Elizabeth King guides you through the second key, goal setting, to help you take the next critical step in building your brand.
Transcript:
Welcome to The Five Keys: Unlocking The Power Of Your Brand. This podcast is designed to give you the tools that you need to create a successful and dynamic brand. I’m Elizabeth King and I’m going to be your guide on this journey.
Hi, and welcome back to The Five Keys: Unlocking the Power of Your Brand. I’m Elizabeth King and I am thrilled to be able to talk to you today about goal setting. Who knew that you were going to be excited about talking about goal setting, because it’s such a sexy topic, but goal setting is so incredibly important when it comes to creating your business goals, to creating your communication goals and to really creating something that is effective. And so today, I really wanted to talk a little bit about one, the measurement side, how you actually create measurable goals. And for me, I liked the smart method. Not everybody likes to use this. You can use whatever is comfortable for you, but when you’re using that smart method, mine is S.M.A.R.T.E.R. I throw a little ER on the end because they’re specific, they’re measurable, they’re attainable, they’re relevant
and time-bound. But the ER part of these goals are also evaluated and reset. And that is a really important part when it comes to communications. I wish that communications was an exact science, but it’s just not, there is so much trial and error that ends up going into effective communication plans. You know, what I found works for one client will not work for another client. And that’s why to me it’s important to have those goals that can be reset, evaluated, make sure that you’re not wasting time and more importantly wasting money on things that aren’t working. So today I really wanted to give you three tips about goal setting for you and how you break down your business goals all the way down to how you’re creating communication priorities. So I am certain that you have business goals, you’ve got some big picture things that you want to accomplish for the year, but do you have that broken down quarterly?
Do you have it into manageable chunks that you can think, okay, at the end of Q1 I want to be here. By the end of Q2 I want to be there. And that’s important when you’re talking about communication goals because these are really important tools to help you achieve those business goals. I want you to be able to create a three month plan and to create something that, again, you can evaluate. It’s a little bit smaller chunk so that you can see is this working. If I tried these three tactics in this quarter, are they working? Am I seeing something that needs to be tweaked? Am I seeing something that is wildly successful and I need to continue upon? So that is why I always suggest that you break it down into smaller chunks when it comes to your communication goals.
But even more so than that, think about your communication priorities. Depending on where you are, if you are a startup, maybe you only have the budget to do one or two or three things immediately. Maybe you’re focused on your website, maybe you’re focused on Facebook, maybe you’re trying to build your list. Or maybe you’re a little bit more established company and you are trying to grow your reach. You’re trying to expand into maybe a new market, you’re trying to launch a new product. All of those things are going to require different tactics. And so I want you to use your goals and again, set priorities. I want to do these things first and the next year I’m going to add in a little bit more. Maybe next quarter I’m going to add in this or that. Just making sure that that you’re keeping it all in perspective. So everything is going, it’s leading up to those big business goals that you have for the year. And so that’s really the approach that I take to goal setting. It is taking one of those high level, big picture business goals, breaking it down into smaller communication goals. And then from there, breaking it down into your priorities so that you are staying on time, you’re staying on budget, you’re able to reevaluate how things are going and then pivot as necessary.
And so I hope that, although goal setting is not sexy, I hope that this gave you a few tips and tricks to creating your communication goals and to building your brand. So until next week, I hope that you have a great week and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Thank you for listening to The Five Keys: Unlocking the Power of Your Brand.
