Ways to grow your small business by setting smart goals

Yes, setting smart goals can grow your business…

Smart goals are the foundation of our business and a key ingredient for success. But how do we set smart goals that encourage growth? How can smart goals be a useful tool for small businesses?

There are many ways that you can improve your business. Smart goals are one of the best ways to grow your business since they allow you to set clear direction and focus in a specific area, leading to growth overall as well as concrete results. How do you know when a smart goal is set right? It should be SMART. Does this mean that all goals should be smart? Of course not, but in this article, we’re going to talk about how setting goals can benefit your small business and how smart goals can help you get started on the right path for success.

Ways to set goals for growth

Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time Sensitive

Small businesses often lack direction. As a result, those who set small goals often fear they won’t be able to achieve them or that they won’t meet their goals after some time.

Setting small goals has the potential to expand your business significantly. For example, you may start off offering free products or services to new clients. As your number of clients grows, you can begin charging for more and more services until eventually, you earn enough money to quit your job.

They shouldn’t complicate your current routine/schedule

Starting a small business is hard work. You probably have tens of hours spent applying for loans, setting up payroll, researching locations, buying materials, or whatever else is required to get your business off the ground.

In order to stay motivated and productive, it’s helpful to have some measurable goal (even if it’s just getting used to writing the blog post once per week) that you can track so you know where you are in relation to achieving your goal.

Your goals should have a deadline to complete

It is said that in the world of business, one of the most important things is to make a deadline for completing the goals. Deadlines help keep you on track and also force you to do what is needed in order to complete it by the specific time when it is set.

The same goes for the digital marketing world. For your business to see growth, you need to set up a deadline for completing your business’s goals. Of course, if you plan on doing this every single week or every month, then that would be good enough already.

For example: If your goal is to attract more visitors and convert them into potential customers, then you should set up a deadline for this. Have a clear cut date when you will be able to check on how many people visited your website and how many of them became potential clients. Also, have a clear cut date when you will be able to measure how much traffic you generated towards your site per day and how much of it converted into potential clients. These are just some suggestions but if you want some ideas on how to go about doing this, then there are a lot of ways on how you can reach your goals with deadlines.

Lastly, regularly review your progress, evaluate and adjust your goals as needed.

As you succeed with some goals and fail with others, you will need to adjust your goals accordingly.

Good goals are like a ratchet: they’re either moving you forward or they’re not; there’s no in-between. A good way to keep them moving forward is to give yourself rewards for meeting your goals (so that achieving them becomes its own reward) and penalties for missing them (so that not achieving them becomes painful).

For example, if one of your weekly goals is to return phone calls within twenty-four hours, make it pleasant to achieve this goal by planning ahead — for example, by getting your calls screened so that only the ones that really matter will come through or by making sure you have plenty of time available when you aren’t doing anything else — and unpleasant if you don’t achieve it by making an appointment with yourself at a certain time on Sunday night to call people back without checking social media or email first.