SMART targets - the staple of every pointless team meeting.
SMART stands for Small, Manageable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Sensitive. This acronym flits in and out of fashion like many managerial objectives. Even if you have never put SMART into practice you have worked under somebody who was attempting to.
I thought of SMART while enjoying Neil Patel’s latest Vlog series.
The series, like most of Patel’s work, is well produced, digestible and knowledgeable. Sharing insight and positioning yourself as an authority is essential in modern marketing. Daniel Priestly’s Key Person of Influence.
But marketers and public figures do this with various levels of success. Take a look at Instagram and Twitter. The platforms are full of personalities trying to become the next Brian Dean. Why does some of this content fail? Why don’t they gain the same reach as industry leaders like Neal Patel?
I reviewed the content that I had found the most useful over the past year.
The three heaviest hitters were the Hootsuite blog, Gary Vee’s video conferences and Neil Patel’s Digital Marketing School. This isn’t because they are the largest and thus have the most resources and widest presence.
They all had one thing in common.
Their advice was all Attainable.
I know what you are thinking. I could have easily picked up the other letters of SMART to churn out a blog.
Let's review their content according to the SMART criteria.
None of their tasks are particularly Small - they cover projects than span months. Their advice is Manageable - you don't need huge resources to follow their programmes. It is all Relevant as it is in their sphere of influence. Most of them don't give you time scales for each activity; so it isn't always Time-Sensitive.
But it is all Attainable.
To illustrate my point I have taken some work from each of the above resources.
Patel’s series on SEO audits. Each ‘lesson’ comes with its own downloadable PDF. These resources are more than magnets or sales funnels to capture your contact details. They are resources for you to organise your thinking so that you can put in place what you have learnt.
Gary Vee regularly releases ‘decks’. His ‘decks’ are a detailed breakdown of how Gary and his team churn out quality content on such a prolific scale. Each page gives step-by-step to create new content and to repurpose old content.
Hootsuite’s Blog includes dozens of takeaways. Nuggets that any sized business or project can do. A cursory review of their content shows that they have engineered it all to be useful. Obviously they want you to invest in their service. But as a content provider they are invaluable.
What can we learn from these dons of content marketing?
Make everything attainable.
Your audience needs to leave you vlog, podcast or presentation that they can achieve what you have achieved. Let’s take a brief digression into the world of fitness and motivational speaking. This saturated market focuses on rags to riches stories.
They want to share their newfound fitness and positive outlook with the world. All you have to do is run 10 miles a day and start being optimistic.
Despite how uplifting they all are, they fail to lead with Attainable steps. They all share the end result - running 10 miles a day but they do not share how you get from 0 to 1 mile
This is exactly what the above content providers do. They show you how you go from 0 to 1 followers, they give you small steps to completing your first SEO audit.
Focussing on Attainable steps will have three affects:
It will be practically useful - making them more likely to share you content.
You will make them feel good - making them more likely to subscribe
They will feel like they are on a journey with you - giving you a follower for life
Thank you for reading this blog.
I hope that you found this useful.
If you are still struggling to create content that is engaging and attainable you can reach us here.