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What Sort of New Year Resolutions, Goals, or Objectives Are Needed In Business? »

Goal!Firstly, a business should have a set of strategic goals.

Yes, like you I’ve seen businesses doing very well with no strategic goals. The problem people often overlook is that that business could be doing twice, three times as well. It could be making substantially more profit whilst delivering a fantastic service. If only the business leaders had thought to set strategic goals.

Strategic Goals For All?

Sometimes it’s more important to just get into business and start making money in an industry you know, you’ve researched or you’ve bought experts in. So there’s no need to feel guilty that you had no strategic goals to begin your business.

Passion begins business, strategy makes profit from it

However, once you’ve into your business stop for a little while and create a strategic plan.

Your New Year’s Resolutions

Make it your New Year’s Resolution to create a set of strategic business goals. Goals that look to incrementally improve your customer’s experience, improve your service, improve your business.

Strategic goals can also make a massive change to your business.

Use Feedback As  Food To Create Strategic Goals

You’ve been operating for a while. So you’ll have had customer feedback on what you offer them. And if you don’t make sure you get some. Feedback is the lifeblood of business, it helps you monitor your delivery against your strategic goals. And it can help you decide some of your strategic goals.

Be wary of using feedback as the only tool for choosing goals. Because you may have to aim for goals that create problems initially or make what you sell cost more. And of course most customers prefer the status quo. Or preferably cheaper!

What Is A Strategic Goal vs A Tactical Goal?

The best way to look at strategy vs tactics is to use an example.

Say you and your partner are keen ice dancers and want to become the best in the world.

Tactics would include continually practicing your moves with your coach. Strategy would ask whether you have the best coach to teach you.

In business a tactic is using advertising to put across your message. Strategy is asking whether the prospects you want to attract use the medium you’re advertising through.

How To Begin Strategic Goal Planning

Start with where you want to end up! Do you want to be the biggest company in your industry? Do you want to serve your customers in a way that no other business does?

Whatever it is note it down and then continue to ask yourself questions about how you can achieve the ultimate goals through a series of strategic goals.

  

  


Brand Hijacking - Does it Matter? »

Branding IronArmando Alves show an example of brand hijacking by Twitter users. The users were fans of the AMC Series “Mad Men” about advertising agencies in the 1960’s. They set-up the character names on Twitter and simply extended by Twittering as though they were the cast. 

And of course I just had to follow the David Ogilvy character!

There have been other cases of brand hijacking, fans writing further stories about Star Wars for example. And the Internet has made it easy to share your own stories based around other famous characters.

However, as I’ve said before the brand becomes what your fans/users/customers/clients want it to be. So you need to think long and hard before coming down on anyone who does "hijack" your brand. Because they may enhance it for you and even take it in new directions you weren’t even aware of.

And of course brand hijacking does matter, so it’s important that you keep abreast of new ways of working that could affect your business.

Currently it’s social media and Twitter. So if you’re in Film, TV or you’re writing books you need to reserve your names in Twitter before someone else uses them.

Registering Your Twitter Name

And you need to do it quick because people are registering a lot of different names, I suspect in the hope that they become valuable in the same way domain names have!

Names like Winston Churchill, Leonardo Da Vinci, Washington, Manchester even a Motorway (the M62) and try registering CarInsurance - yes, they’re all gone already.

There appear to be no country names available…

So whether Social media is here to stay or vanishes forever in a year’s time it’s important that you put a little effort into registering the names you want on Twitter (and on the other social media sites too).

Get my Free Guide to Setting up and using Twitter in business (before I revise it and start selling it!)

  

  

  


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