With Christmas just past and New Year’s Day closing quickly, you know what is waiting on you after the first of the year: new goals. The first of the year is all about making a commitment to doing better than you did the previous year. New Year’s resolutions are abounding in good intentions. Just try to get into a gym this time of year! It is wall-to-wall with sweaty people trying to reach the goal of getting healthier. Of course, by the end of January, most of those purposeful objectives will have been discarded.

Goals! We set them for our own well being and we set them for the advancement of our businesses. How are you going to reach the goals that have been set in your business during 2019? How do you make them something that is truly moving your business forward and not something that is quickly abandoned like a January 1st resolution on January 31st? It is relatively easy to state your goals. It is quite another thing altogether to achieve them. Here are some tips to reaching your goals for the coming year.

Write down your goals

Make a commitment to define your goals and to write them down. It is easy to forget a goal that is never written down, but much easier to achieve it if you are reminded of it on a frequent basis. Don’t just write it down, but put your goals in a place that you and others in your business can see them frequently.

Make marketing part of the solution process

Obviously, writing it down does not achieve it. For that you will need a strategic plan. In between stating your goals and reaching them are incremental steps. Make sure you are using marketing to take these steps. Nothing is achieved in business without marketing touching the process. Marketing is the discipline that communicates the most important parts of your business to people. Marketing is the vehicle used to get potential customers to give your products and services a look. Marketing is the area of expertise that monitors customer satisfaction and keeps them coming back for more. Your strategic plan needs to be filled with marketing actions that lead you to your goal like climbing a flight of stairs. One marketing action leads to another. For instance, if you have the goal of adding 25 percent more sales, marketing will help you identify potential customers, which leads to making them aware of your brand offerings. Marketing will then help make an offer to get them to buy from you, which leads to customer satisfaction and more sales. Marketing is there to make the incremental steps necessary to reach your sales goal.

Measure your success or regression

One of the most important, but most neglected pieces of reaching a goal is the measurement of how you are doing. If you are trying to lose weight, you will weigh in occasionally to see what kind of progress you are making. Likewise, you need to measure your marketing success. Before you implement each step of your marketing, figure out the best way to measure its success. After each piece of marketing, follow up and grade your marketing. This is really important, because if you are not getting the results you expected, you can make adjustments to your marketing plan. It is business insanity to keep pouring time and money into marketing methods that do not get you closer to achieving your goals. Be honest. Not every marketing method is effective on all groups of people at all times. Be smart, measure what you are marketing.

As a new year comes about, make sure you are taking strategic steps to achieve your goals. Make marketing a big part of the steps you take in reaching your business objectives. Use it to get the word out about your aspirations. Define your target market. Use marketing to put your best foot forward and sell your brand. Let it help you aim at the best way to sell to your customers. Make marketing work for you to achieve your goals.