Setting SMART goals as a marketing agency

Within a marketing agency, I’ve found you often spend a lot of time trying to turn vague ambitions into concrete plans. “Grow brand awareness,” “improve ROI,” or “do more with PR” all sound really good ideas, but they’re actually impossible to manage if they stay fuzzy. SMART goals give you a way to translate those ambitions into targets that you can track successfully and report against to see how you’re progressing.

What SMART actually means

SMART is a simple framework for setting goals that are clear and actionable:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Time-bound

It’s a phrase I’ve found a bit overused in theory as it tends to be thrown around a lot, but when you truly apply it properly to real client work I’ve found it changes the quality of conversations and subsequent outcomes.

So diving a little bit deeper into what the framework of SMART goals actually means. If you start with specific then a specific goal answers the following question “what exactly are we trying to achieve, who are we trying to achieve it with and where?”

An example of this in practice would be:

A vague goal is “Increase website traffic.”

To make this specific, you would set the goal as “Increase non-branded organic sessions to the UK site’s commercial pages.”

Specificity forces you to decide which channel and which outcome matters the most and that clarity helps your marketing teams all pull in the same direction across the various disciplines.

Moving onto measurable, if you can’t measure your goal then you can’t say whether it worked. This can be a big sticking point when trying to report back to wider stakeholders who need context on what is happening related to the goals you’ve set. An unclear goal would be to “improve engagement on social media” whereas a measurable goals is to “increase average LinkedIn engagement rate from 3% to 4.5% in 6 months” 

Measurement can be either quantitative using numbers, percentages, volumes, rates.

Or qualitative using sentiment, feedback scores or brand perception surveys. For client work, you ideally define the exact metric and the data source (e.g. “Google Analytics: non-branded organic sessions” or “Ahrefs: referring domains with DR 70+”).

Next, when setting a goal you need to make sure it is achievable. Ambition is good of course but fantasy is not so being achievable means the goal is stretching but realistic otherwise you are always on the back foot. A too ambitious goal would be to triple your organic revenue in 3 months (when you don’t have any extra budget or the tools to set a concrete plan in place for how you’d actually achieve this) whereas an achievable goal would be to increase organic revenue by 25% over the next 12 months, supported by a technical audit, paid media strategy and SEO optimisations.

It can often be tricky to challenge a target but when you do, try to remember it’s not about being negative; it’s about being honest so your team doesn’t feel set up to fail, and the client can understand what is realistically possible.

In addition to being relevant, to make a goal SMART it also needs to be relevant. This means it connects directly to the wider business strategy and the client’s priorities. 

An example of a less relevant goal is “Grow TikTok followers by 20%” when the client’s audience is senior B2B decision-makers. Whereas a relevant goal would be to “Increase qualified demo requests from paid search by 30%” for a SaaS client whose growth depends on pipeline.

Relevance is where you need to do a sanity check that the metric you’re chasing actually matters and it also helps you push back on “vanity metrics” that look good on a slide but don’t move the needle in terms of performance.

Finally, we reach the T in SMART and this is time-bound. Every SMART goal needs a clear timeframe because without this you can’t plan or prioritise how to get to the goal. An open-ended goal can actually be quite negative to a client relationship in the long run as if you say “increase branded search” then this might sound great at first clance but in reality there’s nothing time-bound about this to show when you’ll increase branded searches and there’s no quantitative nature around this goal either. A much stronger goal would be to say “increase branded search impressions by 60% year-on-year by the end of Q4.”

Setting a timeframe on your goal helps to allow milestones to be set, aligns internal and client expectations and also decide on what cadence you can use to report on goal progress.

Turning fuzzy goals into SMART goals

I’ve found that most client briefs get sent across in really broad terms but here’s my advice on how to convert them using some examples:

Example 1 =  Organic performance

Initial ask from a client: “Improve SEO performance.”

SMART version = “Raise domain authority from 54 to 57 and increase our non-branded organic sessions to commercial landing pages by 40% within 12 months, driven by technical SEO fixes, content and digital PR.”

Now the SEO team knows who the authority target is, what the traffic focus is, and the timeline around this. It then allows client services to frame scope and budget against those outcomes.

Example 2 = Brand awareness

Initial ask from a client: “We want to increase brand awareness.”

SMART version = “Increase brand recall from 5% to 10% among UK consumers aged 25-44 in our next brand tracking study, within 12 months.”

To make the SMART version, I changed the goal to add in a specific audience and location, made it measurable via a brand tracking study and set a clear timeframe of 12 months making the overall goal much more aligned with brand marketing.

Example 3 = PR

Initial ask from a client: “Get more PR coverage.”

SMART version = “Secure 40–50 new referring domains with DA 70+ and 30 Tier-1/Tier-2 media placements over the next 12 months, with at least 80% of links coming from editorial in-content placements on industry-relevant sites.”

That gives PR a concrete goal and makes it easier to explain to the client why some opportunities are worth pursuing and others are not as they won’t be linked to the SMART goal.

Example 4 = PPC 

Initial ask from a client: “Get more leads from paid.”

SMART version = “Increase the number of PPC leads by 30% (from an average of 50 per month to 65 per month) within the next 90 days by optimising keywords, ad copy and landing pages.”

How SMART goals help project management

From a client services perspective SMART goals are not just about reporting back to the client on results of but they are a tool you can use internally to drive better delivery and improve project management.

They guide prioritisation because when you are clear on the goals you can then put together a plan on what to tackle and when which helps build out the strategy. If the SMART goal is to “increase direct and branded traffic by 40% in 12 months,” you can then prioritise brand campaigns, PR that promotes your brand and improving the website experience to encourage repeat visits. Then you can deprioritise activities that don’t contribute to the goal despite how interesting they may sound.

Another benefit to project management that setting SMART goals creates is that it reduces scope creep arguments because I’ve found from my experience that scope creep often happens when the client asks for something and the team doesn’t have a shared reference point.

With SMART goals, you can say “This request supports our agreed KPI, so we should either rebalance existing tasks or discuss extra budget.” Or: “This is a nice-to-have, but it doesn’t contribute to the goals we set. Do you want to adjust the goals or treat this as a separate piece?”

The conversation can then become about trade-offs rather than you coming across as being difficult. 

SMART goals also make your reporting meaningful because end-of-month reports then relate back to what matters most to your client and list actions instead of outcomes that can then frustrate senior stakeholders. You can then structure reporting around:

• Progress vs. target (e.g. “Branded sessions up 35% vs. 65% target”).
• What drove movement.
• What you’ll adjust next.

Having this in your monthly reporting pack elevates your role as an agency from simply someone who supplies activity to a true partner of theirs.

Common mistakes when setting goals

Even with the SMART framework in mind, teams can still fall into a few traps.

Setting too many goals is a common mistake to make because if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. You should aim for a small number of high-impact goals per client or per project and supporting metrics can exist, but they shouldn’t all be headline targets.

Setting conflicting goals is another mistake that can be made in goal setting. You should be careful that goals don’t pull in opposite directions, for example, pushing hard for lower CPAs while also demanding a switch to more upper-funnel channels without increasing your budget. The conflict should be acknowledged and a goal set that avoids this so that you can achieve it.

A SMART goal is also useless if nobody owns it as then nobody is accountable. Every goal you make as a marketing agency should have a primary owner and clear collaborators so that everybody has defined responsibilities.

Making SMART goals part of your culture

To get the real value from SMART goals, they need to be baked into how your marketing agency works

Practical steps that can be taken to roll this out are:

• Rewrite your briefs so they always include 2 to 4 SMART goals. We have recently created KPI packs for all of our clients to brief in what are goals are for each relationship
• Use them to frame scopes and estimates that are then presented to clients.
• Client facing wise, put them at the forefront of every review deck and also review on regular catch up calls.
• Internally you should also refer back to them in retrospectives e.g. did we move the metrics we said we would?

Over time your clients will start to think in these terms too and you’ll spend less time debating subjective “good” and more time collaborating on measurable impact.

Setting SMART goals should not be a box-ticking exercise because it’s a discipline that connects your day-to-day activity to business outcomes. For a marketing agency, it’s one of the most powerful ways to align stakeholders, protect scope and budgets, improve decision making and also to demonstrate the value you hold with your clients really clearly. 

When you can say, “We agreed this is what success looks like, here’s how we’re tracking, and here’s what we’re changing next based on the numbers,” you stop being just another supplier and become a trusted strategic partner.

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