How To Set SMART Marketing Goals For Client Acquisition | Back To Basics

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 260

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome. This podcast is for creatives who are usually freelancers who are tired of just sitting around waiting for business to happen to them. They want to take control of things and actually make shit happen, preferably cool shit. And you want to do it all without selling your soul. If that sounds like you, you are in the right spot. This episode is a continuation of our Back to Basics series.

So for everyone who's been following along, you know we're going through these basics because A, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. We already know these things, but we're just not doing these things. And then B, successful people never don't do the basics. So the double negative is there for you to remember it, but we always do the basics, and most of us know the basics, but we just haven't been reminded of them lately, so we're ignoring them. And today's episode is no different. You are not going to grow your business as a freelancer without understanding the core of what we're talking about today, and that is setting smart marketing goals. If I were to sit down and literally ask you, what are your goals? What do you want out of your business? You're gonna have a few vague ideas of things you want to happen. You might have a revenue number. You might have some sort of pricing number or rate number that you want to work yourself up to. You might have a vague idea of the types of clients you want to attract, but you have absolutely zero concrete smart goals. Everything you have swimming around up in your head right now is just half-baked ideas of vague notions of things you want to accomplish, and because of that, nothing ever really gets done. Instead, I want to present to you an idea, and this is what's gonna help you actually get out of what I call plateau hell. This is where in your business, you've hit some sort of plateau.

Usually in the $50,000 to $60,000 a year range is where most people hit that. Sometimes it can be higher, but the plateau hell is where you've just grown to the point where nothing new and exciting is happening. You might have even started to shrink, and getting out of this requires a lot more than just vague notions, vague ideas of what I want to accomplish, vague marketing ideas. It takes real plans, and plans start with what I call SMART goals, and SMART is an acronym. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. There's several variations of what these letters stand for, but they all pretty much mean the same thing. Your goals need to be specific, which most people's aren't. They need to be measurable, which almost nobodies are, especially you creative freelancers. They need to be achievable, so they can't be some crazy pie in the high dream that you'll never accomplish in a million years. They need to be relevant, so they need to actually match the goals you have for your business, and they need to be time-bound, so there needs to be a deadline attached to it. And we're specifically in this episode talking about SMART marketing goals, because in most cases, most freelancers come to this show because they want to grow their business, and there's only two actual ways to grow your business. There's only two. It sounds kind of wrong when you first hear it, because you feel like there's way more than two ways to grow your business, and technically there are, but it all boils down to two things.

First one is get more clients or customers, depending on your business model, but for most listeners, it's get more clients.

And the second way of growing your business is make your clients worth more money. That's it. Pretty much every single goal you can think of when it comes to growing your business boils down to one of those two things. So if you had the goal of growing your social following, that's because you want more clients, unless you're just trying to get ego or validation or whatever. But typically, people are growing their social following in order to get more clients.