Every smart business owner knows that it’s not enough to have a brand. You need to identify what goals you want your brand to achieve. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, especially when you are unsure how to begin. Brand and development goal setting helps steer businesses in the right direction towards success. The first step is to take some time and think about what message you want your brand to align with, then create actions that’ll enable you to pass this message. On that note, here are our five tips to help you set your brand’s business and development goals to make this more digestible.
1. Create an emotional connection.
If there’s anything you should know in business is that there’s no actual monopoly. There will always be someone out there who’s doing something similar to what you have to offer, and perhaps, they’re better at it. Thanks to our interaction with technology, consumers are more aware of the choices and power they hold over brands. Consumers can now pick and choose from a sea of options what product or service they want. What this means to you as a producer is that product satisfaction isn’t sufficient if you want your brand to grow. You’ll need to earn the trust of customers by meeting them on a personal level.
What’s more, you need to prioritize aligning your brand goals with the values of your target audience. For instance, if you’re trying to attract valuable customers like Malliha Wilson, who’s an alum of McGill University and former assistant deputy attorney general to the Ontario government, you can’t expect her to patronize a brand that doesn’t care about human rights or any of her values. Malliha is a person who has a passion for international human rights and indigenous and labor law. No doubt, when working with someone like her, she’ll appreciate you building an emotional connection.
You see, people want a brand that adds meaning to their lives. So, create a goal that prioritizes customer experience over transactions using trust, respect, and consistency to build genuine connections.
2. Use values to stand out.
With hundreds of new businesses springing up in the United States alone every year, it’s safe to say that the world isn’t short of brands in any way. This means you’re in constant competition with other brands, as we have already identified in the previous point. While an emotional will help you build customer loyalty, you’ll need to provide value to attract potential customers.
Have an understanding of your target audience and use this knowledge to provide value. A good example is operating a training and consultation service that offers American sign language (ASL) interpreters for deaf or hard of hearing clients. This will go a long way to make your business have a unique feel and stand out from the sea of other consultation businesses.
This could mean having an ASL interpreter at every session or on standby when needed. Better still, you can get video remote interpreting services (VRI) for your online sessions. It’s easy to get lost amongst other brands if you don’t set goals that give your business an upper edge over other companies. Therefore, always aim to use the value you offer to stand out.
3. Be realistic.
One of the essential criteria of a good goal is that it ought to be realistic. Sure, a goal should be challenging, but it should be realistic and achievable as well. For instance, if you’re a small dispensary business struggling with working capital but want to maintain a quality brand standard, you can opt for 98mm pre roll tubes that are child-resistant.
This is a great way to avoid ruining your cash flow by using an expensive joint tube for packaging. However, you’re still able to pay attention to what you offer by providing standard value. Setting high expectations is great, but it can lead to discouragement and total brand destruction when you can’t keep up.
For example, let’s consider an alternative scenario in which you chose to continue with superior packaging but can’t maintain it in the long run. Eventually, you’re left with two options: either cease production or settle for substandard packaging to reduce cost. Both of these options will affect your consistency and influence customers’ trust in your brand.
4. Solicit team input.
So you have a clear set of brand goals that you want to achieve. You’ll need to take it a step further by asking for your team’s input. For a business and development to be executed successfully, you must get your employees involved. They need to know what these company goals are and ask for their inputs on how they can be achieved. When you involve employees in business decisions like this, they feel more motivated to work. This is better than issuing a top-down initiative as it allows them to take ownership of the set goals. An efficient way to ensure all team members are on the same page is by using OKR training.
OKR refers to the use of objectives and key results for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. So, when you use OKR tools and principles, you create room for your business to have a common vocabulary and workflow for teams to articulate and align their objectives, create measurable goals and learn with data over time. For instance, your objective is to promote brand awareness, get the team members to contribute four to six specific and measurable ways to achieve this goal. Set the best possible outcome and make sure they’re quantifiable in numbers and not by actions or opinions.
5. Be focused and consistent.
Similar to using OKR to solicit team input and achieve your brand’s business and development goals, another important tip is to be focused and consistent. It’s easy to lose focus in the chaotic world of branding if you’re not sure of what you want. Therefore, this may be the most important point of all.
Once you have an objective for your brand, make sure it is the center of your decisions. Refer to it when creating marketing strategies, product creation, customer service policies, etc. This allows you to maintain consistency across all your company affairs. Remember, customers value consistency, and it encourages customer loyalty which, in turn, leads to business growth.
