Are your goals as SMART as you?

The SMART concept will take many of you back a few years but it’s still as relevant as ever. Businesses agree and set out goals to help them maintain a clear direction. To be most effective, goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-framed.

There’s some debate over what the “R” stands for. Most cases suggest “Realistic” but I’m not clever enough to understand how that differs from “Achievable”. I prefer “Relevant”.

Here’s my take on the definitions, using one of Video Vultures’ goals.

Specific – put a number on it. For example, instead of “to sell a large number of videos” use “to sell £50,000 worth of videos per month”.

Measurable – have some way of measuring it. If you’ve no way of knowing the value of videos sold in a month, then your goal is no use.

Achievable – Your goal should be challenging but possible. If Video Vultures is never going to sell anywhere near £50,000 of videos per month then the goal is no use

Relevant – make sure your goal reflects what you wish to achieve. There’s no point of aiming to get 100,000 impressions a month if this has no impact on the success your business.

Time-framed – if you don’t say “by the end of 2007” or “each month” then you’ll never know when you should measure to determine if you’ve achieved your goals.

Setting goals for your website is great fun as you can be very specific about what you want to achieve. Then you simply apply simple website optimisation practices to make sure you succeed.