By McKenna Harris
8 November 2022
Navigating your twenties can be challenging and rewarding. Many young adults, including myself, find themselves lost in a sea of information. When you barely know how to take care of yourself in the real world, you may not know how to plan a future nevertheless the necessary steps to take to get to that future. How do you figure out which direction to take to make your dreams a reality?
Planning your future becomes a lot easier when you think of yourself as a business rather than a person. You need to learn how to market yourself for success and create a plan to achieve success for your business. When planning ahead, the best place to start is by creating SMART goals. You may be asking yourself what a SMART goal even is. Well, SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measured, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based goals.
SMART goals are important in any marketing campaign because they can be tracked. Smart goals are measurable goals, so they have inherent data that can tell you how far you are from meeting the goals you set.
When you create SMART goals, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself: 1. Is my goal narrow enough to create a plan of execution? 2. Will I be able to set milestones to track my goal? 3. Is my goal reasonable for the time frame? 4. Does this goal align with everything else I want to achieve long term? 5. How long will it take me to reach this goal? or When do I want to have achieved this goal? (Herrity, 2018). Asking yourself these questions will set up the framework for successful SMART goals and help weed out goals that just will not work.
Another thing you can do to meet your SMART goals is to use KPIs. What is a KPI? A KPI is “a measurable value that a marketing team sets out to achieve over a specific period of time” (Marketing Metrics & KPIs). For example, if you were setting a personal work goal to improve your sales by ten percent each month, you would be using a KPI. The KPI gives you a tangible value you can base your goals, strategies, and tactics around. Another example of a KPI is the engagement rate on social media posts. KPIs can take many different forms.
After you create realistic goals, you need to find a way to reach them. To reach your goals, you will need to implement both strategies and tactics. Strategies and tactics are oftentimes used incorrectly contextually. A strategy is, “a strong overarching vision, intended to fulfill your predetermined goals and objectives”(Charlie, 2019). In other words, the strategy is the summary of steps needed to take to meet your goals. A tactic, on the other hand, is a, “highly practical thing[s] you will do every day”(Charlie, 2019) in order to meet a goal.
The best way to differentiate between goals, strategies, and tactics is by example. Let’s say you have set a personal goal of saving enough money to buy a car in a year’s time. Your goal is to buy a car in a year, so your strategy would be to save x amount of dollars per month. Your tactics would be to work 5 days a week, cut down on unnecessary purchases, and eat at home. This tactic would allow you to save x amount of money each month to align with your strategy, which in turn would allow you to reach your goal.
Charlie. (2019, July 15). The difference between marketing strategy vs Tactics – an example. Way Back Machine. Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20200721000344/http://charliesaidthat.com/digital/digital/difference-between-marketing-strategy-vs-tactics-an-example/
Herrity, J. (2018, September 19). How do you set smart goals? definition and examples. Career Guide. Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/smart-goals
Marketing Metrics & KPIs. Klipfolio. (n.d.). Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://www.klipfolio.com/resources/kpi-examples/marketing
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