We talk a lot about ‘goals’, especially at this time of the year, but often we are not clear on why we have chosen them, or how we will arrive at the outcome we want. Here are a few reasons why it’s important.
Setting a clear, actionable goal is the first step towards achieving success. It signals to yourself and others what you want to achieve, and mobilizes your resources towards making it happen. Without a goal, you might be working towards something that isn’t quite what you really want, or you might not be working at all. You might think you’re making progress when in reality you’re nowhere near your goal.
When you set a goal, you’re committing to working towards a result. This can be as simple as ‘I will complete this project by the deadline
So I am sharing with you why I think it’s important to set strategic goals regardless of what time of year it is and how you can go about it in a simple way.
Episodes mentioned in this podcast; Ep. 04 How to measure your comms impact
Let’s dive in!
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Full transcript (unedited)
People often ask me if it is a good time of year to set goals. I think it is because we are conditioned to see a new year as a new beginning, seeing out the previous year and seeing in a new one makes us think about killing old habits or starting new things.
I’ve read a lot of articles on how to be more successful in life. Most of them focus on the obvious: working harder, being better, etc. The ones that really stuck with me, though, were the ones that focused on the things that I hadn’t considered. I realised that I had been setting my goals based on what I thought I should be doing, rather than what I wanted to be doing.
Setting a clear, actionable goal is the first step towards achieving success. It signals to yourself and others what you want to achieve, and mobilizes your resources towards making it happen. Without a goal, you might be working towards something that isn’t quite what you really want, or you might not be working at all. You might think you’re making progress, when in reality you’re nowhere near your goal.
When you set a goal, you’re committing to working towards a result. This can be as simple as ‘I will complete this project by the deadline
So I am sharing with you why I think it’s important to set strategic goals regardless of what time of year it is and how you can go about it in a simple way.
Let’s dive in!
We talk a lot about ‘goals’, especially at this time of the year, but often we are not clear on why we have chosen them, or how we will arrive at the outcome we want. Here are a few reasons why it’s important.
Firstly, one of the reasons for setting goals is that it’s impossible to be specific about why we are doing an activity, unless we have a strategic goal in mind. It’s also important that we have a strategic goal so we can measure the impact of our actions.
Secondly, If we don’t have a strategy for what we actually want to achieve with our communications, we will spend a lot of time and money without really understanding what we got out of it.
Thirdly, Having the right goal means we spend our budget and time effectively. It means we can brief the right content, and we can hire the right team to help. We will achieve our business goals because we thought about the steps we needed to take to get there.
Some examples of strategic business or project goals are increasing sales of a product or service, attracting and retaining more staff, increasing signups for a particular service or product, generating warm leads for business, generating traffic to a new website.
How do you implement this?
A strategic goal is the bigger picture: it’s what you want to accomplish over a period of time.
A tactical goal is the more immediate: it’s what you need to accomplish in a specific timeframe. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of work and forget why you’re doing it in the first place.
If you want to build a business, for example, you need a strategy. You need to know your market, your competitors, and your customers. You need to know how you’re going to reach them, and why they need to hear your message. Without a strategy, you’re just flailing around, working hard but achieving little.
Setting a clear, actionable goal for each project in communication planning is one way to do this When you set a goal for each project, it means you can be clear on exactly what you want to achieve and why you’re was doing it in the first place.
I’ve completed projects with strategic goals, and without them. By far, the most successful are the ones with a strategic goal, because everyone gets a result.
It doesn’t matter what size your business or team is, you can have a lot of impact with a bit of thought and a focus on what it is you’re trying to achieve.
In fact, you will likely be more productive by working towards a common strategic goal as it helps sort out the important tasks from those that are nice to have, or the once that distract us with their glittery newness.
I have taken this in to my communciation work and devleoped 7 clear steps that I use nad I will share with you today.
I call my seven steps to success, briefly they are;
Define your Purpose?
Set a Goal
Define your Audience
Create your Message
Develop your content Content,
Evaluate and Review
Reward yourself and celebrate your success
There is a kink in the show notes today about my seven steps if you want to know more about how they work and sketch out a roadmap for yourself, helping to refine your strategic goal.
I want you to walk through the seven steps. Did you go through all seven steps? Did you miss one out? Which one did you go to first? I’ll be really interested to hear about it.
What goal are you working towards and what do you need to do to achieve it? I’d love to know so DM me or contact me on email my contact details are in the show notes.