This post describes how to develop a marketing goal in the context of your big picture. Say you want to plan a special vacation every year and next year it’s cooking school in Italy, with Lydia Bastianich herself. One of the areas of focus that  might come out of your financial forecasting exercise is “I need more clients”. Breaking this down more specifically, you might decide that you need to increase your business by 30% in the next 3 months. That’s the big picture goal you’re starting with.

If you need more clients, there are 4 potential focus areas:

1. Filling the pipeline - having enough phone numbers to call
2. Following up - calling the phone numbers you have
3. Getting presentations - turning the call into a meeting or next step
4. Closing sales - getting from contact to landing work

Say you choose #1, filling the pipeline. Your marketing efforts must have 3 impacts: outreach, visibility & credibility. Let’s narrow down to visibility & choose public speaking as the strategy to focus on. Breaking this further into a SMART goal, you might commit to contacting 3 groups or associations each week about speaking. That’s a SMART goal.

• Specific - contacting groups & associations about speaking
• Measurable - 3 (easily observable)
• Attainable - there are enough groups, I have enough time, I’m a good speaker
• Realistic - intuition, analysis, experience & peer comparison tell me this is possible
• Timely - per week

Bottom line- start with the big picture and get increasingly SMARTer with your goals. Work down to the level where you assess your progress every day because you can clearly see if you’re doing what you need to do to reach your goal.

Attribution to a fantastic resource- I’m using CJ Hayden’s Get Clients Now! book as my framework for these marketing conversations. Her method is a classic because it works; do check it out. The GCN program is based on action and this kind of specific goal setting is fundamental to getting and keeping on track for the 28 day period.  Shameless promotion break- I’m a licensed facilitator for the 28 day GCN marketing program based on the book, and I’m starting a new session this month and another one in September.