Business Goals – How to Set Them

What are business goals?

In other words, they are the benefits a business gains by undertaking planned, usually long-term, activities. For example, a company’s goal may be to increase sales, improve its website’s search visibility or build a stronger brand image.

What are business goals used for?

They are important for many reasons. Planning marketing activities makes it possible to define precisely which actions will deliver business benefits while keeping investment to a minimum. This, in turn, helps achieve the desired results at the lowest possible cost, saving time, effort and money.

Let us now look at how to formulate business goals correctly.

How do you set business goals?

This is the simplest part, as the answer often becomes apparent when you identify and address the weaknesses that need to be eliminated to improve the business’s performance.

It sounds incredibly simple, but difficulties arise when we ask: “HOW can we achieve the goal we have set?”. When answering this question, we need to consider a range of variables that will ultimately shape the initiatives we undertake.

In the simplest terms, you need to consider both the company’s internal capabilities and external market requirements. The former include factors such as the investment budget, while the latter include competitors’ activities and the specific characteristics of the industry.

What can a company’s objectives be?

In essence, any business benefit can become a target. The most common marketing goals for a company include:

• increasing revenue, sales or profits,
• building an expert image,
• reducing production costs,
• reaching a larger audience with the offer,
• improving conversion rates,
• increasing brand awareness.

It is worth noting that broad goals are achieved through several smaller ones. For example, effective sales are not possible if a company fails to build a strong image or create an attractive offer. For this reason, defining goals and the conditions required to achieve them is far more complex than simply imagining a general outcome such as “I want to earn twice as much”. Let us therefore look at how to develop such a plan in practice.

Business goals – examples

We will present two scenarios to show that business goals can be defined and pursued in different ways, depending on the specific situation.

Example 1 – e-commerce

The owner of an online shop wants to make better use of the traffic to the website in order to improve the performance of the offer. To do this, they plan to increase the conversion rate by encouraging more visitors to complete their purchases. Several options are available, including:

• a new visual design for the shop,
• simplifying the category structure,
• refreshing the product descriptions,
• speeding up the website,
• adding higher-quality images,
• creating discounts and promotional codes.

In this case, the business goal is clearly defined, but there are many possible paths to achieving it. It is easy to see that choosing the best one depends on numerous factors, which is why the methods used should always be matched to the company’s specific circumstances.

For example, the shop owner may opt for a new visual design if the website has not been updated in this respect for several years. However, if the design was refreshed a year ago but the sales copy was not, the focus should shift to creating new product descriptions, and so on. In short, much depends on the current condition of the online shop, as marketing activities should primarily address its weakest points.

Example 2 – plumbing services

Michael is a local plumber who would like to increase the number of repair jobs he receives in order to earn more. His business goal is therefore to attract more customers – what options does he have? The simplest would be to go from house to house breaking taps and then repairing them (we apologise, but the joke was too tempting).

Returning to the serious discussion, Michael correctly recognises that people look for these services in specific situations, such as plumbing emergencies or installation work. His potential customers are therefore only a fraction of the population, and that group is constantly changing. This means that the audience is difficult to define precisely, so broad advertising will not reach people who have a genuine need for these services.

Michael therefore rules out options such as leaflets, advertising banners and other forms of outbound marketing. Instead, he considers methods that will make his services easier to find when they are needed. His options include:

• paid Google Ads campaigns,
• search engine optimisation,
• NAP listings,
• advertising on trade and tradespeople portals.

Let us examine the possibilities offered by these solutions. By choosing Google Ads, Michael can display his website whenever someone searches for “Plumber + [name of his town]”. He can also use copywriting services to publish an article titled “How to fix a dripping tap”. If the article achieves a high position in the search results, anyone who may be having problems with a tap will find his website after entering that keyword (and he will not have to spend a single penny on each visit!).

In summary, because of the nature of his services, Michael uses the potential of inbound marketing to promote them effectively to people who are actively looking for plumbing assistance. In this way, he achieves his business goal of attracting more customers.