What is the difference between goals, strategies, and tactics?
Choosing a goal can be one of the hardest things to start with in any pursuit. Sure, we all have goals in mind, but how do we set clear and attainable goals while also ensuring that we can track our progression?
Simply stated, a goal is a distinct achievement made that identifies the end result of an action or several actions. It is something that is made to provide a clear end state. It can be personal, business related or even both. Every goal needs a plan however, more commonly known as a strategy. Now when it pertains to the strategy, that’s where our tactics are embedded. Since strategies provide objectives to achieve the goal, tactics involve actions that are needed in order to execute the strategy effectively. Confused? Don’t be.
What is the importance of setting SMART goals when creating a marketing campaign? What questions should be considered?
SMART goals in marketing are those that provide a specific benchmark that can be measurable, are attainable and realistic, and are set to be achieved within a certain amount of time. They provide a clear framework in how your goals should be structured in order to streamline, track, and achieve your identified goal. If your goal doesn’t make sense or cannot fit into this framework it should be a clear indication that your goals need to be refined a bit more. In marketing time is literally money and you want to ensure that you’re setting yourself up for success with clear goals that make sense and are clearly understood.
Provide examples to portray how marketing tactics align to strategies in order to support set goals.
In this example we will focus on a company that is trying to increase visitors to their website in by increasing search engine traffic by 30% in the next three months. Our goal is specific since we clearly stated what we want to do. For it to be measurable we will review our most popular posts, review comments, revamp them to include new links, images etc. and then publish new content based on what was most popular. For this scenario we can also use Google business analytics to see how much traffic we are gaining in this effort. In terms of being attainable, our goal of 30% in three months averages out to 10% per month which is also achievable. Our goal is also relevant and realistic in trying to achieve more internet traffic. Our goal is not focused on sales just yet, but more so generating buzz surrounding our site and brand name. In relation to time, we have set a period of three months to achieve this goal. NOW in our example our goal was to attain 30% more internet traffic in a period of three months. Our strategy was to identify our most popular posts, revamp, and post similar revamped and updated posts. The tactics associated with this strategy would be to review comments, add new images, links, and publish new content.
How can you ensure that your SMART goals are met using key performance indicators (KPIs)? Explain using examples to support your rationale.
Ensuring that your SMART goals are met can be a bit tricky depending on your stated goal, but through the use of key performance indicators (KPI’s) we are able to monitor, track, and measure values that enable us to gauge the effectiveness and progress of our goals. We’ll use our scenario mentioned earlier to discuss KPI’s. In our scenario we stated the overall goal of achieving more internet traffic to our website. If you remember I mentioned the use of Google Business Analytics as an example of the type of resource that can measure our website traffic. Through our chosen provider we are able to see the number of searches, times of the day we generate traffic, +/- in new visitors and many more statistics related to our site. This service provides a key performance indicator that we are able to use in order to measure the success and effectiveness of our strategy and tactics. While our example utilized Google, there are other ways to provide KPI’s using internal sources. An example of this would be a company that uses their sales team to track revenue, average deal sizes, and the average number of sales daily/weekly/monthly. This information might be useful in gaining an understanding of the busiest times of the year and trying to capitalize on such times.
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