Customer personas and SMART goals

Customer personas represent a group of similar people in a desirable audience. They:

• help a company figure out how to reach people at the right time and with the right message, offer, or products

• allow you to focus your time and energy on prospective leads that may actually turn into customers

• can be created manually or using automated tools 

There are a few ways to create customer personas. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Xtensio, and Up Close & Persona have persona generators built in.

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SMART considerations 

To make sure your goals are SMART, consider the following factors: 

• Specific: What do you want to accomplish?

• Measurable: What are the success metrics that will determine whether the objective has been met? 

• Attainable: Is this a realistic goal that you think you can meet?

• Relevant: Is this specific marketing goal aligned with your company’s overall objectives? 

• Time-bound: What is a realistic time frame that this goal can be met within? 

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Example scenario

You’re a digital marketer for a photography and photo sharing company. Users can upload their photos onto your website and, using your design templates, make scrapbooks and other items to commemorate events, trips, loved ones, and more. You are setting new SMART goals in preparation for the upcoming financial quarter. 

You know the company wants to focus on increasing scrapbook sales for this next quarter, so you start thinking about goals. You decide to set a SMART goal to give you something to compare your progress against. You come up with: 

We aim to increase scrapbook sales by 15% by the end of the next quarter through a robust social media campaign where we focus heavily on influencer marketing.

This goal fits all of the SMART goal criteria, which means you’ll be able to easily track your progress and make adjustments as the social media campaign progresses.