If you consider yourself a data-driven marketer, you have probably heard the same incomplete goal-setting advice over and over again:

1. SetSMART goals.
2. 每月至少一次跟踪您朝着这些目标的进度！
3. 衡量最佳运作的方法adjust your marketing planaccordingly!

Unfortunately, Psychology tells us that’s not good enough.

To make matters worse, whenever we talk to marketers who do set goals, we often hear an even worse strategy that usually sounds like this:

1. 设定6个月或年度目标，例如“产生的线索比去年多20％”。
2. Review data each month and track progress towards the longer-term goal

Here’s what is wrong with this picture:There are no intermediate goals that help guide data-driven decisions as marketers are doing their work! In other words, your team may be tracking data, but not changing the tactics based on data. With the strategy above, goals do not affect daily or even weekly decision-making.

So why don’t marketers track progress to monthly goals on a weekly basis, as early signals of success? Here are a couple reasons we hear:

• 向老板或客户（最常见的原因）报告错过的目标是令人生畏的。设定每月目标可能会引起很多尴尬的对话。
• Marketers don’t want to be impulsive and change their strategy. It took awhile to convince their boss or client that they have the right strategy. They don’t want to have to do that every month.
• The dogged belief that it will eventually get better if we just keep doing more work.
• It’s too hard and time-consuming to set, track and revise goals.

Unfortunately, by not setting monthly goals,marketing leaders are actuallyhandicapping their teams。Psychological research shows that concrete monthly goals give marketers necessary feedback for making better decisions. Specific goals empower marketers to stay on track and avoid high-pressure, no-win situations later in the year.

Follow these 4 science-backed steps to start crushing your numbers…

1. Set Concrete Goals to Ensure You Are Focused

这是一种永不错过目标的简单方法：避免完全设定数值目标！您可以设定一个目标：“We want to generate more leads this year than last year.”

只要您比去年做得更好，您可能会认为自己度过了美好的一年。但这是违反直觉的现实 - 设定一个模糊的非数字目标实际上造成了风险your team will fail to achieve that goal! If you want to improve on last year’s numbers, even by a little bit, setting a concrete goal is your best move.

海蒂格兰特Halvorson是一个社会心理学家那t studies goals at Harvard. She has investigated the connection between goal-setting and achievement, and found thatvague goals overwhelm your brain并鼓励您专注于其他事情。

Editor’s note:Would you like toview your most important goals at-a-glance，你去的任何地方？通过Databox移动应用程序跟踪您当前的性能，并访问您从移动设备构建的任何仪表beplay体育appios板！

这是一个例子：假设您的目标是“增加博客的流量”。您每天都要牢记这个目标。但是，您可以做很多事情来到达那里，例如：

• 创建更多社交媒体帖子
• Do more keyword research
• Write more content
• 构建链接
• 尝试一种新的内容
• … and the list goes on

Your brain will become overwhelmed with all these possibilities. A lack of a concrete goals will cause second-guessing. It needs direction so that it can focus its energy. Without a clear focus, you will default to the same tactics you were previously using or worse, you’ll get little done because you’re bouncing back and forth between different activities.

听起来很熟悉，对吧？像其他所有人一样，您的大脑想要清晰，以便它可以在自动驾驶仪上运行。

图像源

On the other hand, if you set your goal to “20% more traffic month over month”, your brain can immediately begin calculating how to get there. Not only can you create a solid plan, your brain will literally begin to make decisions on autopilot that it thinks will lead you towards the goal. It can begin devoting energy to concrete tasks like:

• 每周写3个博客
• Post 15 times on social media
• Research keywords for 1 hour a day

See how much more achievable that seems?

Wait, it gets better…

2.创建通知Behav实时反馈循环ior

在这一点上，您可能想知道为什么您不能在办公室里悬挂一个大标志“We need 20% more traffic this year”,and watch as employees make data-driven decisions to meet the goal. This is what you can call an “information-based appeal.”

To discover a better solution, we need to look at the success of radar-enabled speed limit signs.

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这个概念是first attempted in Garden Grove, California in 2003。学校区域的驾驶员将加快超越传统速度限制标志的速度。警察会努力分发票，偶尔，汽车甚至会与行人和骑自行车的人发生事故。但是，这些风险似乎都没有停止超速驱动器。

但是，当他们使用动态速度限制符号（显示您的速度时）添加反馈回路时，它们将速度降低14％！反馈循环具有4个关键组件：

1. 证据that shows why the information is relative to you (your speed).
2. 相关指标that compares your data to a benchmark (the limit)
3. Consequencesthat indicate what will happen if you do not act (a warning on the sign)
4. 动作that will directly prevent the consequences (you need to hit the brakes)

The risk of an accident would not cause drivers to act, but a feedback loop did.

The loop works because your brain is constantly trying to achieve homeostasis, or equilibrium.

PS。如果您想将相当于动态的速度限制符号放在办公室中，以便您的团队具有接近实时的反馈循环，put a TV on your wallthat puts your stats front and center (like Nextiny Marketing shows in the photo below) or if you run a remote team, enable your team members toview your key stats and goals on their mobile。

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2F%2f%2f%2f%2f%2FWWWWWWW.FACEBOOK.COM%2FNEXTINYMARKETING%2FPOSTS%2F166664242424242438169789664&width=500

3. Set Monthly Goals to Motivate You/Your Team Properly

As I mentioned above, too many marketers set six month or annual goals. Some set goals that are too short-term too. It’s important to get the timeframe just right. For marketing, monthly goals make a lot of sense.

Here’s why…

Your brain is not going to be able to focus on one big marketing goal that takes months to achieve. Theconsequences太远了，actionsare unclear.

And if the goal is too large in a small time frame, your brain will tune it out because it knows the goal is unachievable.

但如果the combination of these 4 factors is just right, your brain will search for ways to resolve the difference and return to homeostasis.

1. Theevidence是您目前的指标。
2. The关联是每月目标。
3. Theconsequences取决于老板或客户的反应
4. Theactionsdepend on which marketing tactics you can use in the timeframe

用外行营销术语，这意味着，如果您的进度在您面前提出，那么您将努力和聪明地达到月度目标。

Back to our example… if your goal is to hit 20% more traffic this month compared to last year, the story becomes clear to your brain. You will know the exact number of sessions you need this month, and you can do the math to figure out the work you need to do.

4. Adapt Activities Frequently to Ensure Monthly and Annual Targets are Hit

When doing annual planning, you’re most likely looking at your options for hitting the marketing goal for next year based on what you did last year. But, don’t be tempted to just “double down” on what worked last year. Things like the following are bad, inflexible plans:

• We will launch two new marketing campaigns per quarter instead of one.
• We will double our ad spend
• 我们的目标是使100,000名读者从35K到博客。

Chances are, unless your business just prints cash, these are unrealistic plans.

Plus, you’re short-changing your team’s ability to do even better with incrementally more resources.

By only looking at activities or long-term goals, you rob your team of the ability to react to data in real-time. This is a flawed approach for a few reasons:

1. You are placing a large bet that your first marketing plan is good enough. Chances are, you made some poor assumptions. (Marketing, after all, isn’t a complete science… yet!)
2. 您正在鼓励团队将精力集中在活动完成上，而不是活动的结果上。例如，如果他们的任务是每周写3个博客文章，那么他们可能没有时间撰写和推广博客文章，该文章可能会获得您平均帖子流量的10倍。而且它们可能会使您的广告支出增加一倍，而不会获得两倍的结果。那将是灾难性的！
3. You may miss opportunities that could provide a step-change in results with little effort. For example, one of the smartest things we did in the last few months is ask another site to link to us in a post they had written a year ago. It took about 20 minutes of work and drove nearly 1,000 signups for us.

相反，设定较短的任期目标并设置频繁的反馈循环。换句话说，每天检查您的进度。如果您无法快速评估自己的表现，则每月只有一个机会来改变战术 - 在您报告自己的电话号码时。甚至还不够好。

Below are examples of goals we’ve set. Some of the goals, like “double MRR” are set by our boss, while some are derivative or sub-goals individuals have set for ourselves to help us get to the bigger goals. Bysetting monthly goals, our team has became masters at finding ways to exceed [most of] our targets.

As you head into 2018, most companies are building their annual plan. While this is an important process to go through once per year, make sure you’re setting and monitoring goals much more frequently in the new year. Otherwise, 2019 will roll around and you will not have made as much progress as you could have or as much as was expected of you.

Need some help?If you need a way to track marketing data and specific monthly goals in near real-time, you should check out our new SMART Goals tool. For free, you can track data from up to3 connectors像HubSpot，Salesforce和Google Analytics（分析）一样！