I write a lot of marketing plans – for a really diverse range of businesses.  I love the planning part of a marketing campaign – whether that campaign runs for a week or is part of a plan for the marketing for a whole year.  I always start at the top: with the objectives that a company wants to achieve.  And I have to make sure that I get this bit right, because the rest of the plan hinges on it.  The actions themselves are built upon those objectives, so if they’re wrong, the plan is inherently flawed.

Unfortunately, a lot of CEOs and MDs are content to set business and marketing objectives that are too vague and wishy-washy.

Instead they need to be SMART.  If you’re writing your own marketing plan, don’t make the same mistake.  Here’s the way to ensure your objectives are really SMART:

• Specific – it’s no good to just say that you want to “increase revenue”.  Be specific, and say instead “increase revenue from £1m to £1.2m”.  Of course, you can be even more specific and say from which customer segments, or from which products you want the revenue to come – it all depends on your business.
• Measurable – only when you measure how you’re doing, can you check if you’re on track.  But you need to make sure that the objectives you set can actually be measured.  Companies will always measure financial indicators like turnover, gross margin and profit.  But what if your objective is about increasing your market share?  Unless you can measure what it is to begin with, and what it is later on, then it’s worthless setting it as an objective.
• Achievable – this is the hardest part of setting SMART objectives.  Until you’ve tried, you may not know if your objective is attainable or not.  But there are some concrete things you can consider.  Do you have the resources to achieve the objective?  Do you have the people, the budget, the time?
• Realistic – are you willing to work towards your objective?  Are you going to put in place plans that will actually come off or will something else in the business get in the way?  Make sure it’s realistic that the objective will be worked towards by all concerned.  A good indicator is to ask yourself if you genuinely believe it can be accomplished.
• Time-based – set some time limits to your objectives, so that you know over what periods to measure them, and so you can see if they’ve been achieved.  For example, your objectives could be tied into an annual plan, or you might want to measure the number of leads generated every month.

Here’s a great example from a small IT company I worked with:

Increase revenue by 10% (from £1.2m to £1.32m) in the next financial year.

You can see that it’s specific, measurable and time-based.  You’ll just have to take my word that they were certain it was also achievable and realistic.  (They *were* engaging my services to help them grow, after all!)