As we kick off the New Year, some of you will start 2014 with personal resolutions; others, perhaps, have made business resolutions to do “blank” in 2014 to grow your business.
Resolutions are a good start; but how do you do it? How do you make your business truly grow?
You need a plan. And to have a plan, you need to know your goals, short-term and long-term. Defining what matters – defining your goals – is where you start.
In the book, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan, Francesca Gino, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, takes a look at the motivating factor of “temporal landmarks” such as New Year’s. The turning of the calendar motivates humans to reach their goals because the landmark event makes those goals “salient in our minds,” writes Gino in a recent HBS blog. Why? “Because these landmarks trigger reflection and thus can potentially highlight the gap between our current behavior and our rosier, desired future behavior … As mounting evidence suggests, we often choose what we impulsively want over what we should choose given our long-term goals and interests.”
Write it down, says Gino. Research has found that those who plan out their goals, actually writing down their short- and long-term goals, are more effective in “bringing their actions in line with their expectations.”
Print it out, fill it in, post your goals on your office wall:
Short-term goals:
1)
2)
3)
Long-term goals:
1)
2)
3)
Here is why goals are so absolutely important. If, for example, you are physician that wants to be the next “Dr. Oz,” your platform would need a national strategy, that begins with a local strategy — including local speaking engagements that grow into national engagements and local PR to build you up from a local media/community resource into a national “talking head.” Conversely, if you wanted to be “Best of…” in your city’s top-rated magazine to increase your patient load, your strategy would be different, more localized. If you are retailers, do you want to be the best retail enterprise in your community or do you want to expand and become a national franchise?
Asking yourself – and answering – “what’s my goal?” is key to designing the right strategy for 2014 and beyond.
Once you have defined your goals for 2014 — Question #1 on our list — you can start asking yourself these next questions — we start here with #2:
2) Do your verbal and visual messages (your brand) speak to your target markets?
3) What’s your PR plan for 2014? (FYI-If you think you don’t need public relations, well … you are wrong).
4) What is your marketing plan for 2014?
5) Do you know where your target market is hanging out? Are you engaging them in a way that reflects the essence of your business?
6) Do you have a plan that enables the trifecta – PR, marketing & social media – to work together to support growth in 2014?
7) Does your website have a call-to-action? Is your content up to date?
8) Do you have a blog to support your SEO strategy?
9) Do you even have an SEO strategy?
10) Does your 2014 strategic plan incorporate public relations, marketing and social media within your overall business cycle to support growth and sustainability?
/’sas∙s’ē/ agency has set its own goals for 2014. The first quarter of the year, our blog series will complement our upcoming a “lunch & learn” seminar aimed at SMB’s (small to medium size businesses), companies that may not have big budgets for individual PR, Marketing & Social Media Directors.
If you would prefer to meet in person – i.e., “lunch and learn” with /’sas∙s’ē/, our complementary seminar kicks off January 31st. It’s not too late to define your goals, create a plan for 2014 and learn how to integrate a PR, Marketing & Social Media Plan into a budget that may be limited.
For more information and to RSVP to our seminar, click here.
