It has just turned 2020 and hopefully you have some big plans for the year. I know we do here at HyperWeb, and backed up by some recent reading, I have decided to put in place a strategy for further business development. The strategy involves client acquisition and retention, which therefore requires a focus on marketing and customer service.
I thought I would start the year by sharing a basic structure and some useful tools that you can put into place to set some goals, plan a pathway, and form some habits and steps to make it easy to get there.
Business goals need marketing goals to achieve success.
Examples of Business Goals:
- + More sales
- + Grow brand awareness
- + Increase market share
- + Expand into new territories
- + Develop a new product or service
- + Increase profit
Examples of Marketing Goals:
- + Increase website traffic
- + Increase social media following
- + Build your mailing list
- + Increase conversions
- + Increase enquiries and leads
You can’t achieve the goals on the left without the goals on the right.
It is a cliche these days but it is true that goals need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aspirational, Realistic, and Time-bound). Marketing is about driving business growth and awareness, and to achieve our goals and reach our KPIs, a number we need to track metrics such as new projects, new retained clients, enquiries, project completions, and income measures. These are the targets to aim at via the achievement of the result metrics you have set in your marketing goals.
Strategically we need to draw a line from marketing goals to business goals so we understand how they are tied to one another and what impact achievement will have in driving business results. You will also need to understand how you will resource the activities required in terms of staff and finances. Do you have the skills required internally, or do you need to outsource? What does success look like? Do you have the capacity to handle the business growth?
I believe in order to achieve an overarching goal in business, a business owner or manager also needs to be strong in other areas of life. Therefore it is important to set some personal health and relationships goals, because without a healthy body and a healthy life it is very hard to achieve business success, and wouldn’t matter much if you did.
Without going in to too much detail, business goals rely heavily on a marketing strategy. This marketing strategy requires planning and commitment on a daily basis to action and iterate. The daily actions are implementing parts of a project, steps, and habits.
There are a few tools to bring this all together and harness the power of habits, streaks and visualisation. In addition to our internal project management software Asana, I have put into use two apps that serve different purposes. The two apps are Remente and Strides.
Remente is useful as a readily available wholistic view at the goal and the tasks required to achieve it. What do you need to develop in order to achieve the goal. What do you need to do on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis to achieve the goal. While Strides is more of a daily habit tracker of progress on your positive habits required to achieve your goal as well as the individual steps and tasks that you need to make a habit to achieve your goals.
What habits can you develop and track that will help you reach your marketing and business development goals? Planning your content strategy for the year and implementing daily actions such as posting on social media, weekly or x number of times weekly, reaching out to past clients, writing and publishing blog content, following up on proposals, making new connections, and monthly EDMs. Setting these up in a goal planning and visualisation tool and habit tracker with notifications is a good way to ensure you do it and you do it with a laser focus on your goal.
All the best for 2020 and may you your reach your goals!
