Goals

Do you have formal goals that drive your marketing activities? If not, it is important to come up with some. Without goals, you don’t specific things to shoot for. Goals will allow you to focus, strive for something, and evaluate how you have done. Maybe you have heard of SMART goals. If not, check them out at the Houston Chronicle’s excellent small business resources page.

I am not going to go over them in much detail or define them, as you can refer to that page. But rather, I’m going to discuss the spirit of goals. They actually are a very valuable strategic tool to help you succeed.

The first point of goals is to provide yourself targets to shoot for. It’ll help you focus and gather the resources you need to attempt to achieve the goals. If you make others in the organization aware of the goals, they can help contribute to achieving them.

But the other major point of goals is probably more important: to allow you to evaluate your performance. If you don’t have goals, you don’t have a firm grasp of your performance. Sure, if your revenues exceed your expenses, that is good. But do you really know how you got there? And how can you improve the following year? It’s important to continuously monitor and assess your performance. Without goals, it’s hard to do so in a meaningful way.

So definitely put some goals together in the spirit of the SMART framework. And be sure to keep them modest. Attempting to reach for the stars is good in theory, but can be hard to achieve in the short term, which can sap motivation. Break up long term goals into more reasonable short term ones. One builds on the next and puts you on the path to full achievement.

Do you have questions? Please let me know.

What is your plan?

Do you have your marketing all planned out? If not, know that it is important to do so. Small businesses tend to do marketing in a haphazard way. Something sounds good, they think about it for a bit, and then do it. This can sometimes result in positive outcomes, but sometimes not.

It is best to develop a marketing plan that lays out everything you are going to do for a set period of time. Let’s say a year for illustrative purposes. Create a plan that discusses in detail what activities you’re going to do and when, and most importantly, why you are doing them. These activities should be created and carried out with a goal in mind.

Make sure that you are specific. Are you going to do a coupon campaign? If so, lay out all the details. Who are you sending it to, how many, how long will the campaign last, what will it cost, what do you hope to get out of it, and how are you going to measure it?

Thinking through all these details ahead of time will make the marketing process go so much more smoothly. And it will help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing over time.

What are your Goals?

Does your organization have specific marketing goals? And are those goals evaluated regularly?

If your answer to either of those is ‘no,’ then you should consider revamping your marketing activities. By having specific goals, you create specific targets to work towards. This allows you to focus and have direction. Alternatively, if you don’t have goals, your marketing efforts are likely not going to be as effective as they could be.

Your goals should be clearly written, easy to evaluate, and measured regularly. For example, “increase month over month sales by 5% in each of the next six months.” This is a clear goal, it is easy to evaluate, and can be done so monthly. If you miss a goal, you can then reconfigure what you’re doing to improve your chances of meeting the goal at the next measurement period.

If you don’t have goals, or you do but don’t measure them, how can you know how well you are doing as an organization?

An added benefit of creating goals is that it forces you to step away and take stock of where you are and where you want to be. This allows for some consideration of changes in what you do to improve the performance of the company.

Final note: the creation, evaluation, and updating of goals should be treated like any other marketing activity you do. It is probably as important as your promotional activities.