Setting your goals to grow audiences

Setting your goals to grow audiences

How do you manage your creative talent? OR, does your creative talent manage you? How confident are you that the individuals in your team know the end goals your business needs them to be aiming for?

For people working in smaller teams much of the direction can be detected from what the boss appears to prioritise. Some of the time this can work but it doesn’t help drive high performance.
In addition this clumsy approach certainly won’t stack up if your business is expanding… taking the boss away and the direction with him or her.

The degree to which each member of the team understands the goals is the degree to which the team will achieve those goals, and within an agreed deadline.

Another point to ask is, when these goals are reached, what’s next?

After working with creatives and executives who lead content and programming teams, the most successful are very clear on what it is they are going to achieve and by when. The best can vocalise with ease too.

The Goal setting process

Let’s use a creative team who are responsible for audiences/consumers, as an example of how you can approach setting easily understood goals. Let’s assume your company’s over arching goals are about growing audiences/consumers and growing revenues.

Areas of Focus

Facilitate a discussion about the areas you/the team/the organisation need to focus upon. Ask yourself questions about what is currently working or not. Usually it’s a discussion on what needs fixing.

Prioritise your list into a number of focus areas, which could look like this:
– Audience profile
– Grow digital revenues
– Inventory management is loose
– Social media platforms
– Fixing staff churn in sales

Next, write into a statement.

Once you have agreed the areas of focus for the next 12 months then it’s time to put each of them into a statement that’s clear and easy to understand. The acid test is can you communicate the statements and does every member of the team understand what is to be achieved?
As an example: Audience profile becomes the goal – This year we will focus on growing our younger audiences.

Do the S.M.A.R.T test

Is “This year we will focus on growing our younger audiences” SMART?

The questions to help you are, be:
Specific – When you are say “younger” what specific age or demographic profile do you mean? What does young mean? You have to be more specific.

Measureable – When you say “grow” what measures will you ascribe. From xxx 000s or % to 000s or %.

Attainable – Is this achievable within the resources available? Or better still what resources do we need to have, can we get them!? Then ask how achievable is it. If it’s unclear or not achieveable, work out what needs adjusting, the goals, the measures or the timescale?

Relevant – Is this really relevant to our current business? Is this goal results-orientated to our organisation… is it the right thing to do now?

Timely – Is it clear when this goal needs to be achieved? By when?

‘In order to… we must……’

Once you have a smart goal then it’s the task of communicating and testing it with the team.

Work with the team (or individual) to determine what needs to be done to achieve each goal. Ask the question “…In order to achieve this goal we must…” List the areas of focus and turn them into sub-objectives – in short repeat the process.

Manage Performance

Assign the activities, then set your work in progress (WiP) meetings to manage activities and tasks required to achieve your business goals. A WiP meeting that focuses on what it is that needs to be achieved (the goals!) is an effective meeting.

In other articles I have talked about appraisal systems where at the heart of great performance management and coaching are clear goals.

A final tip, the simplest was to test your goals is to be sure you can say yes or no.

Yes we have achieved this goal or no we haven’t – and there can be no argument either way.

Can you articulate your goals for the year? If you’d like a hand walking through these steps, drop me line or call me.