The Most Common Mistakes That Keep Us From Reaching Business Goals

The 2 Most Common Mistakes That Keep Us from Reaching Business Goals

MISTAKE 1: NOT BEING FULLY COMMITTED TO YOUR GOALS.

The number one reason you're not reaching your goals is because you have yet to fully commit to reaching them. They look cute in your notebook, but you're not really about this life. The truth is, you're letting self-doubt and fear stop you from trying. Because when you really try, failing feels like it will be the end of the world. But it's not. You have to want it more than you're afraid of it. Your lack of conviction is causing you to leave goals unattained, because you're constantly starting over or never start at all. Shift your mindset to a growth mindset and be open to doing what it takes to reach the level you aspire to be at.

MISTAKE 2: YOU AREN'T TRACKING THE RIGHT METRICS.

You haven't reached your business goals because you've been tracking the wrong things. You have let yourself get consumed by insignificant vanity metrics like followers, pageviews, time on site, and likes. Why don't these really matter? Because vanity metrics can easily be manipulated, and they don't help us make business decisions. The metrics you need to track are the ones that indicate the health of your business.

You should know some key things such as:

• The conversion rates for your products, services and funnels
• The cost of acquiring a customer
• The referral source that drives the most traffic
• The channel that drives the most sales
• The channel that is most engaging for your audience
• Your best performing content

You might be like: "Allllllllright Emm, chill out. You lost me at customer acquisition channel." My bad. I get carried away with this stuff. As a digital marketer, my job is to connect these dots for the brands that I work for, and I've transferred that over into small businesses. Just because you don't run a multi-million-dollar company (yet), doesn't mean you shouldn't apply the same practices. I want you to learn how to use your data to make better decisions in your business. But first, you need to get organized, so you can actually find this data and have the mental capacity to process it all.

How You Can Properly Set Business Goals

First things first, you must stop everything that you're doing. You been doing too much, and you need to take a seat. Yes, you need to take a huge step back, so that you can make a comeback. To get organized in my business, I take December off every single year. I don't take on new clients, projects, or create new content for 60 days. I create my marketing plan for the following year and take time to dive into the metrics of my business. We spend so much time consuming information and trying new strategies, that we overlook the best resource that we have: our existing data.

You need to break down those business goals into monthly and weekly milestones. Those bite-sized, short-term goals are what hold you accountable and allow you to assess if you're on track.

How to Set a Monthly Business Goal

1. Decide what you want to accomplish for the year and why. How much money you want to make, how much merchandise you want to sell, how many people do you want in your class, etc.
2. Divide your goal number by 12. That's your monthly goal. If you want your weekly goal, divide your monthly goal by 4.
3. Calculate your conversion rate by dividing your pageviews by the number of sales you had.
4. Take your monthly or weekly goal and divide it by your conversion rate. This will help you identify the amount of pageviews you will need to reach your goals.
5. Break your goals down into tasks. How are you going to achieve your goal every week/month?
6. Have an accountability system. How are you going to assess if you're on track?

It may be overwhelming to take this all in, but understand that learning how to set up realistic goals and attacking them will help you finally check off some items on your "Goals" list.