Often small businesses look at their goals for the year as the calendar year ends or begins. Given market forces and pressures, it’s critical to continually evaluate where a business stands, where it needs to go, and what needs to happen to get it to the next step. With a bit more than half of 2019 already behind us, what would your answer be? You don’t need to tell us but be sure to share it with yourself. Take a few minutes to stop everything and start evaluating the rest of the year.
Be honest with what those pressure points are and where your business needs to grow, change, or improve.
Setting goals is important for the short and long-term growth of your company. Now, with your goal in mind, let’s go through all the steps to make it happen. Laying out all the steps for achievement will minimize stress and maximize return.
One of IQComputing’s goals for the rest of 2019, is to increase our social media presence. In the world of small business, owners are usually busy running multiple, if not all, aspects of the company. This can lead to things like social media, being put on the back-burner. But in the world of small business, social media can have high ROI, with little input.
Outline Your Steps
The best place to start with achievement of your goal is to clarify and breakdown what needs to be done to carry out that goal. A specific goal will help you be able to create steps for achievement more easily. With our goal to increase social media presence, we are hoping to achieve growing awareness of our business. We want to reach future clients, as well as current clients, to keep them updated about ongoing and finished work. By outlining an approach, we are breaking down our goal, we’re working towards putting it into action.
For example, creating a content calendar will help us outline our posts for our channels, and help us ensure each post is well thought out with quality content. Since our goal involves social media, it’s important to keep ourselves on track. Whether it’s making a content calendar, implementing a social strategy, or improving copy, we are laying out small steps to help us work towards our end goal.
Track Your Progress
An important part of setting and reaching a certain goal, is to make sure that the goal is measurable. Having an attainable and measurable goal will make it much easier to track your progress and make changes accordingly. Throughout the process of reaching your goal, you can track how your efforts are going. This is important to ensure that progress is being made. For example, once we’ve implemented our social media strategy, we’re able to monitor our posts, ads, etc. One of the biggest aspects of a social media strategy is checking on what is working and what isn’t and changing your content accordingly. You can put a lot of time into your content and your profile, but it’s important to monitor your work, to ensure reach and engagement. Once I’ve tracked my social media efforts by running data analytics, I can then go back and make changes accordingly.
If your goal was to make the ordering process on your ecommerce website easier, you can then track the numbers, or get feedback from your clients to see if they are benefiting from the changes. Breaking down your goal into specific tasks can help you reach deadlines easier. Creating benchmarks and tracking your progress, will help keep your goal moving the right direction.
Stay Motivated
A big part of achieving a goal is staying consistent. Sticking to your schedule will be key in making sure you’re progressing and staying on track. Keeping yourself motivated, even when there’s a major setback, will help you move forward in the process. Setting aside time to check on your efforts will give you peace of mind that you’re moving forward and will give you the time to make changes if need be.
Celebrating small milestones will keep you and your team motivated. We’re here to help you carry your St. Louis web design goals over the finish line!