Developing Key Objectives for Your Small Business

As small business owners, we have a lot of options that might move the needle for our business. Part of being a great small business owner is developing key objectives for your marketing plan. By developing key objectives for your small business, you will know what to aim all your sales and marketing efforts toward over a period of time.

What is a key objective?

A key objective, when creating goals or a quarterly plan for your small business, is the thing that you are going to aim all your effort at over a period of time.  What is the thing that you believe will move the needle forward for your small business?  

Here is a list of key objectives that will help move your business forward

Promote New Products or Services - focus on your marketing efforts here since your existing products or goals will become set aside or depreciated while you are promoting the new product
Grow Digital Presence - aim your focus on people who will become potential customers, not just to increase your number of followers - they are not real customers
Lead Generation - to get leads is just the start, what comes next? Leads need to become customers so get them into a cycle to convert them into lasting customers
Target New Customers - focus your marketing efforts to anyone who doesn’t know who you are at all or who are just becoming aware of your small business
Retain Existing Customers - instead of getting new customers, focus on nurturing the relationship with your existing customers
Increase Sales and/or Revenue - a great objective to have - across multiple products or services
Increase Profit - multiple ways to do this - increase prices, grow your audience, convert more people to customers

This list is just a sampling of the more than 60-70 ideas to think about when developing key objectives for your small business.

How can sales and marketing support your goals?

Next, you want to think about how your marketing and sales efforts will support the thing or goals to accomplish.

You don’t need a big, fancy marketing team to get this done.  You need to be intentional with what you want to accomplish.  For example, if you want to grow your online presence, you need to focus on that objective in the moment, and not while doing a million other things that will take your attention away from that goal.

Pro tip:  Instead of setting so many goals that you feel overwhelmed, think of developing key objectives.  Maybe the word “goal”  feels too much like setting a resolution that you will never keep.  You definitely don't want your small business objectives to feel like that.

Let’s start developing key objectives that you will be able to wrap your head around and be comfortable with when it comes to growing your small business.

If you want to read more about developing key objectives when marketing your small business,  click on this article. https://blog.alexa.com/marketing-objectives/

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