Annually entrepreneurs need to set business goals.  Generally these are related to business growth but they can cover any of the normal business functions from sales and marketing to employee management and operations. Well written goals help business owners focus on what’s important so take your time when crafting them.

Writing good goals is as much science as art as they should be measurable and have an estimated time frame for accomplishment. Marketing plans should only be written once the business goals are established. Too often entrepreneurs rush into marketing activities without taking this very important step of writing clear measurable goals and then are disappointed when the marketing doesn’t work. 

The typical marketing tactic is to create, test, analyze and roll out or retest.  Without well written goals built off your strategic business plan that drive the marketing tactics there is no way to know how successful your marketing efforts have been.  You can’t tweak or eliminate those that aren’t working and that risk wasting marketing budget, time and possibly business growth.

A good goal has 4 parts:

1. What you want to accomplish
2. How you will accomplish it
3. A quantifiable measurement for success
4. The time you estimate to completion

Here’s an example:

To increase brand awareness by increasing the number of blog subscribers by 25% in 6 months.

By writing clear measurable goals effective marketing activities and tasks can be created to meet expectations.  With an established measurement the selected activities and tasks can be analyzed for success and the outcome used for building the next round of goals.

So before you launch into any marketing activities take a minute or two to write the business goals you’ll need to have a growth year.

Susan Frederick

Managing Director

Market-Train