Episode 77: Small Business Tips: Why You Need To Set Goals For Every Quarter of the Year
In this quick tip episode, Fiona reminds small business owners why it’s important to set goals every quarter - whether it’s reading a book to educate ourselves or make more money through increasing your online conversion rate. Listen now to inspire you to set sub-goals for each of your main yearly goals to make 2021 a better year for your business.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Making Goals For Every Quarter
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 77 of My Daily Business Coach podcast.
So today you are listening to a quick tip episode. These come out every single week and I also have two other types of episodes, a longer coaching episode and a longer interview with a small business owner. So if you're not already, make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss out on these quick tip episodes as well as the longer ones. All right.
So let's get stuck into today's quick tip and find out what it is and how it can help you in your business today. If you are listening to this in real time, it is Tuesday, the 2nd of March, and that means that we have, you know, 28 days roughly left of the first quarter of 2021 and 2020 for many businesses was just a shambles.
Let's be honest, 2021 for some businesses is still really, really tough. But for other businesses they are kind of finding their feet again and they're getting back on track now. I think I felt this, I felt a lot of my clients felt like this January was a bit of a like, "oh, just leave me alone" kind of attitude towards business and even the best-laid plans of people kind of getting in. And, yeah, I'm really going to map out this next year what kind of a little frazzled, just as almost like a hangover from 2020. But I wanted to come on today's quick tip episode and sort of make you think about, OK, this first quarter of the of which we actually have 29 days left. I was making a mistake. It's the second of March, 31 days in March. So the 29 days left of the first quarter of 2021. And I wanted you to really have a think about what did you want to achieve or what do you want to achieve this year in 2021 as a whole. I often ask my clients to just think of three things. Not like twenty, not five, just three things. So if you can think of those three things, take one of them and consider what could you possibly work on between now and the end of March. 2021 that will help you achieve that one goal by the end of the year.
So say for instance, your goal is to make more money from your online store. One of those kind of subgoals of that or one area or metric that you might look at is your conversion rate. So there's an acronym CRO, which is conversion rate optimisation. And so you might think as a business, if we could get to the end of 2021 and have a higher conversion rate, we'd be making more money. Even if our audience didn't really change, if we had the same amount of people coming, if I converted at a higher rate, money technically should come in to be more for the business. Now, this is just imagining that your price points don't change and the stock levels are good.
But so if you are thinking, "OK, that one goal was to make a bit more money this year from the e-commerce site, the conversion rate is part of that goal. So what could I do between now and the end of March to help with that?".
And so you might have things like if you don't already know your conversion rate, setting a benchmark, what is the conversion rate right now? What has it been historically? Does it go up and down throughout the year? And that might be something that you can look back on your analytics or whatever platform you're using and just look at a custom data range or a date range for the last calendar year or the last financial year and have a think about, OK, well, what's an average benchmark conversion rate that we could set and then consider? How much higher do we want that to go? Obviously, people would love it to go right up to the sky, but let's be realistic and set a benchmark first and then set a goal for that benchmark. So if your conversion rate now is 1.6%, you might decide I'd actually love it to get to 2 or even 2.3%. And let's see how we could manipulate things or tweak things or change our calls to action test buttons, test different imagery, test video content, and see if we can get that conversion rate higher.
Maybe it's that the brand promise is not being delivered when people come to your e-commerce site from, say, social media or another channel. So that's what I'd love you to think about. What were the three things you wanted to achieve in 2021?
Take one of those and just consider what's one small step that I can make between now and the end of this month so that I am more inclined to achieve that goal by the end of the year. And it could just be around education. It could be it was a big thing for us. Right. I'm going to educate myself on that. I'm going to watch some videos. I'm going to download some freebies or checklists, or I'm going to go and get a book out of the library and read about it, although I think it's always changing, would probably not suggest going and reading a book unless you've read your book.
But what can you do? What small thing? Sometimes we can look at the whole year and we just focus on that end goal and we don't break it down into small enough steps for us to think, well, what's what can I do today? What can I do this week? What small thing could I do to make it more likely that I'm going to hit that goal at the end of 2021?
So that is it. The quick tip episode for today. Very quick indeed. But really, we don't stop to think about this stuff enough. So that is my tip. If you are traveling, if you're at the gym, if you're on a walk and you want to come back to this and really think about, "OK, what's the process that she said", again, you can find the full transcript of this episode over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/77.
All right. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this useful, I would love it if you subscribe so you don't miss out on any other podcast episodes. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
