Defining Goals for Your Website

Runner finishing the boston marathon

Defining goals for your website is the key starting point of your activities that may strongly influence the success probability of your online business.

In facts, it’s only after this process of goals definition that we can:

  • design and develop a website that works
  • create a logical and structured working plan
  • understand if we are going in the right direction or not

Goals are useful if they are: not too many, clear, quantitative, measurable and with a deadline assigned.

Setting quantitative goals it’s not easy, especially if we are just starting-up and we don’t have a past experience concerning the results we may achieve.

However, it’s very important to attempt estimating which business results could be obtained by our activity within a certain time span, even if our estimate it’s not fully accurate at the beginning: we’ll be able to refine it when we’ll have more data available.

Suppose that our website is an online store specialized in selling running shoes.

Based on our online market research (in future posts we will see how to do it), we define our goals as follows:

  1. 30.000 sales in 1 year
  2. 1.000 contacts of potential customers in 1 year

Great! These goals are a few, clear, quantitative, measurable and have a deadline assigned! 🙂

Now, our next step is to define a strategy that will allow us to reach these goals. Defining a strategy translates in listing several activities that need to be carried out. For any online business, these activities will likely include:

  • website optimization (SEO, landing page optimization, etc.)
  • online advertising (e.g. Google AdWords)
  • social network marketing (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
  • email marketing
  • off-line promotional activities (flyers, radio & tv commercials, etc.)

Moreover, when the business is running, we’ll have to constantly check the performance of our activities and take the necessary corrective actions in order to make the online business capable of reaching our goals within the deadline.

Therefore, once our strategy is in place and all activities are listed and scheduled, it is crucial to identify some measurable parameters that will reflect the status of our online business performance: the Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. We will talk about KPIs in the next post.

Checklist:

  • have you estimated reasonable business results that can achieve with your online activity, within a certain time span?
  • based on this estimate, have you defined some clear, quantitative, measurable goals and have you assigned a deadline?
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