Online Goals That are Smart

How to set goals for your website performance that make sense.

Why Bother Setting Goals? Simple. Because nobody just wakes up successful. 

You must have a clear path to the destination you wish to arrive at, you need to know where you’re going. This isn’t a new idea. Pretty simple, right?

Setting goals to achieve your desired outcome is not new either. Nor is setting smart goals, ones that are specific to your desired outcome, make sense, are actually achievable, have purpose and meet a timeline that is specific to where you are in your life and business. Nothing new, but very rarely followed through with.

In this article, I am going to detail for you the first two priorities for how to set goals that bolt your business needs to your website and how to track performance and influence your website(s) have to student acquisition.

Before anything, let’s start with a simple acronym for discovering if your efforts and goals have alignment. Considering the needs of successfully reached goals as mentioned above, let’s call this SMART goal setting. 

When setting up a proper inbound marketing system, you need to first consider the specific metrics you’ll need to track in order to understand the effect your site(s), landing pages or campaigns are achieving. 

Unfortunately, this is where most studio owners fail, get discouraged and don’t even go further than scribbling down “how many people called from our website this month.” 

Specificity in traffic metrics can be as broad or as refined as you need them to be. Simple is better. For almost every studio owner that I can think of, from twenty to two thousand students, there are only four specific metric sets that are needed, and are hands-down the most important. In order, they are: 

I could go further with a fifth metric - Retention - but this is not within the scope of this article. Specifically, we’re looking at new student/client acquisition.

Visits are the folks who have taken a first step to learn about you. They are somehow attracted to your message and offering. The click comes from paid search, organic search query, paid banners, blogs, social and so on. There are tons of channels they can enter from, and yes - you need to be there to greet them. So this goal set can be about who, from where and how many of them... Actually, this can be mind-blowingly (and even creepily) more complex, but for now - keep it simple!

Leads are those Visits who are compelled to take an action through a Call To Action (CTA), that a content piece on your site leads them to. That can be an on-site advertisement, opt-in for an eBook, joining a social property or making a low barrier purchase. There are tons of ways, but most common is offering their email in return for a content piece that is crafted to serve the desired outcome they are looking for based on the channel they entered your site through.

Contacts are that next step where you actually make face-to-face contact with them. This can be over the phone, through email (yes, but this is specifically through what’s called an indoctrination email piece) an ascension purchase or an in person visit to your studio.  

OK, we know what we need to measure, so where do we begin? 

By definition, measurement is capturing and associating a specific number to the role of an action we’re taking and the outcome that is a result. In order to measure, you MUST have current data. You can’t measure the right amount with past data that is no longer relevant.

So where can you get data sets that will help you build your goals? 

Simple. Google Analytics, it’s free. Yes, there are tons of CRM providers out there that can provide this service for you, but guess what? They’re most likely aggregating this data from Google. A CRM service may be a good idea as we scale business forward, but if you're getting started with your online tracking now, start with Google, learn how it works and make the most of a CRM investment later. The data you get now will allow you to set up a benchmark.

If you’re a new studio or you’ve never properly tracked goals before, I’m going to provide you with a median based starting point from data sets I’ve gained from the US martial arts business space. Ready?

Quick break… If this seems too difficult to you, it's not. What I’m teaching here is about as easy as it gets, and I’m tired of listening to studio owners ‘brag and laugh’ about how their ‘old ways’ are somehow preventing them from establishing their business in a new consumer centered economy. It's a bullshit excuse they'd never accept from a student... and I call bullshit. Get to work and build your studio, make goals and push forward. The majority of your prospects are looking for you online, not on flyers you photocopy and tack in the post office... Back to business. 

• 1000 Visits per month goal

• 3/100 Visit / Lead conversion = 30 Leads per month

• 1/10 Lead / Contact conversion = 3 Contacts

Your site’s data may be different, but for those without data these median benchmarks will be an easy starting point for measuring traffic conversions on your site and determine precisely how your website is driving clients to your business. After the point of contact is achieved, the conversion from Contact to Customer in a yoga studio or martial arts school is traditionally done offline, so therefore metrics here is more specific to the individual campaign and the message delivered.

The next step is Attainable. Are you capable of serving these clients within your goal set? Do you have a conversion system set up to properly channel these new, excited contacts into stoked clients or students of your studio? Obviously, your goals must be realistic and achievable for you to capture best results... but those results have direct correlation with your goal set and how you realistically scale your conversion goals forward.

Inside the Kaizen Mastermind, we’ll be doing a deep dive on these SMART goal setting and drilling down the last three elements, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. 

So where are you with your own goals and how are you measuring them in your studio?