Any serious business book will tell you that Goals are an essential part of any good business plan. The same is true when planning your online marketing strategy. Goals should be ambitious, realistic, inspiring and should represent where you want your business to be heading to. Goals should be SMART (learn more about SMART Goals), meaning they need to be specific, measurable and have a target date in which the need to be achieved.
print out 3 copies of your business and marketing goals: keep one beside your bed, one in your studio / computer workspace and the last one in your camera bag.
Your Business Goals are the aspirational signposts for what you want to achieve by running your photography business. Take a moment to write down two to four Business Goals. Your Business Goals could look something like:
- Earn a yearly salary of $68,000
- Increase my customer base to 250 by the end of the financial year
- Sell 500 canvas prints by June 30
- Convert 20% of my wedding clients to Child Portraiture within 12 months
- Increase the profitability of each wedding job by 25%
- Generate a passive income of $50,000 from selling my photos online
- Retire at 40 with $1,000,000 in the bank
Marketing Goals represent the methods by which you plan on achieving your Business Goals. Your Marketing Goals could look like:
- Create an email marketing database of 1000 opted in users in 3 months
- Have 10,000 unique website visitors by years-end and convert 10% into a qualified sales lead
- Appear on the first page of an organic Google search by 30th June for the keywords “Alabama Landscape Photography”
- Generate 50% of all future business from Word of Mouth
- Send a quarterly email newsletter with a 50% open rate and a 20% click through rate to my website
- Win 4 International Photography awards by 2010
Note that each goal is specific, is measurable and has a timeline in which the goal needs to be reached. Your goals are going to be unique to you so ensure your goals reflect your personal ambitions.
These goals will be the basis by which your success will be measured against. From now on, every decision you make about your photography website or marketing strategy needs to contribute to the achievement of these goals. These goals should be part of your daily focus. I don’t want to get too caught up in the motivational aspects of these goals as there are plenty of blogs, websites and books that cover these in much greater detail than I can. But as a suggestion, print out 3 copies of your business and marketing goals: keep one beside your bed, one in your studio / computer workspace and the last one in your camera bag.
Make sure your goals are audacious and a little bit scary. Do not start the next phases until you are totally inspired by your goals. Visit us at PhotoMerchant to get photography business online.
