People who make clear goals for themselves typically perform better than those who don’t. Applying this approach into business works the same. Prioritizing goals either in your professional or personal life makes a difference in the long run as you are only focusing on what matters most.

As the year comes to an end, planning your next business strategy begins. You want to ensure you’re making the right decisions, maintaining consistency, and meeting or exceeding each objective according to the key performance indicators you’ve identified in your strategy.

Why Does an Objective Matter?

As a professional, you want to make decisions that better your organization and ensure that you’re on a profitable path that is sustainable. Setting goals and objectives holds you and your team accountable because it measures your progress and provides insight on what is working and what isn’t.

An objective can take many forms such as driving velocity, increasing household penetration, or creating brand awareness, but it’s important to make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, and time bound. These types of objectives help maintain efficiency and consistency across your team.

When developing your marketing strategy for the new year, take a look at your past objectives and how you reached those goals. Using research data you’ve collected from previous campaigns, you can base your new objectives on different ways you want to improve.

Here are a few examples of effective goals to incorporate into your strategy:

• Attain 10,000 new followers on brand social platforms over a three-month period
• Grow household penetration rate by 5% in a one-year period
• Increase velocity for your product at Kroger by 15% over a two quarter period

Reviewing Your Strategy

Reviewing your marketing efforts and brand strategies is a good first step to developing your goals for the new year. You can review your plans however often you see fit but holding regular review sessions at the beginning of every quarter will help make key-decision making easier.

Look over milestones, benchmarks, and timelines to measure how you maintained success over the course of the year. If there are certain benchmarks you did not meet, find what was the cause and consider changing the objective to something more manageable for your brand. Once you establish what works for you and what doesn’t, it’s time to make changes to your plan.