Fine-Tuning Your Goals

You can use sales funnel data to fine-tune your goals (see Figure 16-1). Part of fine-tuning your goals involves honing them down until they transition from hopes to milestones. Here are a few examples of things people mistake for goals:

Want to make more money. This is a hope and a dream and a great aspiration, but it isn’t a goal. It isn’t specific enough to be a goal.

Want more customers. This one still isn’t specific enough, though it’s a better idea than “make more money.” It’s on its way to being more concrete and measurable.

Want more brand awareness. This one could be measured if it were only more specific.

Want to become a thought leader. Another good idea, but it’s not quite specific enough in the long run.

How can you make these hopes and dreams into real goals? The first step is to make them specific — laser-point specific.

Here are some examples of specific goals that you can then turn into marketing campaigns and measurable metrics:

Increase restaurant bookings by ten people per night in a three-month period. This goal is solid because it allows you to take a baseline measurement of how many bookings you have each night now and build from there.

Obtain eight more sales leads per week through your website.

Convert 5 percent of new website visitors to leads or sales per month in the first three months.

Have 50 more people sign up for your newsletter or mailing list each month through your AdWords campaign.

Design a display ad campaign in AdWords for a class with a goal to sell out the available seats or webinar slots.

Create three new blog posts a week and have a goal of getting all new posts spontaneously shared on Google+ and Facebook within minutes of posting them. Track their reach. Have a secondary goal of broadening the reach from 10 views per post to 500 views per post within the first month.

Get interviewed by two national publications within six months based on your demonstrated authority on a topic through your blog posts and other content-like videos.

As you can see, even from the few examples, it’s not that you don’t want to make money, get more customers, or have more brand awareness. It’s that you need specific, incremental, measurable goals to achieve these things.