Getting to the details of your marketing goals

In my last post, I talked about taking your successes and mistakes in the past year and writing those down. Hopefully, these were insightful for you and are helping you see where you want to improve.

Your marketing goals document is going to be a couple pages long. Put it into your word processing software and save it - this is going to be an important file for you to revert to.

Here is how it is going to flow:
1. Your goals
2. Reaching your goals

Your Goals
Your goals section is going to be compromised of at least five goals for the new year. Profit and sales is almost always the #1 goal of all businesses and organizations. That's why you are in business. So start there. What do you want your profit to be this year? Think about the salaries you want to give yourself and your workers. Or what do you want your sales to be this year? This may be an important point for some businesses that have hit their profit goals in the past.

The rest of your goals are going to be dependent a lot on what you noticed with your successes and mistakes from this year. I saw that I wasn't keeping track of my finances better with my business. So one goal I have is to have my financial paperwork better taken care of, so I'm aware of where we are financial at any moment.

If you are dealing with numbers, make your goals somewhat quantitative as well. You need to be able to measure your success. Knowing you are doing well on reaching your goals will give you momentum to keep going. Seeing you are failing to reach your goals will help you make a quick turn in your business to reach those goals throughout the year.

So don't just say "I want to increase my profit at the end of the year," or "I want to take home more money each week." Say "I want my profits to increase by X number of dollars this year," or "I need to take home X number of dollars each week."

Other ideas for goals:
* Improve your image in the community.
* Improve your branding.
* Adding more employees or more products

Reaching Your Goals
So once you've gotten a list of at least five goals, we need to write down how we are going to get there. This will take more thinking and may be something you will add to throughout the year. For now, get as much down as possible. Throughout the year, I'm going to give you more tips on how to reach some of the most popular goals and you can add them to your list.

Right now, work on writing at least one action you can do for each goal.

Increase in profit as a goal? Your actions for reaching this goal could be increasing marketing efforts, decreasing your expenses, changing your pricing, adding more salespeople or a number of other actions. As a matter of fact, this goal is so huge, you should have several actions for it.

Improving your image in the community as a goal? Your actions could be sponsoring a certain number of events in the community this year, having your employees volunteer a certain number of hours this year or you getting involved with sitting on the boards of local organizations.

Improving your brand as a goal? Consider the actions of having consistent branding on all of your marketing materials, improving the reflection your office has to those coming into your office or how you treat your customers.

For me, with the goal of a better understanding of my financial situation at anytime, my action is going to be to complete my bookkeeping each week, rather than put it off for months.

Again, you want to make these goals as quantitative as possible.

You should now have a long list of actions that you are going to do throughout the year. Everyday you will be doing one of these things. Don't stray from these actions. These are what are going to help you reach your goals this year.

And I wish each and everyone of you the best in the new year! That's one of my goals in this blog - to see my followers improve their business.