You will be able to break a business goal into a marketing goal and one or two metrics per channel.
Ask most small business owners for their marketing goal and you'll hear something like "grow our Instagram" or "get our name out there". Both sound like goals. Neither tells you, at the end of the month, whether marketing did its job. You could gain five hundred followers and still have an empty class next term.
A goal you can use starts somewhere else: with a number the business actually needs. This lesson shows how to start there and work backwards until each of your two channels has its own number to aim at.
The business number is the result that pays the bills or moves the business forward. New students, orders, booked appointments, repeat customers, revenue. Pick the one that matters most for the next few months and give it a deadline.
Priya, who runs the maths tuition centre from lesson 2.1, has empty seats in her P5 classes. Her business number for the next term is 20 new students. That is the goal everything else in her marketing will be measured against.
Notice that she didn't start with "get more enquiries" or "post more on Google". Those come later, and they only make sense once the business number is fixed. If you start with the channel, you end up chasing whatever the channel counts, which is usually not what the business needs.
Very few businesses turn every enquiry into a customer. Some people ask about prices and disappear. Some book a trial and decide against it. So the next question is how many enquiries you need to reach the business number.
The answer comes from your own history. Look back at a recent period and count two things: how many enquiries came in, and how many of those became customers. Priya checked her WhatsApp and her enrolment records for last term. She had about 60 enquiries and 15 new students. These are example figures, and they mean roughly one in four enquiries became a student.
If one in four becomes a student and she wants 20 students, she needs about 80 enquiries over the term. A term is roughly three months, so that is about 27 enquiries a month, or six or seven a week.
Use your own rate, not a figure from an article or a competitor. A rate you read online comes from a different business with different customers, prices and follow-up habits. Your own past rate, even a rough one, describes the business you are actually running. If you have no records at all, start counting now. Make a sensible guess for the first month, mark it as a guess, and replace it with the real number as soon as you have one.
Now split the enquiries between your two channels from lesson 5.4 and give each one its own number. That number should be something the channel produces that leads, fairly directly, to an enquiry.
For a channel that finds new customers, it is usually an action a stranger takes on the way to contacting you. Visits to your website from search. Taps on the call button in your Google Business Profile. Messages started from an ad. For a channel that keeps customers, it might be replies to a broadcast, re-bookings, or referrals passed on by an existing customer.
Priya's two channels were Google Business Profile for new families and a monthly WhatsApp update for current ones. 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, or 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.
Each channel now has a number she can check every week. If Google brings 12 enquiries in the first month instead of 20, she knows where the gap is, and she knows it in time to do something about it.
Likes, followers, views and reach are easy to count because the apps count them for you. That is exactly why they creep into goals. They are only useful if you can show a link from them to the business number.
Sometimes there is a link. If a home baker can see that most of her orders come from people who first watched one of her videos, then views on those videos are a reasonable early signal. But if a centre has a thousand followers and most of them are other tutors, students who left years ago and people who liked one funny post, the follower count tells you very little about next term's enrolment.
The test is simple. If this number went up by half next month, would you expect more customers? If you can't say yes and explain why, leave it out of the plan. You can still glance at it, but don't steer by it.
The activity below asks you to do this for your own business. Start with one business number for the next quarter and work backwards with your own conversion rate. If the enquiries you need look far higher than anything you've had before, write that down too. It is useful to know now, before you set a budget in lesson 6.4.
Write your business goal for the next quarter and work backwards to the number of enquiries and channel actions you need each month.
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