How to Set Smart Business KPIs for Your Organization

Step One: Define Your Organization's SMART Goal

SMART goals have five key characteristics. They are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

These are the goals that your organization is working toward at any given time. SMART goals don't just shape your overall goals; they also shape your marketing goals, individual department goals, and every other facet of the business.

These goals might include, for example, generating ten new leads at the end of every month or increasing your conversion rates by 2% each month.

Step Two: Analyze Your Full Funnel - Marketing and Sales

Take a look at the sales journey from the buyer's perspective. What steps must they take in order to reach the end point? Look through the full sales funnel one step at a time.

This allows you to achieve a clearer picture of what your customer actually goes through on their way to making the decision to purchase your products or services. This is how to set KPIs for marketing - by looking at the whole picture.

Check your marketing efforts: what steps are you taking to reach out to your clients? How does the sales team act when they connect with a client? Do you have a smooth, cohesive process, or is there a break between what customers experience during the marketing process and what they experience when they're ready to move forward in the buyer's journey?

SMART marketing KPIs quickly become visible as you work your way through the process.

Step Three: Make a List of Little Levers

Little steps can lead to big changes within your business. For example, as you created your roadmap in the second step, you might have learned that greater numbers of emails or phone calls lead to higher numbers of sales.

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Make a list of all of these "little things" that make a big difference over the course of your day. These little levers are the places you can make changes to create big impact over the course of your marketing campaign.

These marketing metrics might include:

• Blog visits and how many blog visitors convert to customers
• The engagement rate of your social media posts
• Your traffic to lead ratio and how it is impacted by specific types of content
• Social shares of specific content, especially content that leads to customer conversions

Step Four: Experiment

Be agile! Rather than accepting static returns, be willing to experiment and learn how you can make your marketing dollars more effective. When you increase the number of emails you're sending to email subscribers, does it increase your overall sales?

Is there a point at which customers are overwhelmed by the volume of emails and stop reading them? What about your social media marketing strategy: are there specific topics that raise engagement, increasing shares and getting the word out about your business or your new products?

By showing a willingness to experiment, you can substantially change your marketing strategy for the better over time.

The key performance indicators you measure will have a big impact on how well you are able to adapt your marketing strategy in order to meet the needs of your customers.

Get a free marketing assessment today to learn more about the key performance indicators you should be tracking, including the 6 marketing metrics that your boss really wants you to be tracking and why they matter for your company.

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