Did you set a new year’s resolution? Have you created a vision board that lays waiting before us? Do you have a set of goals and objectives for you and/or your business? You’re not alone. January imbues a sense of new beginnings and fresh starts. Changing the final digit of the calendar year brings with it a sense of a clean slate to correct what didn’t work and to aim at new dreams and objectives.
Of course, if you’re already struggling to keep up with those resolutions and goals you set, you’re also not alone. Most of us will abandon our resolutions by the middle of January. The goals and objectives we set with intention for the year start to meet with the reality of our day to day, the limitations we underestimated, and the challenges we didn’t anticipate.
Before you throw the towel in, however, try these tips to get the year off on the right foot and keep on track reaching your objectives.
Attainable goals are measurable goals. “We will expand our customer base” is not the same as “We will increase our reach to new customers in our local market by 2% in the first quarter.” Being specific enables you to create a plan with action steps and tasks that can be assigned to appropriate team members. It helps you allocate budget and resources to reach your goal. It helps you evaluate success and adjust when necessary.
In the example above, you’ve identified a target market – in this instance, your local area. Your marketing plan would, therefore, focus an increase in spending on communications and advertising vehicles that best reach potential new contacts in a geographic radius you’ve identified as “local.” Your detailed goal is now guiding your approach to your outward-facing communications.
Instead of investing your first quarter ad spend on a national campaign or targeting speaking engagements at broad industry conferences, you can focus your resources on more specific engagements within the smaller community. Your sales team can focus on relationships and pitches within the more targeted region.
When we’re casting vision and setting intentions, we can set the bar as high and broad as we want. That doesn’t mean we can reach it. Setting a personal fitness goal of running a marathon with your eye on a race about 2 months out can be attainable if you’ve already been a regular runner with a decent amount of daily distance under your belt. On the flip side, “train to run a marathon” as a general target with no target timeframe for the accomplishment leaves a lot of wiggle room to skip training days and slide into a ‘maybe I’ll get there eventually” routine.
Do your research. Make a realistic plan. Set small, measurable mini-goals along the way to track progress. And then go. “I’m going to train using this Couch-to-26 plan my fitness coach mapped out for me. I’m going to register for a half-marathon in September and a full marathon for next February. I will track my progress using this nifty app.”
Even the best intentions and due diligence can’t get it all right all the time. Setting out with a well-defined, measurable, attainable goal in mind is step one. Reevaluate your plans and your goals along the way. Make adjustments where needed.
Maybe your initial marketing plan to use Instagram to reach local audiences isn’t yielding the results you anticipated. Experiment with other social media platforms and see if there’s one that resonated with your community better. Maybe you got the flu and lost training time and you feel like you’re behind on your goal to master the long-distance run. Adjust where you need to.
Give more time and recommit to what should work even if it hasn’t yet. Evaluate whether your target timelines and expectations are still reasonable. Is this target market harder to crack than you expected? Maybe it’ll take two quarters instead of one. Is the mental leap to growing into a long distance runner feeling harder to master than you thought? Run (not walk) a few 5Ks to build your confidence. Measure. Evaluate. Adjust. Recommit. Refocus. Our goals are a work in progress, not just a start and finish line.
Flipping the calendar – digital or paper – to a new year feels like a natural time to think about setting goals, casting vision, and correcting course. We tend to treat a new year as a launching point for new beginnings. And it is. It can be, anyway.
Resets and fresh starts, however, are not only for January’s window of freshness. The tips and tricks you read on the pages of leadership blogs and business publications can be applied in the deep, long, hot days of July, just as much as they can in the first weeks of a new annual calendar. Bookmark this article and come back to it throughout the year whenever you need to refocus or reset.
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