How often do you reflect on your business? Every month I evaluate how my business goals are tracking. It’s good to look at the highs and lows of business. I find it is a great opportunity to celebrate wins and gather learnings on how I can do better. This process keeps me focused, more productive, with the end goal of being more successful.
As most of you know who know me well and have read my blog, I’m pretty passionate about SMART goals. After all, if you don’t have a specific goal, with a specific time frame in mind that you can measure and connect with, then why are you in business?
There are many ways you can reflect and review your business progress.
Here’s my checklist for maximum business impact.
1. Set
Set your goals. How will you know if you are successful or not if you haven’t defined what successful is? Our personal measures of success change at different times in our lives, and so do our professional ones at different stages of our business growth. Setting specific targets also provides a framework for evaluation. We can only determine our progress if we know what we working towards.
Hot Tip – Make sure you can measure your success with digital tools like insights and analytics.
2. Track
Have analytics installed on your website. There’s no reason for you to not have this. There are a few programs available, however you still can’t go past Google Analytics for value. The data provided here will give you so much to measure your goals with. Everything from how many people are visiting your website, from what location, what device and how long they are staying on your website and more.
3. Measure
Regularly measure how your goals are progressing. I check my analytics and insights depending on the goal at least weekly. This may be through Facebook Insights, logging into my website traffic data, or reviewing the engagement analytics on a specific social media or blog post.
4. Review
Data and results are not useful unless you learn from them. Review your results in context of your goals. This not only helps with focus, it keeps you on track too. Google Analytics also allows you to set up custom reports based on your preset goals. Making the most of this function will also save you time.
5. Adjust
Based on reviewing your results in line with your goals, to stay on track, don’t be afraid to adjust what you are doing. Sometimes the smallest of adjustments can significantly improve your results. Research and experiment with different variables. This may include things such as the times and frequency of your social media posts, the topics and media type of your content, or how you connect with people online after networking events.
Dot for the day: Have you set your SMART goals yet? Don’t delay if you want to work smarter to achieve your goals.
If you’re not sure where to start, that’s what I’m here for. I look forward to having a chat with you.
