Now that you know end goal for 2015 you need to quantify it. This means coming up with a goal number for your 2015 marketing plan. This might be hard for some people so here’s a woo woo way to make it easier. (Stop wrinkling your nose and read on my friends. I led a team that built a $25 million dollar business in five years. You can’t do that without a bit of woo woo. By the way, to all my former employees at Shamrock for whom this was probably an incredibly painful experience but you stuck with me, thanks and I’m sorry.)
Back to our regularly scheduled programming. I want to remind you that setting goals is part of the personal philosophy by which you run your business. Some people may have had a hard year in 2014 and want to sandbag it for 2015. This is okay! Maybe you’ve had some setbacks and just staying even would be fantastic. Maybe you’ve redirected your brand or company and you know you’ll sell less in 2015. This is okay too.
On the flip side, if you’re an aggressive personality, you might always choose stretch goals. Or perhaps you’re a strong believer that “thought transcends matter” and you think whatever you set out there you’ll manifest.
Now, if you’ve chosen a goal that contributes to your end goal, you’d better know what percentage turns into actual sales. If you don’t know this, you might not want to use that goal as a contributing factor, as you don’t know enough about it. Think on that. If you do know, then just do the math to quantify your goal.
Once you understand how YOU PERSONALLY set goals, it’s easy to come up with a number. You can simply use a percentage on top of 2014, too. 10% for a larger company is great. Doubling if you’re just gaining traction is good as well. Feel free to email me, tweet me or comment below if you’re struggling with this. If this is really hard, just stick something on there. You can change it later after you’ve moved further on in the plan. Please don’t ruminate on this for more than 15 minutes. And if you leave it now, a magic number may pop into your head later in the day!
As a side note, in more sophisticated marketing plans you would choose objectives that contribute to your end goal, and set both quantifiable and qualitative goals for those objectives. We’ll be talking about setting those kinds of goals in January, so stay tuned. For now, you’re doing this because a marketing plan has been tough to get going. So stick with a simple goal for now.
