From the course: Small Business Marketing

Establishing your goals

From the course: Small Business Marketing

Establishing your goals

- You likely have a vision of what you need your marketing to accomplish. It might be to increase traffic to your website, drive more phone calls or get more customers to come through your doors. And these are all examples of common marketing goals, but as is they're useless. Your goals need objectives. You see, goals are just the general idea of what you want to accomplish. Objectives are how you'll make it happen and how you determine if you succeeded. Goals without objectives are useless. One of the most common mistakes in small business marketing is not setting goals. You can't simply point yourself in a direction and march forward, you need a plan. A common approach is to align your goals with an acronym called SMART. This means that for a goal to be effective, it must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. And the approach that I use to map out goals, which is also in use at companies like Google and LinkedIn, is to use OKRs for goal setting. And this acronym stands for objective and key results. It looks like this. First, you set the objective. Objectives answer the question. Where do we want to go? And then two or three key results to follow. The key results define whether the objective was met. They answer the question: How do we know that we've got there? And this is important because otherwise you can't decide if you've achieved your goal or not. Let's say we want to increase online sales for a coffee shop. Here's how we'd set SMART goals inside the OKR framework. I set my objective and it's specific, I want to increase online sales for filters and mugs. Next, we set our key results, and these are measurable, relevant to the goal and attainable. For this example, let's say sell 100 packages of coffee filters and sell 250 coffee mugs. Now, all goals should be time-bound. And traditionally, OKRs are time-bound by a quarter. So we might say that this objective is due by the end of quarter one. But you can also set goals by the week, month and so on. Now, as you can see, the key results are how I'm qualifying that we increased sales. I've decided that if I achieve each of those key results, well, we've hit our goal. Now, if you'd like to learn more about OKRs, I recommend John Doerr's book "Measure What Matters". Now there are many ways to set goals, what matters is that you commit to setting goals and measuring your progress. Failing to do so will put you at a serious disadvantage.

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