5 SMART Marketing Resolutions to Make (and Keep) in 2017

Photo credit: Eduburdie

By Anna Condon, Junior Copywriter

Get fit. Save more. Quit smoking. With the dawn of the new year, like clockwork, we compile lists of bad habits to break, hopes for the future, and all the things we’d like to do differently in the coming year. It’s a time for resolve, renewal, and resolutions. But, we often end up falling short.

According to a survey by Statistics Brain, less than 10 percent of people felt they were successful in achieving their resolution last year. In theory, resolutions offer a benchmark and motivation to achieve more — but most of us make too many at once, make them too vague, or just aren’t motivated.

Specificity is key.

New Year’s resolutions tend to be aspirational goals that are difficult to attain. We make these grand overarching goals as motivation, but with larger goals it’s crucial to plan specific, quantifiable steps to achieve them.

When it comes to your marketing efforts, you can’t afford to set (and eventually abandon) vague or unrealistic goals. Instead, focus on making specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely (SMART) resolutions, which can help you energize your team, prioritize projects, and create a guide to adjust your strategy along the way.

Don’t simply resolve to “build a better website.” Set a goal that you can track and measure as the year progresses. These types of goals will require you to plan ahead and figure out ways to make them a reality. By being specific you know exactly what you’re working toward instead of a vague concept of your goal.

To help you start brainstorming, here are five examples of SMART resolutions:

1. “Increase conversions on your top performing landing pages by two percent in the next six months through a targeted email campaign.” “Create one new lead-generation asset each month to grow our email list by 20 percent in the first quarter.”
2. “Review our SEO keyword strategy at the beginning of January and revise as needed to increase blog traffic by 10,000 visits in February.”
3. “Promote our e-book through guest blogging and LinkedIn to reach 5,000 downloads by end of year.”
4. “Schedule and publish two tweets every day from the company account and respond to comments within one hour to attract 500 new followers by the end of the first quarter.”
5. “Optimize our website for mobile and evaluate user experience so we can decrease cart abandonment on mobile by XX percent.”