By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing, OPTIZMO Technologies, LLC – published on Forbes.com on 3/18/20.

If you read any business, motivational, or self-improvement articles or books, you’re likely familiar with the concept of goal setting. While similar to making your New Year’s resolutions, effective goal setting should be more than an annual exercise.

Here are a few best practices for getting the most out of your marketing goals in 2020 and beyond.

Make It Specific And Measurable

One of the most important aspects of achieving a goal is initially defining it. A common one for many people is “to get in better shape.” Sounds great on the surface. But let’s apply that to marketing and rephrase it to “getting your marketing program in better shape.”

What exactly does this even mean? How would you know if you achieved the goal? Certainly, you can subjectively decide that you have made some changes that you think are good, and therefore, your marketing program is in better shape. But this vagueness limits what you can achieve through goal setting.

Instead, make sure your goal is both specific and measurable. Something like “improve our email marketing campaign conversion rate by 20%” provides something specific to focus on, along with a well-defined target to measure against. You can easily look at your campaign performance to determine your progress in meeting the desired outcome. Setting goals like this gives you a much more objective way to measure your eventual success.

Go Big Or Stay Home

There seems to be a fair amount of debate over how lofty your goals should be. Some experts suggest setting smaller, achievable goals to build momentum, while others say you should set difficult ones that stretch your abilities and are much harder to achieve.

Read the rest of the article at Forbes.com.