To win now you need to be conquesting your competitors customers

With headlines such as “Cost-of-living crisis causing customers to keep vehicles longer” and “Used car buyers negotiating harder over prices because of cost-of-living crisis” in the past couple of days and the latest “AutoTrader Monthly Intelligence report ” for July 2022 indicating a drop in Used Car Market Health of 24% YoY it’s time for retailers to adopt ‘SMART’ marketing – Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound.

By adopting SMART marketing you will give yourself the best chance of conquesting customers from your competitors. Why do you need to be ‘conquesting’ customers I hear you ask. With the used car market likely to shrink in the short to mid-term then the only way you will maintain your sales volumes is by aggressively chasing a higher percentage of market share – with fewer buyers you need to convince in-market consumers that you are a better option to buy from than your competitors.

So, to win more customers you need to attract more in-market buyers. Combining inbound sales & marketing principles with SMART goals enables you to optimise your marketing activity whilst delivering on ROI. Get this right and you will cost-effectively attract more customers to your brand and your products. SMART goals force you to think deliberately about your actions and how they relate to the results you’re trying to achieve. SMART goals help banish delusion-driven marketing.

In the current market where demand is slowing (1 in 5 used car buyers now indicating they will defer their next purchase) and price is more important than ever you need to ensure you remain highly visible to the remaining 80% of buyers that are still considering purchasing a car. You need to be more visible than your competitiors.

So, let’s take a deep dive into SMART objectives and understand how these help maximise and optimise your marketing budget and as a result deliver the best ROI (Return On Investment).

Specific – Goals must be written so that they are clear and refer to a particular part of the business.

Instead of: “This year, we’ll improve our online marketing,” consider how much more specific “By the end of Q2 2015, we will increase traffic to our website by 25%” is.

If you’re not sure what specific looks like for your goal, consider these questions :

• What do I want to accomplish?
• Why is this goal important?
• Who is involved?
• Where is it located?
• Which resources or limits are involved?

When creating your SMART goal, be as concise and specific as possible. The more specific the goal, the more likely you are to achieve it.

Measurable – goals that can be quantified and, as a result, tracked.

In the example above, increasing website traffic by 25% is measurable. You are able to identify the starting point (current website traffic) and whether you have reached the end result (current traffic + 25%). Without that measure, your goal remains abstract.

Achievable – SMART goals must be realistically attainable based on your existing skills, resources, and timeframe.

For example, if you received 500 visits to your company website last month, you can’t reasonably expect to get 50,000 visits the next month.

Similarly, if you’ve generated an average of 10 leads every month, jumping to 2,000 leads in one month is unlikely. Many businesses do this to push employees to “go as far as they possibly can.” (Sound familiar?) In reality, all this does is discourage.

SMART goals are goals you can achieve. They encourage success. 

Relevant – To be effective, SMART goals must be relevant to the business. 

Relevant – To be effective, SMART goals must be relevant to the business. If the goals focus on a result that the business can’t handle, the goal is irrelevant.

For example, if your current website can’t handle more traffic, you may want to rethink your goal to increase web traffic by 25%. Perhaps the goal becomes needing to identify and implement a new website solution within the next three months.

Once you’ve reached that particular goal, you can focus on increasing web traffic with a digital tool that can handle it.

Time-based or Time-Bound – Goals must have a deadline or time frame by which they should be achieved. 

Without a specific deadline, the goal becomes a moving target and unlikely to be reached.

If you are looking to increase your website traffic by 25%, how you reach that goal will differ depending on whether you intend to do so in 3 months or in 3 years. 

Without SMART goals, your marketing is delusion-driven!

SMART marketing goals matter more than ever given how much information we have to deal with on an ongoing basis.

Rather than be distracted by the constant pace of change, non-stop emails, and an ever-increasing wealth of data points available to track (think page sessions, conversions, email stats, social activity and referrals, etc.), why not embrace SMART goals to stay focused and ensure that what needs to happen for the business actually happens!

Here’s what is to be appreciated about the SMART marketing goals process: 

• You can’t help but get your hands dirty. If you’re going to be specific, you have to think about what you’ve done, how that worked, what you want to do more of, etc.
• By thinking specifically and including measures, you consider past results. You analyse what worked. You consider the levers you have available to deliver on goals and how to make smart use of them. If you need to increase traffic by 25% within 3 months, you’ll need to come up with a robust content plan and calendar to deliver on the goal.
• SMART goals force you to plan ahead. You begin with the end in mind and consider the various steps necessary to reach the end.
• You proactively think about bundling activities into marketing campaigns
• You embrace a discipline of planning ahead and developing expectations for all of your marketing activities. 

Yes, it can be difficult to figure out what to measure and how the measurements interrelate given all of the online data available to marketers. Proving ROI can be difficult and frustrating however, it’s a great deal easier with SMART goals.

For examples of SMART marketing goals, check out this blog.