You will be able to break a business goal down into a marketing goal and one or two metrics for each channel.
Take a sheet of paper and write down the one result your business most needs over the next quarter, with the date you need it by. Every other marketing goal is calculated from that figure, so settle it first.
When small business owners talk about marketing goals, they usually say something like "grow our Instagram" or "get our name out there". Neither tells you, when the month closes, whether your marketing worked. A page can pick up five hundred followers while next term's class stays empty.
Start from something the business genuinely needs. Your business number is whichever result pays the bills or moves the business forward: new students, orders, booked appointments, repeat customers or revenue. Choose the single one that counts most over the next few months, and attach a deadline. From then on, judge every other marketing measure by whether it helps that number.
Avoid opening with a channel goal such as "get more enquiries" or "post more on Google". A goal like that only has meaning after the business number is fixed. If you begin with the channel, you drift toward chasing whatever the channel happens to count, which is rarely what the business needs.
Priya, who runs the maths tuition centre from lesson 2.1, has empty seats in her P5 classes. Her first move is to fix her business number for next term at 20 new students. She leaves "get more enquiries" and "post more on Google" aside until that is decided.
Hardly any business converts every enquiry. Some people ask what you charge and are never heard from again. Others come for a trial and choose not to sign up. How many enquiries you need therefore depends on your own track record.
Pick a recent stretch of time and count two figures: how many enquiries came in, and how many of those people became customers. Comparing the two gives your conversion rate. Rely on your own records and ignore rates quoted in articles or by competitors. A published rate belongs to another business with its own customers, prices and way of following up. Your past rate, even if it is rough, reflects the business you actually run.
If you have no records yet, begin counting today. For the first month, use a sensible guess, label it as a guess, and swap in the real figure once you have it.
Priya goes through her WhatsApp messages and last term's enrolment records. She had about 60 enquiries, and 15 new students came out of them (example figures). Roughly one in four enquiries turned into a student.
Divide your business number by your conversion rate to get the total enquiries needed. Priya wants 20 students and converts about one in four, so she needs about 80 enquiries across the term. Taking a term as roughly three months, that comes to about 27 enquiries a month, or six or seven a week. Monthly and weekly figures give you something to measure against while the term is still running.
Share the monthly figure between the two channels you picked in lesson 5.4. Give each channel its own channel number: a figure that channel produces which leads fairly directly to an enquiry. Where a channel's job is finding new customers, this is usually a step a stranger takes before getting in touch, such as a visit to your website from search, a tap on the call button in your Google Business Profile, or a message started from an ad. Where a channel's job is keeping customers, it could be replies to a broadcast, re-bookings, or referrals that an existing customer passes on.
Priya uses her Google Business Profile to reach new families and a monthly WhatsApp update for current families. Her example plan looks like this:
Business goal: 20 new P5 students by the start of next term. Enquiries needed: about 80 over the term, about 27 a month, based on her own one-in-four rate. Google Business Profile: about 20 enquiries a month, counted as calls and messages that start from her listing. WhatsApp update: about 7 enquiries a month, counted as referrals and sibling enrolments from current parents.
Google's 20 and WhatsApp's 7 add up to the 27 a month she needs. Because each channel has its own figure, she can check both every week. If Google produces 12 enquiries in the first month against a target of 20, she can see which channel is behind and still has time to do something about it.
These four numbers end up in goals mainly because the apps tally them automatically, so they take no effort to track. They earn a place in your plan only if you can show how they connect to your business number.
In some businesses the connection holds. A home baker who notices that most of her orders come from people who first watched one of her videos has good reason to treat views on those videos as an early signal. A tuition centre with a thousand followers is a different case if most of them are other tutors, students who left years ago, and people who liked one funny post. Those followers mostly won't buy, so their number says little about who enrols next term.
Run each of these numbers through the up-by-half test. Ask yourself: if this number went up by half next month, would I expect more customers? Unless you can answer yes and give the reason, keep it out of the plan. Looking at it now and then is fine, but don't make decisions by it.
The activity below asks you to do this for your own business. Choose one business number for the next quarter, set its deadline, and work backwards with your own conversion rate to the enquiries you need per term, month and week, then a number for each of your two channels. If the enquiries you need are far higher than anything you've had before, write that down too. You'll want to know it before you set a budget in lesson 6.4.
Write down your business goal for next quarter. Then work backwards to the number of enquiries and channel actions you need each month.
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