Most doctors and healthcare providers I’ve met don’t make decisions without data. Nor do they often make recommendations for patients that aren’t highly specific.

That’s not just true for healthcare providers. Over the years, our agency has built up a rapport with healthcare businesses selling a variety of products and services. They all work the same way. Whenever possible, they make informed, data-driven decisions about nearly every aspect of their business.

Except marketing.

For whatever reason, many of the healthcare providers and businesses I’ve spoken to over the years think about marketing differently than they think about other business units. I’m not quite sure why–that’s just how it’s seemed to unfold. Whatever the reason may be, shifting your thinking as a business in healthcare can do great things for your marketing.

A system I like to use a lot whenever it applies is something you’ve probably heard of before: S.M.A.R.T. criteria. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

To bring this back to the healthcare angle, think of it like this. If a doctor were meeting with an obese patient who wanted to get healthier, that doctor wouldn’t tell the patient: “I think you should lose weight.” Not only is that completely obvious, it’s also very broad and gives no specific next steps. Saying “I think you should lose weight” would be about the least useful thing a doctor could say in that situation.

Taking that general goal and applying it to a specific context is where you begin to frame it for success. “I think you should aim to lose 5 pounds by the end of this month,” the doctor might say. “Start by cutting 200 calories a day from your diet and spending at least 10 minutes walking outside each day.”

See the difference? One is general and, at the end, you’d have no real criteria by which you could judge its success. Is losing 1 pound good enough? 5? 10? The other is specific. Not only does it give a specific goal to measure against, it’s also much easier to follow than something that frames the problem broadly. It’s specific, it has a timeline, it’s measurable, it’s attainable, and it’s relevant to that patient’s life.

The same is true in marketing. You may have a marketing goal of wanting to increase leads–to grow the number of hospitals reaching out to your medical supply company about buying product. Simply stating that “you want more leads” isn’t enough. A SMART goal would be something like this: increase inbound leads by 13% month over month by the end of 2015.

That gives you something to measure against and also gives you an idea along the way as to whether you’re succeeding or failing. Just as the patient going to the doctor might know he was meeting his goals if he’d taken both steps the doctor asked for 15 days in a row, so too can a company that sets SMART goals tell how it’s doing along the way. In the context of the goal I just mentioned, having 2% MoM growth in September after setting the goal in January would be a sign that things need to change.