Turning your project’s goals into SMART goals

Are you currently working on a project?

Do you know everything you need to know to deliver your best results?

Understanding the main objectives to an important project will help improve your performance, and streamline your through process every time you work on it.

One of the key concepts for laying out objectives are the SMART goals.

Each component of the SMART goals help keep you on track. They are:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Time-bound

In this blog article, we’ll describe how being mindful of each of these components can help you better keep track of your project goals.

Specific

When looking at the first goal, you should ask yourself – what makes this project specific?

• What are you trying to accomplish?
• Who bears responsibility?
• What needs to be done (daily, weekly, monthly etc)?

For example, if your specific goal is to ‘promote a new coffee blend’ in your cafe, your goal can be written specific in this way:

Increase monthly take-out and dine-in orders by curating targeted social media campaigns.

Measurable

Once your specific goal has been set, the next step is to figure out how you can track your progress.

Tracking the tasks and measuring your achievements is important to diagnose issues, and helps to aid in future projects as well.

Knowing how much, or how many in a relevant setting will tell you if your project has been successful.

Figure out your benchmarks and then decide on how you want to measure them, including how many/which platforms to advertise on.

Here’s an example of a measurable goal:

Increase monthly orders by 1000 by posting 1 curated, targeted social media campaign per week on Instagram and TikTok.

Achievable

During this point of planning your goals, you should refer to your current track record. Refer to your previous experience and do a reality check. Your SMART goals should be realistic and attainable, and not over-the-top desires.

Looking back at our coffee order example, if the shop were a brand new, small business with few repeat customers, an increase of 1000 monthly orders is far too high of a margin.

Increase monthly orders by 200 by posting 1 curated, targeted social media campaign per week on Instagram and TikTok.

On the other hand, if this were a franchise business of international recognition, overseas export and many ties to news outlets, more media outlets should be considered for the campaign.

Increase monthly orders by 1200 by posting 1 curated, targeted social media campaign per week on Instagram, TikTok, Amazon and UberEats.

As such, make sure to fine-tune your goal so that it is Achievable.

Relevant

This is the step in SMART goals where you should reflect on the benefits this project will have on the company. Think it through, and consider the bigger picture.

For example, if the majority of your shop’s sales come from Instagram advertisements for deliveries, consider the impact this project could have for increasing revenue.

Increase monthly orders by 200 by posting 1 curated, targeted social media campaign per week on Instagram and TikTok. Majority of customers are delivery orders from Instagram (mobile) users, and growing via this platform will increase revenue.

Time-bound

Time is valuable. In order to properly gauge your tasks’s success, it’s important to measure when a goal has been achieved.

How long will you work on this project? How long will certain tasks take? Will there be maintenance required?

To keep everyone on the same task schedule, it’s good to implement time-bound parameters.

We can build onto our previous SMART goal like this:

Increase monthly orders by 200 before Q4 of 2022, by posting 1 curated, targeted social media campaign per week (from October) on Instagram and TikTok. Majority of customers are delivery orders from Instagram (mobile) users, and growing via this platform will increase revenue.

Conclusion

By understanding each aspect of SMART goals and creating your own, your road to success in maintaining progress, and ultimately finishing your project.

To recall, SMART stands for:

• Specific (Who’s, What’s, and/or Where’s).
• Measurable (How many/much, how to keep track).
• Achievable (Accomplishable, attainable, realistic, finite).
• Relevant (Suitable for you/company, right time, economic?).
• Time bound (What can be done within specific time frames).

Regardless of scale, your next project could be improved with these goals.

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