Most real estate professionals have one common struggle -They have a finite amount of time and resources but unlimited ways to grow their business.

In many cases, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and stuck in an “analysis paralysis” phase, which can result in either trying a little bit of everything with no results or in some cases, trying nothing at all.

Setting SMART goals can help identify the goals you should want to achieve in your business and how you can reach those goals. This article will show you what SMART goals are and how to use them to help market yourself.

What Is A SMART Goal?

As you can probably guess, SMART is an acronym that can allow you to set clear marketing goals for your real estate business.

When talking with many real estate professionals, we’ve come to realize that many try to set targets for growth and success but always lose track of them when the next new and shiny thing comes along.

A SMART goal makes your goal clear and attainable. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Based.

Using this framework, you can define the purpose of your marketing efforts to make sure you’re not wasting your and your employees’ time.

Let’s walk through how to make a SMART goal…

Step One: Specific

You want your goals to be specific to understand what you want to achieve. A mistake that many real estate professionals make when trying to set goals for their business is using vague benchmarks. They say things like “I want to get more clients” or “I want to increase my sales.”

The problem with this is that you never know when you’ve technically reached your goal. That’s why you must be specific in setting up your SMART goals.

For example, instead of saying “I want to get more clients,” you can say, “I want to get 25 extra leads this month.” For our sales example, you can say, “We will boost our sales by 10% this month.”

Step Two: Measurable

The goals you set should be measurable in such a way that you can track them throughout the goal’s progress to make sure you’re on the right track. There should be a way within your goal to measure the growth from your starting point to the endpoint.

In our 25 extra leads a month example, you should be able to see how many leads you have obtained to then know how many leads you have left to reach your goal. If it’s the 10th of the month and you only have five new leads, then you know you need to kick it up a notch to reach your goal.

If you don’t make that goal measurable, you won’t know if you’re on track to reach it.

Step Three: Achievable

When setting your goal, you need to be realistic in your ability to complete it successfully. It should bring you out of your comfort zone but also stay possible. If you want your website to increase in traffic, you wouldn’t set your goal to be three times the viewers you got last month.

You’d try to get a 10-20% increase month over month. This will allow you to eventually triple the viewers you had at the starting point if you keep achieving this but is more realistic and attainable in the long run.

One mistake real estate professionals make here is setting their revenue goals for the start of the year. They try to create these crazy benchmarks like “we want to make 10,000% more than we made the year before” instead of something realistic like 150%.

Step Four: Relevant

Every one of your professional goals should be relevant to your overall brand. This step will help you stay on track when you see all these new things you might want to chase after that come out every year.

Ask yourself. Does this goal seem worthwhile in the long run? You want to make sure you’re putting your time and efforts into the right avenues for your business, and staying relevant will help.

Step Five: Time Based

Every marketing goal you set should have a date or time frame attached to it. This is essentially the deadline to focus on and a timeline to work with.

Not only does setting a goal like finding X amount of prospects a month give you a measurable amount of people to target, but it also allows your day-to-day tasks to have more structure as well.

If you’re looking for 300 extra prospects a month, then you can think about it as finding ten a day. This allows those everyday non-important tasks to get pushed aside when you have a long-term goal like this in mind.

Get to Work

Using the SMART goal framework for real estate professionals allows you to stay focused and efficient each day. Try setting a SMART goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.

Once you get good enough, you’ll start setting SMART goals for different sections of your business, whether that’s marketing, customer satisfaction, management, and more. That’s the great thing about goals. You don’t have to have just one.