Business goals are an essential part of setting your company up for success. How you establish them is vital, so you need to make sure you do it right. Here are a few tips on how you can set clear, actionable business goals.
Why You Need Better Business Goals
Goals are powerful. They can focus attention on achieving desirable outcomes and make your business better. But when you set vague goals like “be more profitable in 2021,” it isn’t helpful and leads to a lot of questions. How profitable do you want to be? When will the “profitability” be achieved? How will you know the company is profitable?
Making specific goals will help you know when you’ve achieved them and when you can start your next goal. It will also help marketing companies, like us, know how to help you achieve your goals quickly with the right strategy.
Do a SWOT Analysis
This is a type of analysis you can easily do yourself that will help you identify where your company is doing well and where it can improve. SWOT is an acronym for “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.” Create a list, going through each part of the acronym. Write down what your business is doing well at, what it isn’t doing well at, what opportunities exist that you can use to your advantage, and what factors outside your control could be a risk. Once you complete this list, you can use it to identify and prioritize a few areas you’d like to develop into business goals.
You can’t decide where to go without knowing where you’ve come from.
Review Past Performance
Don’t forget to review your past performance. You can’t decide where to go without knowing where you’ve come from. Go over data, analytics, and anything else that will help inform a number of your future business goals.
Make Your Goals SMART
After identifying what you’d like to work on and reviewing your past performance, it’s time to develop your business goals. When you take your goals from the idea stage to the action stage, you’re going to want to create SMART goals. This acronym stands for:
- Specific – What exactly are you going to do?
- Measurable – How will you measure these goals to know if you succeed?
- Achievable – How will achieve this goal?
- Relevant – Does the goal connect to your overall objectives?
- Timely – When will you achieve this goal?
Making sure all your goals are SMART goals will help you clearly understand how to achieve your goals and see if you’re making progress.
Measure Progress Regularly
When you put your business goals into action, make sure you measure the progress regularly to ensure you’re on track and meeting them in the time frame you established. By keeping track regularly, you can also quickly adjust any objectives if needed to better meet your goals.
Let’s Achieve Your Goals Together
With clear business goals and a strategic marketing team, your business will grow! Our team at BPD can take your goals and create strategies to help you with digital marketing, search engine optimization, social media ad marketing, and more. We have been assisting small businesses with growth since 2008 and would love to help you out! We’re located in Cave Creek, Arizona, and Montrose, Colorado, but serve nationwide.
