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SMART goals for business

SMART goals for business by Market Action Research
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SMART goals for businesses

One important aspect of achieving new marketing strategy objectives can be obtained by setting SMART goals. SMART is an acronym, which stands for: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. To ensure goals are stated, practical, and significant to the team the goal must be specific. Having a goal that is measurable means that the goal is quantifiable and is possible to evaluate for improvements.

SMART goals for your business

Goals that are achievable require the goals to being realistic to accomplish and agreed upon by the team. The relevancy of a goal alludes to the goal be reasonable and related to the scope of the main objective. A goal that is time bound means that it has been given a specific date or time frame to accomplish the stated goal.

SMART Goals for Edible Arrangements

In the following we will use the company called Edible Arrangements® to illustrate how you could craft SMART goals for your business. For background, Edible Arrangements is an edible fresh fruit baskets franchise that creates edible fruit arrangements and gourmet chocolate dipped fruits made to order. Currently, Edible Arrangements markets its products to consumers on the premise that people buy because they want to impress their recipients.

The mission of Edible Arrangements is “To WOW You®”, which is supported by the time invested in developing personalized fruit concepts, delivering the highest quality fruits, providing a high level of customer service, and highly trained staff to help select the best arrangements for any occasion. The Edible Arrangements franchise currently has over one-thousand two hundred independently operated locations. The company serves a variety of fruit baskets and treats that can be picked up at an in-store location or delivered to a customer’s door.


SMART Goal Examples

Now, let’s pretend for a moment that you are the marketing manager for Edible Arrangements. Furthermore, lets assume that the company has aggressive consumer marketing objectives. The following three SMART goals are designed to help Edible Arrangements meet their hypothetical aggressive consumer marketing objectives. Of course, you could take each of these SMART Goals and adapt them for your business too.

SMART Goal #1: Edible Arrangements will increase existing consumer sales through the website of edible gift baskets 20% by December 31, 2019, through marketing and incentivizing repeat purchase behavior.

SMART Goal #2: Edible Arrangements will increase new customer sales 10% by December 31, 2020, through offering a referral program on the company’s website.

SMART Goal #3: Edible Arrangements will increase profitability by 10% by December 31, 2019, through the reduction of product and service-related expenses.

Each of these goals specifically states what will be accomplished, can be quantitatively measured, is possible to achieve, relevant to the business’ overall marketing goals, and is time bound by a set date to achieve the desired results.

Measure and Track Your Results

Making your goals concise will also help to communicate your goals throughout your organization, and make sure that the message is properly received by your team. Additionally, it is also important to make sure that your business has proper methods of tracking the progress of goals through various metrics. Some companies refer to these metrics as Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, because they reveal how well your company is performing in specific areas. It is important to note that not all KPIs are monetary, and can vary greatly depending on a company’s industry, customers, if the company serves upstream or downstream buyers in a supply chain, and so much more.

Customer Target Markets & SMART Goal Alignment If you are managing a large organization like Edible Arrangements whose core values and value propositions are well entrenched and designed to present an attractive product and service offering to customers, it is likely you will need to consider your customer target markets. In this previously mentioned example, Edible Arrangements will need to make some adjustments to increase alignment with the company’s new SMART marketing goals. Through the company’s in-store and e-commerce platform, the company can utilize database marketing techniques to provide automated e-mail campaigns to customers based on specific criteria that is requested in their customer profile.

Let’s say hypothetically you did some market research and found that men spend sixty-eight percent more women in online per transaction. Also, lets assume that people born between the years 1966 and 1981 make more purchases online than other age group. This initial research will tend to indicate that not all Americans make the same amount of purchases online. Perhaps you drilled down a bit further and found that the cities that shop the most online include New York, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, San Diego, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Dallas. This information could be useful for achieving the company’s SMART goal of increasing existing customer sales by 20%. For example, if someone indicates they are buying a birthday gift for their spouse that is on a specific date, e-mail reminders can be sent to the customer segment prior to that event re-occurring and offering an incentive to schedule their delivery in advance.

Recommendations for birthday arrangements can be made in this birthday reminder email communication that are around a similar purchase prices as paid before and possibly even higher price points to WOW the recipient that much more. This marketing strategy could give Edible Arrangements an advantage over competition by encouraging customers to make a repeat purchase instead of buying from a competitor. Marketing to existing customers is a type of market penetration strategy. This technique is not limited to birthdays but could also be used for any number of special of events as well. This type of encouragement could place Edible Arrangements in a preferred position for repeat purchase over a competitor assuming the recipient was truly WOW’ed by their gift and overall experience.

The case for this marketing example can certainly go much deeper but suffice it to say there needs to be adequate research that is conducted prior to truly understanding and creating realistic SMART goals for your company. In future articles, we will cover other important aspects to consider when crafting an effective marketing goals that you can use for your company and website.

Choosing the Right Web & Marketing Company

Market Action Research team can help you with your website and online marketing. Through our years of experience in web technologies and seeing first hand what works and what simply does not work. We can help you navigate all the technological and marketing choices. We strive to always provide you a fair assessment that includes the upsides and downsides of each solution, all while finding the best fit to make your business processes even more effective and efficient.

We are different than many companies because we take a deep dive in our approach in understanding about your business and industry, and pride ourselves in the time we take to truly understand what makes your business tick, as well as, what will help deliver superior results on the web. Since 2011, we have completed the most complex projects from full warehouse automation, working with banks, traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, e-commerce companies, real estate websites, and so much more.


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