What are your business goals for the year ahead?

It’s most importance of have your business goals pinned down, before you start considering your marketing goals.

Remember: If your marketing strategy is aligned with last year’s goals, you won’t achieve this year’s goals – unless you want exactly the same.

To help you set your business goals, here are a few questions and exercises.

Celebrate the just gone

Firstly, take a look back on the year just gone and note your successes, what you achieved that made you feel really proud. It’s so important to acknowledge and celebrate achievements, no matter how small.

Actually, you don’t need to wait for the end of the year to do this. Do it at the end of each month. Even at the end of each week or day.

Stop | Start | Continue

Then still reflecting on what happened last year you can use the model: Stop | Start | Continue to note things that worked well or things that didn’t go quite as planned or were a hinderance to your progress.

From this you can make informed decisions:

  • Stop: Things that didn’t deliver on the effort you put in
  • Start: Things that you could / should start doing (you’ll need to come back to this)
  • Continue: Things that worked well and you’d benefit from continuing or could do with tweaking to improve the outcomes.

Celebration Vision for the year to come

Then do the Celebrate exercise again, but this time fast forward to 31st December or the last day of the 12 months you’re planning. Let your imagination run free and note down all the successes and achievements that make you want to break out the champagne and celebrate!

Next year’s business goals

Having created a vision of where you want to be in a year’s time and what you’d love to have achieved, it’s now much easier to set your business goals for the year ahead.

So that’s your next exercise, note down the things you need to do to deliver your celebratory vision. Then highlight and prioritise the most important ones, these are the ones that will help you achieve your next year vision, and write them down as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) business goals.

Keep these business goals where you can see them. Check how you are doing every month and have a more in-depth progress review every quarter.

Update Stop | Start | Continue

Having set your business goals for the year ahead, revisit your Stop | Start | Continue activities, as these may need adjusting.

Marketing strategies

Now, having set your business goals, you’re in a far stronger position to develop the right marketing strategies, decide your marketing goals and plan the marketing activities that will help you achieve your business goals and a successful year, whatever that looks like for you.

Super Niched

If you would like inspiration, guidance and accountability to bring focus and targeting to your marketing to gain quality enquiries and dream clients, I’d like to invite you to join the next Super Niched course. All the details are here.

If you’d like a quick chat to see if Super Niched is right for you, you can email me, call me on 07565 382803 or book a call.