How to identify and set effective Business Goals

Business Goals are needed to monitor your success

A critical part of your digital marketing plan is establishing clearly defined, quantifiable goals. You should think about exactly what you are looking to achieve from your digital marketing and assign goals that reflect this, which are measurable.

Goal-setting is the process of taking active steps to achieve your desired outcome. Maybe you're looking to achieve more sales, greater conversion rates or a certain number of new clients per month. Each of these desired outcomes involves setting and reaching smaller, staged goals.

Each of these major goals can be broken down into smaller, more attainable goals that will propel you towards success.

There are three types of goals - process, performance, and outcome goals.

• Process goals

  These are specific actions or ‘processes’ of performing. For example, a Process Goal designed to lead to more clients may be to post 4 times per week on Social Media to raise your exposure. Process goals are easy for you to control and manage.

• Performance goals

  These are based on personal standard. For example, aiming to achieve a reach growth of 1,000 people on Facebook. Personal goals are mostly controllable and driven by the related Process Goals.

• Outcome goals

  These are based on success. In this example, it may be gaining 100 business leads or sales from Social Media posts. Outcome goals are difficult to control because they are determined by more outside influences such as people's decision-making, access, exposure, and time.

Each of these 3 types of goals directly feed into the next. With a strong focus on your Process Goals, you influence the success of your Performance Goals. With a high level of success in your Performance Goals, you stand a great chance of achieving those all important Outcome Goals.

So when you are setting your Business Goals, ensure that you look at your primary objectives, and break these down into smaller milestones.

Tips for setting your Business Goals

• Use Metric-driven Goals

  Always include goals which you can clearly monitor and measure. It's important to be able to keep track of our progress, success and equally where improvement is needed. Metrics allow us to adapt our strategies where needed, so be sure to set goals that you can monitor in this way.

• Include Milestones and Deadlines

  Give yourself a timescale to work to for each goal. This may be a certain number of sales per month, or an increased social following by a certain date. Whatever your goals, ensure each one has a date to measure achievement.

• Establish Smart Goals

  Smart Goals are a well-defined combination of thee above points. So instead of saying "We want more sales". We form a structured goal with a dedicated timeframe. For example; "We want to achieve 100 sales each month".

Be sure not to ignore this essential step in your business planning. You can work more effectively with clear, realistic business goals in place.

Now, we will look at using these goals to introduce our metrics and defining how each will be measured, using Key Performance Indicators.

What are Key Performance Indicators, and how are they used?

Once you have established your business goals, it's a good time to start thinking about how you will measure the performance of your digital marketing campaign.

To do this, we use Key Performance Indicators.

A KPI is a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for your business progress, milestones, and insights that assist you in measuring success and making important decisions for your company.

In short - A KPI is the value used to track the progress of your business goal.

There are KPIs for every aspect of business, whether it's financial, marketing, sales, or operational. We look at the defined business goals and decide the metrics which will give us the best insights. We recommend that you create a spreadsheet or table with each of your business goals listed, the KPI for each of these goals and an area to add the value each month for ongoing comparison.

For Example;

Tips for deciding your Key Performance Indicators

• Choose a blend of Quantitative and Qualitative KPIs

  A quantitative KPI relies on numbers to gauge progress, for example, "1000 leads to be generated every month"

  A qualitative KPI looks at opinion or feeling-based data, for example, positive reviews or consumer attitude towards your brand.

  Both types of metric are important for tracking the overall performance, so be sure to choose the right approach for each of your business goals.

• Focus on a few Key Metrics

  This process shouldn't be overcomplicated or be too laborious. Focus on insights that will provide you with actionable data to improve performance and provide a return on investment. For example, focusing on the number of likes on a Facebook page is great. However, you may be better served to monitor the success of a Facebook post by using Google Analytics to track how many visits from Facebook your website received.

• Monitor all important aspects of your business

  Do not focus exclusively on obvious marketing metrics such as website visitors, sales or social media. Your customer service and operational metrics are just as important, so be sure to keep a check on internal processes also.

Think carefully about your KPIs and be sure to evaluate them over time, introducing new metrics as needed to monitor new activities. Once you have established the metrics you will be using, you can move on to get a baseline reading of your current performance.

KPI Baseline Reading

Now that we know how we're going to measure the performance and effectiveness of our marketing efforts, let's take a baseline reading of our current position.

It's important to have a grasp of how we are currently performing to guage improvement over time. Use the spreadsheet or table you have created to complete a baseline column.

Once you have recorded all of the data for your current position, you will have a clear idea of where to focus your efforts for improvements and where you are currently performing well. This will allow you to assess any current marketing methods to evaluate where change is needed and what can be learned from successful metrics.