As the end of the year approaches, between holiday shopping, relatives visiting, and the weather going batty, you have a very important task: creating your small business marketing goals for the New Year.
This can seem like an intimidating task, but it’s an essential part of setting yourself up for success in 2015.
In this post, I will provide a simple strategy you can follow to assess your marketing results and set your goals for the year ahead.
You probably tried a lot of different marketing activities in 2014. Jot down a list of the activities you were involved in.
For most small businesses, this list will include:
Once you’ve gathered a list of marketing activities, you’ll need to make sure you have the tools you need to effectively measure your results.
Luckily, most marketing channels have built-in reporting tools you can use to track your activity.
Here’s a quick overview of the tools you’ll want to consider:
As you start to look into your reports, you’ll likely see some new terms and have questions about what these metrics really mean for your business.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the most important marketing terms and what they mean for you:
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Website/Blog
Paid Advertising
As you start to look at your results, you’ll want to pay attention to both your marketing metrics and your business results.
On the marketing side of things, you’ll be able to gain valuable insights into:
But you’ll also want to look at how your different marketing activities are impacting your business. This could include:
Take the most successful tactics and create your high priority goals around these items first. They need to be challenging, yet reachable goals for your business to be set up for success.
Say you use email, social media, and content marketing. You started a blog this past year that has done fairly well. In 2015 the goal could be to increase unique blog traffic by 20 percent. This will involve some smaller objectives to be able to achieve it, such as writing more articles per month and including videos and images to enhance engagement.
Now look at those tactics that weren’t as successful.
Maybe your business put a lot of effort into being active on Twitter, but didn’t see a lot of engagement. Decide whether this is an avenue you want continue to improve. If it is, look at how you can trigger engagement by reaching out to customers, mentioning thought leaders in your field, or running a Twitter ad.
Maybe the issue was you couldn’t measure some of these metrics or gauge the success adequately. This alone could be a goal before you start the New Year. Find affordable ways to measure the missing metrics for the upcoming year.
Orient your efforts around the obvious winners and put some other things on the backburner or drop them entirely. You don’t need to be pursuing every marketing tactic, just the ones that work best for your business.
Come back to these goals every quarter so you can evaluate if you’ll be able to reach them or if they still need to be a high priority. A lot can change in your business over a few months and that can alter the direction your goals should be heading.
Long-term goals can also be forgotten if they aren’t revisited regularly.
Just sitting down and making goals is not enough — you should be checking in with your progress regularly to make the most of the initial plan you’ve put in place.
Yes, there is the possibility your goals might change, but if you don’t continue to evaluate your progress, you’ll have a harder time deciding how to change your initiatives properly.
By sitting down to review and reflect on the previous year of your business you can make next year even more successful.
As a small business owner you have a lot on your plate and using your experience to organize next year’s business goals is a great way to put your business on a clear path in the upcoming year.
Have any questions for goal setting for the year ahead? Let us know in the comments.
About the Author: Cami Bird is the Head of Local Success for MarketMeSuite, the social media marketing and engagement platform for small businesses. She is an expert in social media engagement and inbound marketing, and loves Welsh Corgis. MarketMeSuite was the first company to pilot Constant Contact’s Small Business Innovation Loft.