Planning Your Road to Success

One of the things I do for my clients is simplify marketing so it eliminates confusion and enables the business owner to focus on what is important. But there is always a part of marketing that stresses many small business owners – i.e. determining their mission, goals, strategies and tactics. These concepts are important in order to develop a plan that focuses you on what is important to help you succeed.

Mission vs. Vision

Mission (purpose) = defines why you are in business and what you are doing now.

Example:
Masterful Marketing partners with small business owners as their trusted marketing advisor to help them achieve success by learning, incorporating and executing marketing strategies and programs that take their business from mediocre to marvelous.

Vision = defines what you want your business to be or be known for. It’s useful to develop a 1, 3 and 5 year vision to ensure you can progress to where you want to be through well defined measurable steps:

Example:
One year: By December 30, 2010, Masterful Marketing will be offering quality information products in addition to coaching services that make up 20% of the overall revenue for the company.

Three year: By December 30, 2013, Masterful Marketing will be recognized as one of the top three marketing brands for small businesses in the United States.

Goals

Goals are well-defined, targeted statements that give you clarity, direction and focus. It is important for the small business owner to define what you need to do to achieve your vision in measurable and realistic terms. If a marketing goal is to “increase visibility for your Website”, then you need to include by when and specific criteria with which you can measure your results. Ideally, you should have only 2 or 3 goals that you want to work towards in a 3-6 month timeframe. Any more than that, you risk taking on too much and achieving nothing.

A common approach to developing your goals is to use the formula for the five characteristics of well developed goals – S.M.A.R.T.

• Specific -  What exactly are you trying to accomplish? The more specific you can be, the more likely the goal will be accomplished.
• Measurable – How do you know if you are successful? Answer the questions “How much?”, “How Many?”, and “By When?”
• Attainable – Is this realistic based on the resources you have or can acquire to achieve them or a major obstacle to success? The best goals should encourage you to reach, but not so far as to involve unavailable resources or unrealistic expectations.
• Relevant – Will this goal help you reach your vision? Setting goals that do not align themselves with your ultimate outcome will divert your attention from those that help you get where you want to go.
• Timely – What is the deadline for this effort? Without having specific time frames associated with each goal, you most likely will not achieve them because the day to day interruptions will take over.

Example:
By December 2010, create, launch and sell via the Internet 25 copies of an information product that simplifies developing a marketing plan for small businesses.

Strategies and Tactics

Probably the most confusing concept is how to determine strategies verses tactics. Previously, I wrote about Traditional vs. New Media Channels and the five categories of marketing strategies that are available within each channel – advertising, direct marketing, events, public relations and word of mouth.

When determining how you will achieve your goals, your plan should define which strategies you will include on each channel and the activities you need to be doing regularly that will lead you toward those goals.

Example:
Implement Internet marketing activities to launch the product into the market including public relations, advertising, events and word of mouth: The tactics (activities) that will help me achieve my goal include:

• Build my email list by offering a free marketing plan template;
• Develop the pricing and packaging strategy for the new information product;
• Develop a press release to announce the product and submit to the online media outlets;
• Create a blog post describing the new program and feed it to all social media channels;
• Develop an email announcement to send to my list;
• Develop a Facebook Business Page and announce the availability to my fans;
• Offer a free one hour tele-clinic that creates value and introduces the program to your target audience

It’s useful to include your tactics on a calendar with deadlines so you get the activities underway or completed in time to achieve your goals.

Stay Focused

As small business owners, we all want to do many different things believing that more is better. In marketing, you are better off selecting one to three of your most important goals and work towards achieving them. Having too many goals will only set you up for failure and disappointment. Figure out what’s important to you to accomplish in the next 3 to 6 months and go for it. Otherwise, you will be constantly distracted and won’t accomplish anything.

How are you defining your goals, strategies and tactics? What are you trying to achieve by the end of this year?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Mission, Vision, Goals, Strategies and Tactics is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

This is the second post in a series that discusses your year end marketing review to help you get ready for the new year.

Your goals can deal with many different elements of your business. You can have goals to drive more business from information products, generate better quality inbound leads, increase the awareness of your brand, drive more visitors to your web site or get more repeat clients. The primary purpose for setting goals is to guide your efforts and measure their success.

Regular review of your goals should be something you do more often than once a year, but now is as good a time as any to take a look. Reviewing your goals is not about looking back but about seeing if your goals are moving you forward. It is also not an exercise where you beat yourself up for not getting them done! The review is to determine which ones you accomplished and which ones you didn’t and why.

Do you have a vision for your business?

Chances are very good that those goals you did not accomplish were not aligned with the vision you have set for your business. Setting goals that help you get where you want to go makes those goals so very much more important to you and therefore, more likely to be accomplished.

And if you don’t have a vision, you should! Your vision is not just the dream about what you want your business to look like, but your beacon that inspires, gives you direction and keeps you on course. There are benefits of having a clear vision and the accompanying goals that help you get there:

• It focuses you on where to spend your time, effort and resources. It helps you assess the many opportunities that become available and make choices based on whether the opportunity gets you closer to your vision.
• When you become overwhelmed, you can look at whether what you are doing is heading you towards your vision. If it isn’t, then you need to decide whether continuing to spend time and effort on this activity is truly worth it!

Do your goals help you get to your vision?

Look at your goals for this past year and determine which ones you want to continue to strive for based on your vision and which ones just go away. For every goal you set, make sure it helps you get to where you are trying to go. Be focused on the ultimate target, set goals that will take you to your dream and you will see great things happen to your business.

What’s your vision for your business? How will you realign your goals to achieve your vision?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Reviewing Your Goals is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.