Use SMART Objectives in Your Marketing Plan & 3 Email Tips

Article submitted by: Jay Lipe, CEO

A Few Words about SMART Objectives

A lot of my small business clients have asked me about developing SMART Objectives for their marketing plan. But few know what the acronym stands for. SMART Objectives are goals that are:

Specific - If you say "We'd like to have more customers", that's too vague. But if you say "We will have 10 new customers by year's end", now that's specific.

Measurable - One key to using SMART Objectives is to make them measurable. For you and your small business to know if your marketing efforts are successful, you must be able to quantify any SMART Objective.

Attainable - Goals should be challenging....and streeeeeeeeeeeetch you and your small business. But if the SMART Objectives are too much of a stretch, no one will try, and morale will suffer.

Results-oriented - Every SMART Objective should start with an action verb. Start each objective phrase with words like "complete", "increase" or "decrease".

Targeted - Let's face it, most of us are motivated by deadlines. Why else would marketers use expiration dates so often? Attach a due date or deadline to every SMART Objective you set.

If you want to go deeper in understanding SMART Objectives, check out Stand Out from the Crowd: Secrets to Crafting a Winning Company Identity.

3 Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing

1. Offer dialoguing opportunities - To readers of Marketing Tips and Tools, I offer a series of email autoresponders that provides a marketing tip each month. Want to know which of these 12 autoresponders gets the most opens and responses? The one whose subject line is "Can I Get Your Opinion?" In this message, I ask 3 questions about the value of the e-newsletter and then ask for their responses. People LOVE to give their opinion these days, and I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of your feedback from this message.
   
2. Lead with information - I recently unsubscribed from a good friend's enewsletter, even though he subscribed to mine. The reason? Every single email marketing message I received from him was purely promotional. "Join me for my new teleseminars", "Buy my book now, and I'll throw in another book for free", "Come hear me speak at the XYZ Convention" was the tenor of every word of every message. I agree that the primary objective of email marketing is to promote your business. But there are different strategies to accomplish this objective. One is to offer enough free, valuable information so people willingly want to purchase more of this information (in-person or through email).
   
3. Sprinkle in some personal bits - I learned this from Ali Brown, the Ezine Queen. In one of her ezines, she talked about how important it was for an author's personality to show through in your e-newsletter. I balked at this initially because I didn't think others would be very interested. But in the last issue of Marketing Tips and Tools, I included a section called "3 things you Don't Know About Me(and May Not Want to): I've played drums since I was 11; I set our house on fire when I was a teenager; My brother threw a dart into the side of my head. The response was huge. I think people want to know something about the person sending the email newsletter and when they do, they trust you (and the company) just a bit more.

Jay Lipe is the president of Emerge Marketing LLC, a firm that helps growing companies focus their marketing. He is the author of the books The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses (Chammerson Press, 2002) and Stand Out from the Crowd: Secrets to Crafting a Winning Company Identity (Kaplan Publishing, Fall 2006). He is also a sought after speaker and seminar leader, and can be reached at 612.824.4833, through his Smart Marketing blog or through his website. Hear a podcast interview with Jay discussing Small Business Marketing.