What are you doing online?
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Or could you be doing something else with your time?
Now before you comment “well everyone expects me to be there”, I want you to really think about the answer to that question.
If you can’t quickly tell me that, something could very well be amiss and maybe you should be doing something else with your time. Can you tell me what the purpose of your website is? Can you share the purpose of your social media presence?
Everything we do online needs to be in alignment with our Business goals. Everything.
It is the fundamental plank of what I teach inside the Digital Ascent - my main training program at summit school that is focussed on Digital Strategy.
But before we start doing any strategy work at all, I ask students to define their business goals for me. We need to be clear on what our business goals actually are before we can start diving in and trying to do anything in the digital space.
Once we can list out our business goals, we can then think about what kinds of digital activities are going to help us achieve them. These steps will become our Digital Goals.
In my business I have a series of goals for this financial year. 2 that immediately spring to mind are.
- Develop a brand footprint within my target markets
- Sell XXX number of courses
So if I was to then think, how might I achieve those goals, I can look at all manner of digital activities that will help me achieve these wider business goals.
I might have a digital goals like these
- Grow my Instagram following to be 20000 ( because this is part of my plan to be highly visible in my target space
- Grow my website traffic by 300% - again this helps to cement my brand footprint
- Develop a series of short videos that provide quick tips for each of my courses. This content marketing goal, is going to help me sell more courses as people will know about them and come to know more about me.
- Grow my email marketing list to be in excess of 5000 contacts. I would then have a series of digital activities that would help do this ( webinars, downloads, social media signup ads etc)
I am sure you can see that when we start with say just 2 key business goals, that our digital goals, might also start off simple (like grow our email list to be xxx for example) but these are then broken down into tasks or activities that contribute to these overall goals.
I ask you this question again.
What are you doing online? Or could you be doing something else with your time?
Do you now see that you perhaps you have lots of things you should be doing, but perhaps you need to plan them out better or simply just define them.
People can sometimes struggle to go from an overarching business goal to see the connection with digital goals. Often this can be because of a mindset that sees digital from the perspective of say social only, or I need a website because everyone has one. They have not quite made the connection that these items are just more tools at their disposal to achieve their business goals and dreams.
Digital tools and tactics are some of the most cost effective and sales effective conversion methods you have at your fingertips. Often though, people don’t see them like that or are unsure of how they use them effectively.
The biggest single driver of success that I see with small business owners & entrepreneurs like you however is the magic of writing down their business goals first - then writing down a series of digital goals ( activities just like I have listed above) to help them achieve those business dreams.
When they can see exactly where tasks like “send out an email newsletter” fit as part of our overall goal of selling more courses, it takes on more meaning. We then can create posts with more purpose inside our Social Media channels that will enable us to reach more of our target customers.
I particularly love this quote from David Amerland
“What we learn from behaviour economics is that the moment a metric is created it generates an incentive for people to pursue it.”
Magic happens when we write down our goals or even just define them in a meaningful & concrete way, like saying them out loud to others, or posting them online somewhere.
So tell me again, what are you doing online?
