SMART Goals + HCP Advertising = Better Results

Goals are important. Often in life, always in business.

But for some, goals can be a very broad idea of where they want to be sometime in the future. When this happens, your goals are more like the objectives – a general statement about what you would like to accomplish. For example:

• Raise awareness of physicians who treat X disease so they will prescribe our medication
• Build a community for patients and caregivers impacted by X disease
• Be a trustworthy resource for patients dealing with X disease

When it comes to advertising to healthcare professionals, goals should be more precise, however. So before launching any HCP advertising campaign, it’s best to have clearly stated goals in mind. More specifically, you should define SMART goals for each campaign and for your overall HCP marketing initiatives.

What are SMART Goals?

SMART goals are created to provide a specific set of targeted achievements. This approach is considered by many to be foundational to all goal setting philosophies. The acronym SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.

Certain questions should be answered when you set SMART goals for your HCP advertising. The marketing team should ask these questions:

• Specific – What exactly do we want to achieve?
• Measurable – How will we know when we’ve reached our goal?
• Achievable – How can we achieve this goal? Is it a realistic goal?
• Relevant – Why is this goal meaningful?
• Timely – When do we want to achieve this goal? When will we review performance?

The SMART goal-setting approach allows you to set up actionable objectives for ad campaigns. Examples of SMART goals include:

• Raise website traffic spending at least three minutes on our site by 5% year-over-year
• Generate 4% more sample requests month-over-month for X prescription via an online form
• Increase the number of followers on our non-brand Facebook page by 5% by X date
• Generate 10% more leads via PPC campaigns by end of year

Data is Key to SMART Advertising Goals

SMART goals hold no value if you can’t measure results. So it’s important to lean on data analytics to assess performance against your goals. They rely heavily on being able to review data in a quantifiable way, so data collection and organization are key to understanding performance results.

If you’re just starting to collect data, it may be a bit more challenging to set specific benchmarks. But those with historical data can set informed goals – based on past results – so they are achievable. It’s also a good idea to map the metrics you track within your data analytics to the SMART goals you have set.

Learn more about using data analytics

Connect SMART Advertising Goals to Business Strategy

Whenever possible, marketers should tie their team-specific SMART goals to overarching business goals. Do these targeted goals align with organizational goals? By doing this, you help ensure your activities are driving downstream activities that lead to financial goals. In fact, setting effective SMART goals for marketing starts with understanding larger, long-term strategic goals.

For example, is a campaign designed to drive traffic to your website going to lead to increased paid attendance at an event you’re sponsoring?

Organizational business goals are often built around increasing revenue, raising product sales by category, growing a customer segment, or similar overarching intents. Once you have a clear understanding of organizational goals, you want to set your advertising goals to drive activity toward those intents.

In conclusion, by creating SMART goals, your ad campaigns will be more targeted, results-oriented, and data-driven. You’ll have even more success when you build new campaigns that leverage your data insights from previous campaigns. By taking the time to set SMART goals and align them with organizational goals, your HCP advertising will become a driving force for brand performance!

When you’re ready to launch a targeted HCP advertising campaign, consider partnering with Elsevier who has been trusted by HCPs since 1880. Contact our Sales Team today.

Article Written by: Alex Brown