Planning Your 2021 1st Quarter Goals

In today’s blog I am going to be sharing tips with you why it is important to begin planning your 2021 1st quarter goals.

Within the beginning of the month you want to determine what goals that you want to accomplish and how you will go about executing on that plan so here is the first thing.

First Things First

What specific goal are you trying to reach?

Grow an email list by #
Increase Sales By $
Create A Podcast For
Build A Website For
Increase Social Media Following by #

Each specific goal that you are trying to reach has tasks that need to be performed in order to reach that goal. I always use the SMART goal acronym

S Specific
M Measurable
A Attainable
R Relevant
T Time-bound

This will guide you when planning out whether your goals are achievable so you’re not wasting time on something that is not going to produce any results.

What Do You Want To Accomplish?

When planning your first quarter goals, you must determine what goal/s do you need to accomplish to bring your business to the next phase. When starting a business from the ground floor the 1st goal is to bring awareness to what your business does and who you do it for. Taking time to put a plan in place is a great place to start for planning your business for growth.

Creating Awareness

When you are bringing a new product and service to the marketplace you will have to find an audience that will purchase your products and services, however if there is a market for your product or service that has already been proven, your goal is how your product or service will outperform your competition.

The beginning stage is to determine how to increase awareness to your target audience by choosing a goal that will bring you closer to your objectives.

If you want to increase in any of the following areas below you must determine by how much and choose a time period in which to accomplish that goal.

Email Marketing
Increase In Product Sales
Blogging
Podcasting
Video Content

Each of the above goals have certain tasks attached to them to reach the desired goal. In the beginning you want to remain focused on the tasks which will bring you closer to reach your 1st quarter goals.

This is where most entrepreneurs get bored and begin to develop the shiny object syndrome, trying to find a quick way to grow their business instead of sticking to their goals and staying consistent in their tasks.

You must treat your business like going to a 9-5 job, even if you are not working an entire day, you must create a schedule and stick to it, consistency will be key when reaching your 1st quarter goals for the New Year.

Goal Setting

If your goal is to increase sales then you have to have a product or service to offer, next you’re going to have to determine what is the dollar amount that you want to reach by the time period you set.

If you want to have 5k months then you’re going to have to create a product or multiple products, as well as have a marketing strategy in place to reach that goal. When you have a goal in place you are able to measure what components of it are working and what needs to be tweaked.

The problem that most entrepreneurs face in their business is they don’t access their data, they have no clue if their strategy is working or not.

How can you repeat a process if you are not sure how you got there? This is key to reach your business milestones in the allotted time-frame and if there are problems along the way, you can always adjust them.

If you have an online presence from the previous year, collect the data from your social media platforms and begin to process what posts had the most engagement.

What were the…

Comments
Questions
How many likes and shares

This will give you clues as to what content your followers are liking and what themes or topics that interest them. You want to now determine moving forward how you will take those posts and update them with new information.

Republish your posts that received positive feedback that helped or educated your followers in some way. There are many new emerging entrepreneurs on the scene and your content can assist them as well so don’t scrap those old posts just give them new life.

Starting Out

If you’re just starting out with your business your goal is to produce content that shows your audience that you are an expert in your niche.

You will have to create social media business accounts with Facebook and Instagram in order to have access to your data.

Determine what platform you will begin with, I suggest starting with one platform until you have mastered it, however if you can manage more than one platform go for it, just be sure to stay consistent on whatever platform you choose.

Whatever goal you choose to reach in your business you will have to create content around it.

Video
Podcast
PDF
Checklist
White Paper
Case Study
Webinar
Challenge
E-book

The list goes on to what type of content you will provide to educate your audience on how you help solve their problem. Not all content is about solving a problem, your content can be to entertain.

The next step is to determine what tasks you need to implement to reach the goal/s you’ve written. Whatever the goal that you want to reach you will have to start with creating content to meet that goal.

If you are just starting out you will have to build your content library and your content should be geared toward how it will help your followers.

Content is around you everywhere and as a consumer you consume content that is relevant to the following list below.

Content that entertains you
Content that educates you
Content that solves a problem
Content that relaxes you
Content that inspires you

Your goal as an entrepreneur is to create the content that your followers love to consume.

Setting Up Processes

When creating content you want to have systems in place that will equip you to streamline the process, such as…

Content Calendar
Email Autoresponder (Mailchimp, Getresponse, Mailerlite)
Promotional Calendar
CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)

You may have to approach your business in the first 3-5 yrs as a job until the business becomes profitable where you can bring on a VA or a team, however you can find entrepreneurs who you can collaborate with to bring your business before another audiences.

My goal is to make you aware that you have to do the work, it’s called doing your due diligence until you build the momentum in your business to scale it. Please feel free to leave any questions in the comments.