It’s time to set SMART marketing goals in 2022 to meet your ambitious business objectives. In this guide, I will break down the key objectives that you will want to be tracking, and how to start setting up your marketing goals to align with these key business objectives.

Why do you need to set marketing goals in 2022?

Whether you are small one-person team, or part of a global marketing function, a clear set of SMART marketing goals for 2022 will give you direction, accountability and ROI. This is true regardless of whether your marketing function is focused on content production, branding or lead generation — all marketing should align neatly to business objectives.

One of my personal challenges has always been in validating the marketing function to stakeholders. Many of the businesses that I’ve joined have seen marketing primarily as a support function to the rest of the business; a support function is not necessarily wrong, but it’s important when seeking greater budgets that you have clear goals that you can benchmark your performance against. A clear set of marketing goals gives you fuel to request greater budgets, delegate tasks to other colleagues or teams, and motivate performance-orientated team members.

So, want a bigger budget? More team members? More recognition for your achievements?

Then it’s time to get started with setting marketing goals for 2022.

How to create SMART goals for Marketing

Firstly, we need to ask: what are marketing goals? And how are we going to set them? We are going to use the SMART framework for our goal setting in this article. SMART goals must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

• Specific: Who, what, where, when, why?
• Measurable: You can’t improve what you don’t measure
• Attainable: Requires effort to achieve, but not impossible nor fanciful
• Relevant: Related to broader team objectives
• Time-bound: A clear deadline ensures accountability

In simple terms, this approach to goal setting will ensure that your goals are, as the acronym suggests, specified to your function, easy to measure, genuinely achievable, relevant to what you’re team is doing, and all goals will have a clear time-frame in which to achieve them.

Take a look at the following example of a goal that is not a SMART marketing goal:

“Boost traffic with marketing efforts”

When setting effective performance goals for marketing managers, will this tick that box? Unfortunately, no. Firstly, let’s look at how specific the goal is. ‘Boost traffic’ can refer to so many areas: web traffic, social media visitors, app users, specific product pages. Instead, let’s be specific and say that stakeholders are looking at increasing bottom-line revenue for a new line of products. So to make this more specific, let’s change ‘boost traffic’ to “Increase monthly unique visitors to [product line pages]…”.

Next, is the goal easy to measure? We may not communicate how we will measure the goal simply from the goal statement, but it’s imperative that we know how we can track this and that we have a single source of truth. Leveraging our specific component of ‘unique visitors’, we can very easily view this in Google Analytics (GA) in order to track our performance. If this was a lead generation goal, we could set a simple conversion goal in our CRM of choice or directly from GA by using GA goals.

Next, our goal must be attainable. In order to do this, we need to review past performance, and establish our benchmark and then identify what would be an achievable increase to this value. In our hypothetical goal, we have been receiving a consistent 100 unique visitors to the product line pages in each month of the past year. To go from 100 unique to, say, 500 would represent a 500% increase — this is ludicrous. Instead, let’s start with something meaningful but still representing an increase, such as an increase of 25%, bringing our monthly visits to 125. So now we have “Increase monthly unique visitors to [product line pages] to 125 (25%)..”.

Next, we need to ensure that the goal is Relevant to the wider team or business objectives. In this hypothetical example, the wider team needs to boost H1 sales of products. Are monthly unique visitors relevant to this objective? Visitors to a page will usually result in a generation of sales. We could make this more relevant by changing monthly unique visitors to conversions or sales, but our goal is already quite relevant.

And finally, we need a time constraint, otherwise, this goal could continue in perpetuity with no accountability, we could just shift the goalposts at the end of 2022. Let’s say that by the end of H1, we’d like to hit this monthly target. So, our SMART marketing goal now reads:

“Increase monthly unique visitors to [product line pages] to 125 by the end of H1 2022”

This new goal now meets the requirements of a SMART goal and can be easily understood, tracked and – hopefully – can be achieved by the end of H1 2022. If you already have some goals and would like help with converting the goals into SMART goals, feel free to reach out at doug@dougdigital.co.uk or leave a comment at the bottom of the article and I’ll help you shape your goals.

How to align marketing goals with business objectives

When setting your marketing goals in 2022, it’s crucial that you align your goals with key business objectives. A common trend that I see with businesses, both large and small, is a disconnect between what the marketing team is tracking and what is fundamentally driving business.

The first step is to ensure that stakeholders have been consulted to understand the business challenges, to identify where the marketing function can add value. Here are some common examples of business goals, and how we can involve marketing efforts.

“We want to drive more business”

This goal is fairly straightforward; for revenue-orientated business goals, we need to establish goals that can verify business generation, demonstrate clear attribution, and can be meaningfully impacted by marketing efforts. Some common goals to support revenue objectives would include:

1. Establishing a clear attribution framework to identify leads generated by marketing, and the revenue generated when these leads are closed won.
2. Review and optimise conversion rates at all levels in the content marketing funnel to improve revenue generation from all existing marketing efforts.
3. Reduce acquisition costs to make paid strategies more cost-effective, resulting in a greater gross profit per lead acquired.

Drive brand awareness

1. Benchmark and improve brand awareness and engagement campaigns across social campaigns.
2. Leverage Social Listening and monitoring to identify brand conversations and brand reactions.

How to set SMART marketing goals for 2022

In order to get started, we need to identify the business objectives. Are you looking to generate bottom-line revenue? Are you looking for traffic generation? Are you boosting the profile of your brand via content production?

SMART marketing goals examples for digital marketing

Here are some ideas for lead generation that you could employ in your business for lead generation:

• Generate 40 leads from [channel] by the end of Q1 2022
• Increase conversion rates on [product/page] by 10% by the end of Q1 2022
• Reduce Cost Per Lead with LinkedIn by 10% by end of H1 2022

Setting SMART marketing goals for Brand Awareness

• Generate xxx monthly impressions to [content articles] by end of Q1 2022
• Generate xxx monthly impressions to [social media content] by end of Q1 2022
• Improve brand sentiment from neutral to positive by end of H1 2022
• Increase average shares per social post by 5% by end of H1 2022

This is just a small slither of ideas for you to get started with your performance marketing goals in 2022. For any questions, or for support in setting out your own marketing goals, please comment below or reach out to me by email at doug@dougdigital.co.uk