Irrespective of the size of your company, marketing and promotion are ultimately important in driving its growth. However, not every marketing effort will affect your small business’s bottom line. Therefore,  to have a successful marketing campaign, you must factor in measurable marketing by following the SMART methodology. In today’s podcast, Howard Wolpoff from Profit Master Business Solutions and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss ‘measurable marketing: the key to business growth.’ 

Measurable Marketing: The Key To Business Growth

Marketing is a tricky undertaking. While it remains an inevitable aspect of business growth, every business owner who wants to succeed with their marketing efforts must embark on measurable marketing. 

Measurable marketing lets you take a critical look at your strategy and plan where to focus your energies and resources. It can be hard to identify the marketing techniques that will generate the most desired result, especially in this time of rapid change and hype. And this is especially true regarding digital marketing, which has taken center stage in marketing activities today. 

Regardless of the size of your company, marketing and advertising are ultimately crucial to helping you increase your bottom line. Therefore,  you must diligently measure your marketing efforts to ensure that you realize your return on investment (ROI). 

What Is Measurable Marketing?

Measurable marketing entails having a systemic process for identifying the impact of your marketing activities on your small business. In other words, it’s an overall marketing strategy that allows you to know the cost of acquiring a client, how much you will make out of the customer, and what’s the cost of the marketing campaign. 

As a small business owner that wants to grow past the $10 million dollar benchmark, you must put some measurement of some sort in place to know whether your marketing campaign is delivering the result you want to see. 

You can’t have successful marketing if you don’t know what to measure. And that’s the reason you will leverage SMART goals for your campaigns. SMART goals are relevant to marketing as it’s to your business.  A marketing campaign that’s guided by clearly defined goals gives a clear performance benchmark. 

Marketing goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound to accomplish the requisite result.  Now let’s dive deep into explaining what each term means in measurable marketing. 

What Does SMART Mean In Measurable Marketing?

Marketing is all about goals, without defined metrics, you will not know whether your efforts are begetting the result you want. With this in mind, when going about your marketing campaign, it’s proper you follow the SMART methodology to determine what is working and what needs to be improved.   Below are the smart goals that are instrumental for a successful marketing campaign.

Specific

Many small business owners make the mistake of developing a marketing plan that is too broad. However, in order not to lose focus and stay motivated,  you should make your goal clear, specific, and concise.  For example, instead of saying that you want to increase your brand awareness which is a vague term, you should rather say that you want to increase the number of people that visit your website by 20 percent monthly. 

When your marketing campaign is not specific and concrete, it becomes difficult to attain. To make your marketing goal specific, here are the five questions you must consider: 

• Who: Who is involved in this goal?
• What: What do I want to achieve?
• Where: Where is this goal to be achieved?
• When: When do I want to achieve this goal?
• Why: Why do I want to achieve this goal

Measurable

Your marketing effort must have a yardstick for measuring success. From the outset, you must put in place your key performance indicator (KPI ) to help you define and measure progress toward your target goals. 

For example, if you are running a blog for marketing purposes, a good way of measuring success in this regard is to identify the number of people visiting your website on a weekly or monthly basis and how many conversions you’re making through your website content. 

If there are no criteria for tracking progress and performance, you will not know whether your marketing strategy and resources invested are worthwhile. 

Actionable

Having measurable and specific objectives is not enough! You must be able to act on your set goals to have a successful marketing campaign.  Making your goals attainable means that it’s possible for you to actualize them with the available resources. 

If your measurable, specific marketing objective is to increase the number of your website traffic by 10 percent every month, your actionable objective will be to produce engaging and resonating content that will make people visit your site. 

Realistic

Don’t set marketing goals that are difficult to reach. Your goals must be realistic for you to have a successful marketing objective.  Being realistic means that you have to plan your marketing campaign within your budget. And also, you must be strategic about your marketing effort.  

For example, if you intend to leverage SEO as your marketing tool, you should not expect to start getting an immediate results like someone using Pay Per Click marketing (PPC).  This is because SEO marketing takes time and consistent effort to build.

Time-Bound

Measurable marketing demands you should have a time frame for completing your marketing objectives, as this will create a sense of urgency to help motivate you to reach your goals. Time management is of the essence in an effective marketing campaign. 

If your marketing objective is not time-constrained, you might become lax in getting things done when they should. 

Learn About Our Guest 

Howard Wolpoff is the Chief Marketing Strategist at Profit Master Business Solutions and a marketing executive with over 25 years of experience helping hundreds of businesses create profitable solutions to drive sales, attract and maintain customers, and build a solid corporate brand.

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