MSP Marketing: How SMART are your Marketing Goals? (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this blog, we discussed what exactly SMART goals are; specifically, what your marketing goals need to be considered SMART. This next part of our blog will go through how to turn the common vague goal of “increasing revenue” into a SMART goal that you can use for your next marketing campaign.

Turning Your Marketing Goals into SMART Goals

To turn “increasing revenue” into a SMART marketing goal, we’re going to need to define the marketing campaign that we will be running, and tie each piece needed for a SMART goal with that campaign.

Specific

You want to make this goal more specific, so let’s determine a particular service that you would like to sell more of to increase your revenue. Let’s pick a recurring revenue service, like managed services. We could make it more specific as well by targeting a particular industry, business size, location, and/or customer segment (e.g., prospects or your current clients who do not yet get Managed Services from you). Not only will defining this make your goal specific, but it will allow you to better personalize your marketing materials.

For this example, we will be targeting prospects with less than 50 workstations that are within a 60 minute drive from your location. All of these details might not necessarily be included in your goal itself, but are important to keep in mind.

Measurable

To determine how we are going to measure this campaign, let’s decide what the pieces of the campaign will be so we can look at the different benchmarks throughout.

Because you are targeting prospects, it’s probably easiest to use direct mail pieces to pique their attention and direct recipients to your website - two pieces to two different landing pages, and two pieces to blogs. Toward the end of the campaign, it’s also good to have your sales team follow up to ask if they’ve received your marketing materials and to answer questions or clarify as needed.

The overall measurement for our campaign is of course going to be the number of new agreements we get from this campaign, but there are some other measurements that you want to be doing so that you can properly evaluate how successful your campaign is. For a direct mail campaign with a follow-up call component like this, some metrics to look at include:

• Landing page visits / bounce rates / conversion rates
• Number or percentage of QR code scans
• Time spent reading your blogs
• Overall campaign conversion rate / ROI
• Cost per lead acquisition

By looking at these metrics for each campaign material and overall, you can determine which of your pieces might need some improvement for your next campaign run.

Achievable

We want the end goal that we set to be one that is feasible for you to reach. Make sure that your expectations aren’t too high. Remember: you’re targeting prospects, many of which may have not heard of your company before this campaign (especially if you’re new to marketing). And, the bulk of your marketing is using direct mail. Therefore, you might only expect 1 or 2 people out of 100 that are targeted to actually sign up for managed services after receiving all of your campaign materials.

Another thing to keep in mind: it’s going to take a lot of work to put together a campaign like this. You made sure that your sales team set aside some time toward the end of the campaign for follow-up calls. But what about creating the materials? What about actually running the campaign?

If this is an area that you’re worried about, you can partner with us, we can take care of creating and pushing out your campaign materials for you, reducing the burden on your staff.

Relevant

We’ve already determined that we’re going to be promoting managed services to businesses in your local area. If you’re a managed service provider, this is likely relevant to your business and overall goals. Other managed service providers may feel as if they have enough managed service contracts at the moment, and may be looking into selling more SaaS products such as Office 365.

If you’ve made it this far though, it’s likely that the goal you are setting is going to be relevant.

Time-Bound

Lastly, we want to make sure that the goal that we set is time bound. Part of the reason is that we want to make sure that any sales of new managed service contracts are correctly tied to this campaign if they should be. This will allow us to properly measure our campaign ROI.

Let’s imagine that the duration of this campaign is going to be five weeks, starting the first day of May of this year. Our cutoff time will be two weeks after this five week period to give those businesses who drag their feet some extra time to make the conversion. This puts our end date about mid-June (June 19th to be precise).

To put it all together, let’s look at your new SMART marketing goal:

Sell two managed service contracts to two new businesses within 60 minutes from your business that have less than 50 workstations, using a direct mail campaign with a follow-up call component, between May 1st and June 19th.

THAT’S a SMART goal!

Even better: with a goal this well-defined, you can really plan out and tailor your marketing materials to what you are trying to achieve and who you are targeting. This will make it easier for you to achieve your goal. You can also better evaluate your campaign with a goal like this, enabling you to make improvements for the better before your next campaign run.

Your SMART marketing goals will be even easier to achieve with help from the experts. JoomConnect can help! We have multiple pre-built campaigns that you can run with proven success rates, all ready to be branded with your company name, logo, and colors. Contact us today for more details.