Setting effective business goals

Understand how goals can help your company grow

Whether you’re planning for the next several weeks or several years, business goals are the key to growing your company. In order to reach your goals, you can’t just rely on blind hope; it takes both strategy and teamwork.

Goals help you form a consistent standard for high performance and productivity within your company. Having clear communication with your employees and working together as a team will make sure no one is wasting time and energy. Aligning your company behind a set of shared ideals brings everyone together with the same mission. 

The best way to ensure your public relations goals align with your company's business goals is through communicating. In his paper “Guidelines for Setting Measurable Public Relations Objectives: An Update,” Forrest W. Anderson suggests having weekly one-on-one sessions with leaders in your PR department as a way to make sure their goals measure well with the company’s goals. 

When setting company goals, HubSpot recommends utilizing objectives and key results (OKRs). OKRs will ensure the entire team is tackling the same issues, which helps your company keep its sense of purpose while it grows.

Objectives are key statements that declare the outcome of your goals. They help you figure out what it is you’re trying to achieve. Key results track how you get to the objective. Key results are most effective when they are measurable and variable, specific and timebound, and aggressive yet realistic. 

HubSpot also suggests sequencing your goals as a way to prioritize them. By identifying which goals are bringing you the highest value, your team can make sure they meet those first. This way, even if you don’t meet every goal, you’ll reach the ones that matter the most.  

The main thing you should keep in mind when setting goals is to make sure you’re keeping your goals realistic and reasonable. In order for goals in PR to be effective, you need to be realistic about what you can accomplish within a specific time frame and limited resources. If your goals and objectives aren’t realistic, you won’t reach them.

Start planning your company’s 2020 strategic PR/communications plan with our “Think SMART 2020: Strategic Communications Planning Workshop” on October 16. We’ll help plan your first draft for company goals, strategies, research, and much more.

Shiloh Jones is an intern at Axia Public Relations and a student at the University of North Florida studying public relations. She is excited to learn as much as she can during her time at Axia. Shiloh joined the Axia team in August 2019.

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