leads that you’ve captured.

What Types Of Lead Flows Are There?

There is more than one type of pop-up, and Lead Flows offers a variety of different types that you can customize to fit your needs. This includes the following:

  • Traditional Pop-Up Boxes – Traditional pop-ups are the best way to immediately get the attention of your visitors and are a good way to promote new content offers, grow your email list, highlight specific pieces of content on your site, and to promote your social presence.
  • Drop-Down Banners – Drop-down banners appear as thin, full-width bars near the top of your page. Although direct, they aren’t as disruptive as pop-up ads. They’re great for sales and special offers, growing your blog subscribers list, and promoting upcoming events or webinars.
  • Side-In-Boxes – Side-in boxes are ads that slide in at the bottom left or right side of your page. They’re more subtle than other types of Lead Flows and are effective for promoting content offers or growing your blog subscribers list.

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

What Are The Lead Flow Triggers?

Instead of just having ads pop-up on every page, you can trigger your Lead Flows to appear based on certain actions that the visitor takes. This allows you to pinpoint what actions are more likely to result in a conversion, thereby allowing you to strategically present the visitor with a Lead Flow at an appropriate time. The following are the three types of triggers that you can set for your Lead Flows:website redesign process

  • Browser Exit Trigger – You can trigger the execution of a pop-up Lead Flow when a visitor exits their browser window. This gives you a last chance to capture leads who haven’t converted as they leave your site.
  • Elapsed Time Trigger – You can also set certain Lead Flows to trigger based on how much time the visitor has been on a certain page. The minimum amount of time you can set a Lead Flow trigger to is seven seconds.
  • 50 Percent Page Scroll – Last of all, you can trigger your Lead Flows when a visitor has scrolled past the halfway mark of a page (which shows that they are interested in the content of that page and are more likely to convert as a result).

There are plenty of other customization options available. For example, while pop-ups may be effective for website visitors, they may hurt the experience of mobile users. As a result, you can disable your Lead Flows for mobile visitors. By using HubSpot’s Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to track the leads who have filled out your Lead Flows. This makes it easy to follow up and to develop your strategy to ensure that your leads are being nurtured.

Contrary to popular belief, pop-ups can be effective if they are used appropriately and strategically. The best way to leverage pop-ups is through the use of HubSpot’s Lead Flows feature, which provides a variety of customization options to ensure that you can reach your leads without disrupting their website experience.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

SMART Goal Examples That Will Make You a Better Marketer

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When creating your inbound marketing strategy, it’s important that you set goals as part of your planning process. Without goals, you won’t be able to judge the performance of your inbound marketing tactics, which means you’ll have no idea whether your money is being put to good use. When you have goals in place, you can make adjustments to underperforming tactics. However, one of the mistakes many brands make is to set goals that are vague or too broad, such as “increasing brand awareness” or “building brand authority.” While general goals like these are fine, you should also have SMART goals.

What Are Smart Goals?

SMART goals are goals that are (S)pecific, (M)easureable, (A)ttainable, (R)elevant, and (T)ime-bound. They are clearly defined goals that are realistic, quantifiable, and focused. By implementing goals such as these, you’ll know exactly what kind of results you’re aiming for and how to accomplish them. The following is a more detailed breakdown of SMART goals:

  • Specific goals – Specific goals are metrics that you want to improve, such as leads or visitors.
  • Measurable goals – To track the progress you’re making, you need to quantify your goals; for example, increasing the number of visitors to your site by 20 percent.
  • Attainable goals – It’s important that your goal is something that’s actually possible. For example, doubling the number of visitors to your site in one month is probably unrealistic. Increasing your visitors by 10 percent may not be, especially if you managed to increase your visitors by 5 percent the previous month.
  • Relevant goals – Make sure that reaching the goals you’ve set will actually have an impact. For example, hitting your goal to increase your website traffic by 10 percent may not mean much if you have a high bounce rate or if none of these visitors are converting.
  • Time-bound goals – Set a deadline to meet your goals so that there’s some pressure to actually accomplish them.

Examples Of How Smart Goals Should Align With Your Business Goals

SMART Goal Examples

The following are a few SMART goal examples to give you an idea of how you can implement SMART goals in your marketing strategy:

  • Bring in more web traffic – Increasing web traffic is a very general goal. The SMART goal version of this might be to increase web traffic by 10 percent within one month through the use of SEO, social engagement and content marketing to increase lead generation.Future of email
  • Increase email subscribers – Email marketing is an excellent way to nurture leads. A SMART goal version could be to increase your email subscribers by 20 percent within one month using your Facebook ad budget on blog posts that have previously captured the most email subscribers.
  • Gather a webinar audience – If you are planning a webinar, then you can use a SMART goal to help measure its success. Let’s say you’ve already collected 100 signups within two weeks. The seminar is scheduled in one month. Your SMART goal might be to double your signups for your webinar by the webinar date through social, email, and blog promotion in order to close more sales.

These are a few SMART goal examples. As you can see, these SMART goal examples take some very basic marketing goals and make them more actionable and easier to measure. The use of SMART goals can really help you get the most out of your marketing dollars since you can use the results (whether you end up meeting your goals or not) to set future goals that may be more realistic and impactful.

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