Setting and creating business goals when you start an online business helps to create focus for your online business. They also allow you to establish the critical strategies and actions needed to achieve your goals.
Having clear, well-defined online business goals can also:
- help your business grow
- clarify your sales and marketing objectives
- clearly define the direction your business is heading in.
When you are just getting started, business goal setting is especially important. Once you have started your online business, checking back in on your business goals regularly allows you to:
- consider whether you are on track to achieving them
- look at what needs improving to meet your goals, and also
- whether your goals need revising.
Creating SMART Goals for your online business
SMART goals are commonly used. They mean your business goals are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Targeted
You can learn more about setting SMART goals for your online business here.
A SMART Goal examples could be: Achieve a net profit of $2000 per month in the first year of business (by December 2020).
Instead of simply ‘I want to grow my business to achieve a profit’.
By including a specific, measurable, achievable and relistic target you create a much ore focused goal that clearly states what you plan to achieve.
Creating a business plan to set your business goals
If you take the important step of writing a business plan, your business goals are created as part of that document.
Goal writing does not have to be overly complicated, neither does creating a business plan – however they can make a very big difference to the overall success of your online business. They help you to understand the actions needed to achieve your business goals and set out the strategies, tools and tactics you will use.
For example – we discuss in How to increase online sales in your business that one of the 3 ways to increase sales is to increase the number of sales made by existing customers. An important aspect of achieving repeat sales from customers is that hey have a positive experience the first time! So, improving or maintaining overall customer satisfaction may be one of your business goals, that ultimately helps you to achieve your profit goals.
One method of writing business plans that has been really popular in recent times is the Lean Business Plan which is a business plan on a page. You may want more detail than that, if so there are many great free resources available for creating a business plan.
An online business has many similarities with a traditional business and having a budget, sales and marketing plan and business plan are three things that are essential. Together these documents will give you your sales targets, marketing objectives and business goals – along with the budget that will help you to achieve them without going broke in the process!
Whether your end goal is to sell a business and start the next one, or to build a business and team that scales and grows over time and becomes your full time living, these strategic documents are important guides on your path to business success.