Are you one of those business owners or professional service providers who wants to outsource your marketing because it makes you feel like you are chewing foil? NEWS FLASH, the only way you can outsource your marketing is if you outsource your personality, your experience, your talent, and your expertise. Yup, that means you need a clone and it’s not going to happen.
Instead, in the new year before us, imagine you have your MARKETING PLAN and it’s been customized to include only activities that you enjoy (because after all that’s where you’re going to be most magnetic) and it is still a powerful plan that plays on your personality and delivers profits.
And before you even dive into your plan, you’ve got to establish S.M.A.R.T. marketing goals. Goals tell you where you are going, the plan is what gets you there. You’ve got to start with the end in mind and it needs to be specific.
SPECIFIC ~ Yes, you are going to need to apply actual numbers to what you want to achieve. How much revenue specifically do you want in each quarter? How many clients do you want to have on board? Are you working with a team, how big? What’s your conversion rate? So if for 2015 you said you wanted to make a boatload of money, how much is a boatload? Are you thinking of a yacht being a boatload, a barge being a boatload, or perhaps a cruise ship being a boatload? Be Specific.
MEASURABLE ~ You can’t improve what you aren’t measuring. The goals you create will give you milestones. By keeping tabs on your numbers, you’ll be able to effectively track your progress and make changes to your plan as necessary. (No plan is ever fixed in stone, it is a flexible blueprint for your progress.) Make them measurable.
ACHIEVABLE ~ Hey, I love a good fantasy, bet you do too! When it comes to your business, it’s better to be realistic and exceed your mark, than live in la-la land and never come close to your goals. You may think you want 100 new clients and each one is worth $10K, and you’ll make $1M this year. Your 2014 numbers were under $250K, so perhaps 2015 you want to double, instead of quadruple. I’m not saying you can’t, just suggesting you make it possible at the front end and adjust it as your year progresses. Make it achievable.
RELEVANT ~ Let’s say you hate speaking and you want to spending a lot more time at home with your family in 2015, but, one of the goals you set is for more speaking engagements. Yes, you can achieve it, but you are going to be miserable when you do because it isn’t relevant to your business goal of making more money while spending time at home. A more relevant goal would be to create online trainings that you can deliver by webinar or teleclass. Make it relevant to your dreams and your desires.
TIMELY ~ A goal without a deadline is just a dream. Dreams rock, but that isn’t what we are doing here. We’ve moved from dream to goal.
Your marketing goals can be hard to set or you can do it the S.M.A.R.T. way.
COMMENT BELOW with your S.M.A.R.T. Goals!
