When you are running your business, it’s important to set goals and benchmarks that you want to reach in your company. In doing so, you can make sure that your business is constantly moving forward and continues along the right path. It will help ensure that you do achieve the right levels of productivity and avoid issues with your company becoming stagnant. This can lead to the death of any business.
When you set goals, you need to ensure that they are smart:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-Focused
While there are lots of variations on the words used for SMART goals, they all mean roughly the same things. The goals you set need to be within the boundaries of possibility, clear and understandable. There are many goals that you could set for your business from day one. Here are some that we recommend you do explore.
Cost Control
It’s absolutely vital that you do keep costs under control in your business model. Failing to achieve the right markers here will leave your business vulnerable to various issues including the build-up of debt. Once debt starts to build in your business model, it can be incredibly difficult to control and it will be easy for things to get out of hand.
There are numerous ways to control your business costs. First, you need to make sure that you do set a budget for your spending. You should research how much you should expect to spend for a business like yours in the first year and at other markers along the development cycle.
Once you have set your budget, you can explore options to reduce your costs. Part of this should include making your business more flexible. You can do this by eliminating unneeded parts of your company model like the business model. These days, it’s unlikely that any business requires an office or this type of traditional home hub. Instead, you could run your company quite comfortably from home.
You might also want to explore whether it is suitable to have a fixed team of employees. It could be more cost effective to instead use freelancers. The support of freelancers will ensure that you deliver the quality solution that your clients expect. You also won’t have to worry about needing to pay for additional incentives to keep the impact of employee churn low in your business model. Instead, you can simply pay for their services and hire or fire employees as you need to when keeping your model efficient and effective.
Going Green
You should certainly think about ensuring that you are making your business as green as it can be. There are a few reasons for this. First, going green in your business model is another great way you will be able to save and cut back on costs. This is again going to help ensure that your business can adapt to different situations and changes on the market.
As well as this, by exploring greener options, you will be able to improve the reputation of your company on the market. There are plenty of polls that suggest customers are more interested than ever in whether businesses are achieving the right green standards.
Finally, it could help you avoid penalties in the future as governments prepare to take more drastic measures to fight the threat of climate change.
To set a target for going green, you need to explore your current level of emissions. You should then think about the level that you want it to be in four or five years. You can use an energy consultant to explore the options for your business and there are quite a few worth considering.
For instance, you might want to explore renewable energy choices in your business model. One of the key choices here is going to be solar panels. These used to be too expensive for most businesses. However, these days, they are affordable and will fit into a typical company budget. If you’re interested in exploring this possibility, then you should also look for subsidies and support from the government as well as environmental groups.
Recycling is another area to explore when you are considering how to go green in your business model. This could be a smart choice because it will help you eliminate significant issues such as landfill charges that could plague your business in the future.
Engagement
Let’s now turn the attention to marketing. You could have numerous goals and markers for success in marketing. However, we think that your main focus should be on levels of engagement with customers and users in your business. If you achieve a high level of engagement, then you’ll be able to guarantee that customers do keep coming back for more and, perhaps spread the word about your business online. Positive word of mouth is often one of the most valuable forms of currency for a thriving business.
Indeed, engagement is such a powerful tool for business owners, that many marketers are referring to it as the new SEO. You can engage users to increase rankings. Indeed, checking your ranking after running a strategy to boost engagement is one of the key ways of measuring whether your campaign has been successful.
There are lots of ways to boost engagement. For instance, you can think about getting active on social media. Social networks provide you with a clear yet non-intrusive way to interact with customers and clients in a form that they understand and are familiar with. You can set up discussion groups or focus on sharing content that they will find interesting and useful.
Media Attention
Of course, it’s not just about whether you get the right attention from your customers and clients. You also need to make sure that the media is paying attention to your company. The right media attention will help you grow your business to new heights with minimal levels of effort or financial investment. You can track media attention through social mentions of your brand online. If there are significant levels of social mentions, then a media strategy or campaign will be paying off in a big way. But how can you attract attention from the media?
You should definitely think about hiring a PR representative. A PR rep will be able to ensure that your brand or business has the right connections with the media and that you establish a bond. This is going to be a mutually beneficial partnership. You can provide stories and press releases while they will promote your business in a way that is completely natural and doesn’t feel intrusive to the consumer.
For this to happen, you need to look at newsworthy stories for your business. Any significant update or change to your business could be newsworthy with the right spin. This could be as simple as introducing a new product. Philanthropic exercises also attract media attention and ensure that news websites are keen to explore your brand in more depth. You might also want to think about partnering with influencers. These individuals are always on the radar of major players in the media world.
Keeping Customers
Finally, any seasoned business owner will tell you that it’s more important to focus on keeping the customers that you already have rather than finding new ones. First, keeping older customers is always going to be far cheaper and more cost effective. Marketing campaigns to reach new customers will be an expense that you won’t always be able to afford in your business model.
As well as this, keeping customers is going to help you build up brand loyalty. It’s difficult to overstress the value of a customer who is loyal to your business. They will keep buying from your company in a range of different situations. Whether there’s an economic crisis or if you choose to raise your prices, they could continue to support you.
Keeping customers isn’t the massive challenge that a lot of business owners assume. Indeed, it’s possible to do this, simply by maintaining the right level of quality with your products and services. If there’s an issue with quality standards, you need to correct it as quickly as possible. You might also want to think about how you can constantly provide your customers with more value. Give them a reason why they should continue to choose your business over the competition. This isn’t specifically about financial value either. It could be as simple as providing them with content that is both engaging and useful for them. For instance, ‘how-to guides’ will be great and the perfect way to beef up the content on business websites in certain industries.
We hope this helps you understand some of the key goals that you should be setting for your business model. By working towards these goals, you can guarantee that your company is on the right path and that you don’t run into issues growing your business in fantastic new directions. Indeed, if you keep the focus on these points then you will set up your company for a bright future in the years ahead.
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