You’ll very rarely achieve anything in business, or in life if you don’t start with a clear objective. It sounds ridiculous, but if you think about it this way, you might understand why.
You’re getting in your car and you’re headed to meet a friend of yours. They send you the address for where you’re meeting, and you automatically use that location for your GPS to guide you there.
The GPS takes you weaving in and out of streets you would never normally go down and low and behold, a little while later, the GPS says, “you have arrived at your destination”.
In Business, as in life, when you start with a clear objective, you, just like your GPS system, will know when you have achieved your set goal.
Too many people I know are trying to do something, but if you ask them what it actually is, they won’t be able to tell you.
In business, they’ll say things like “I want to make more money” or for their Digital Marketing in my work case, they’ll say “I want more visitors to my website”.
Is this how to start with a clear objective?
Let’s break both of these “objectives” down and see if we can make them a little clearer.
1. I want to make more money
Depending on what you sell, this could be structured in the following way:
I want to bring on X new clients for product 1. Product 1 currently sells mostly through Facebook ads, so we are going to increase our ad budget, create new campaigns on FB, then distribute and monitor over the next 4 weeks.
This is a clear objective. It not only has the end goal, sell X number of Product 1, but it also shows us what we are going to do, how we are going to do it and has a monitorable and analysable result to tell us if we made it to our final destination. Just like a GPS system would.
2. I want more visitors to my website
Again, something very vague and not very useful. How many more visitors? What sort of visitors? Where are these visitors from?
So let’s see if we can’t change this and actually start with a clear objective.
I want to increase the number of visitors to my website by XX% in the next 3 months. To do this, I am going to create niche content, specific to my target audience in Location X and distribute through our 3 social channels online, including an advertising budget of £XXX to ensure the right people see my content.
Again, look at that as an objective. It’s clear, defined, timelined and you’ll easily be able to tell if you achieve your goal. Back to the GPS example, you’ll know when you have “reached your destination”.
Sounds so easy, right?
Don’t get me wrong. There have been times where I have written super vague goals and ideas of what I wanted to achieve next. I never managed to make those objectives a reality though.
When I decided I wanted to start an online news channel for Gibraltar, I knew I had to start with a clear objective.
We broke down all the elements involved. We set a timeline. Each person in the project took responsibility for specific tasks, to be completed within a certain deadline. We had regular meetings and people were held accountable for their successes and failures.
Within 9 weeks, from initial objective being set out, we launched our product. It was on the 11th November 2011. 6 years later, Your Gibraltar TV is still going strong.
My biggest successes
All of my successes have been achieved when I decided to start with a clear objective.
Use the old SMART acronym:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-Bound
Build all your objectives with this in mind. You’ll find you start seeing better results and long-term, you’ll never want to work any other way, ever again.
Everything I do is more or less based on this idea, even when in 2016 I thought I was going to lose everything and have to start again from scratch. I set a plan, I worked on it tirelessly and eventually pushed through all the pain and resentment and came out on the other side a different, and possibly better person.
If you are struggling to build your Digital Marketing objectives, get in touch with us today and we’ll help you create a SMART plan for you to implement going forward. Simply email me on [email protected]
