Let me guess: in January, when the year was shiny and new, you were so excited to create New Year’s resolutions for your marketing efforts. You were so sure that this year — this year! — you would actually work toward those goals.
Only now it’s July and…well, those objectives seem to have fallen to the wayside.
Not to worry; it’s never too late to start working toward your goals. Let’s get you back on track with them, shall we?
First, Blow the Dust Off Those Goals
If you’ve had your list of resolutions buried in your desk or on your computer, how did you expect to be able to achieve them? The hardest part of working toward goals is actually having them where you can see and refer to them regularly. And how hard is that, really? Tape them to your desk front and center. Done.
Assess Where You Are
Likely, all is not lost with your marketing goals. Maybe you vowed to be more consistent in publishing blog content. Maybe you published once a month last year, but this year, you’ve gotten up to a once-a-week cadence. That’s good! Congratulate yourself for even incremental improvements.
Hopefully you made your resolutions quantifiable. If you wanted to boost website visitors, you said by how much. If you were looking to increase sales, you had that magic number written down. If that’s the case, it should be easy to ascertain where you are in reaching your goals. Make note of your progress for each goal.
Re-calibrate and Move Forward
Once you know how far you’ve come with your objectives, you can see how much further you have to go for the rest of the year. Perhaps a goal was to increase social media followers by 50 percent, and you’ve succeeded in boosting them by 20 percent. That gives you a target to aim for in the next few months.
With that information, you can build your action plan. What would it take to hit that number of target followers? What do you need to do? You can break it down into how many people you need to follow each week so that you turn those people into followers and fans.
Typically reaching marketing goals requires many tiny actions, like writing more content, following more people and trying new avenues to reach customers. Identify what needs doing and assign it, either to yourself or someone else, with a deadline. At the end of the year, you should be well on your way to achieving your list of goals.
Images via Pixabay: 1, 2, 3