Know Your Brand: Prioritised Goals

This is the last instalment in our ‘Know Your Brand’ series. So far we have explored how you can think about what key attributes define your brand and how they translate into a statement of intent for your organisation. You have then learnt how to create detailed and realistic customer profiles in order to better target the clients and customers you want to reach and keep, in order to generate leads and revenue.

Now our final article will look at how you can translate insights you may have garnered from the previous exercises into realistic and practical goals. We will explain a system where you can create a clear prioritised list of goals for how the organisation makes money, markets itself and creates systems and structures which make your processes more effective and streamlined. Alongside defining what the difficulties for each goal are and how desirable each is, you will also assign a realistic time frame for each of them.

Being able to explain why you have prioritised your short, mid and long term goals will mean you can create alignment amongst your key stakeholders within your company. Different areas of the business will naturally want to prioritise goals which they are more directly involved in. A marketing team for example may wish to focus on awareness, whilst the product team may wish to focus on efficiency. By breaking the goals down and setting clear priorities you can avoid conflicts and make a strong case for your decision making, especially if individuals from across your organisation are involved in the process of setting these goals.

When creating prioritised goals we suggest you focus on three main areas within your business:

1. Awareness Goals: Increasing the number of customers who know about your organisation.
2. Revenue Goals: Increasing your income.
3. Efficiency Goals: Streamlining and improving your organisational processes.

To begin with you should start by listing out any tasks you can undertake for each category below. We have suggested some possible goals and have given a more comprehensive description of each goal type, however it will very much depend on your business. 

Hopefully by working through the other exercises, practical tasks and ideas for improvements may have occurred to you already. Try to keep some focus on your statement of intent and customer profiles. Ask yourself: 

• Would customer profile [x] find this helpful?
• Does this sound like the company we are saying we are or someone else?

Awareness Goals

These are tasks which will create greater awareness of your brand, products and services. It will largely consist of communications, marketing and advertising across various platforms. Examples include:

• Your website
• Your Facebook Page
• Facebook Ads
• Google Ads
• Email marketing
• YouTube videos
• Business stationery
• Partnerships
• Affiliate programme

Revenue Goals

These are tasks that once completed will generate and grow revenue and are also called ‘revenue drivers’. They do not have to relate exclusively to a product or service but a wider variety of things such as: 

• Create new product
• Increase sales team
• Clarify value proposition
• Expand stores
• Stay open longer

Efficiency Goals

These are tasks that will increase the efficiency of your operations. These can relate to internal communications, tools and software as well as physical processes. Ultimately, anything which will help reduce time, cost and effort. These will again vary widely by what type of organisation you are, the industry you’re part of and the services you provide. Some examples include: 

• Sign-up for Google Apps
• Use Trello to track tasks
• Create style guides
• Develop newsletter templates
• Train your team in Agile
• Hire production-related resources

As you compile your lists of goals it is a good idea to label the time in which you feel they are realistically achievable:

• short term goals, achievable within 30 days or less
• medium term goals, achievable within 60 days or less
• long term goals, achievable within 90 days or less

Next, go through the goals, assigning them a priority score. Do this by working out how desirable each is from 1 to 10 (10 being most desirable), and how easy each is from 1 to 10 (10 being the easiest to to accomplish). Adding these scores together will give you a good indication as to the most desirable and achievable goals to focus on.

The result is a prioritised shortlist of achievable goals across each time span (short/mid/long). This means you are setting goals which can have both immediate impact, whilst not losing sight of longer term goals and the bigger picture.

That concludes our series on how to 'Know Your Brand'. If you enjoyed reading the series or feel like it could benefit someone you know then please feel free to share the articles with them.

If you are intrigued to know more we offer a range of workshops where you can work through guided exercises in more detail with you and your team.

We also offer group workshops alongside other business owners, giving you the opportunity to network and ideate together as well as work through the exercises with one of our branding team. You can find any upcoming workshop details on our Eventbrite page.

Or you may wish to consider one of our one on one business workshops. This is perfect for businesses who want to explore these branding exercises further entirely around their own context and stake holders. With all members of your team getting involved in the exercises, you will get more input creating better results. 

If this is something your would be interested in then please get in touch with Euan Lockwood to arrange a call. You can schedule a time through Calendly, email or call me on 0330 2233 182.