Can you believe that we are already into Q2? Time flies when you’re working hard for your CBD business. No matter how busy you may be, it’s important to block out time to look back on the 1st quarter of 2021. What worked for your PR outreach? What didn’t? Using our spring garden theme and analogy, it’s time to make sure all of the seeds you’ve planted and now grown into seedlings thrive as you move them into your garden.
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From seed to seedling: Measuring your Q1 goals
The first thing you need to remember is that your annual PR plan is looking at your business from a 30,000 ft level. Or, following our garden analogy, this is your complete garden. But it’s important to look at your quarterly goals from the 15,000-foot view. This is like splitting the growing season into 4. It begins with sowing your seeds then moving them to your garden, keeping them healthy followed by the harvest! If you need help working toward your PR goals make sure you get a free downloadable here.
When you’re measuring quarterly goals for your CBD brand, you want to look at things from each phase of that gardening plan. This means widening the scope of measurement. Instead of looking at granular details (like you would monthly or weekly) you’re reviewing and compounding those granular details to see if you’re on the right track to meeting your annual goals. Will your garden produce?
From seedling to soil: Adjusting your PR goals
You’ve spent the past 3 months nurturing your seeds and they’ve finally sprouted! Now’s the time to move them to soil. What does this look like for your PR plan? It starts with adjustment. What if you’ve moved your seedlings from the planter to the ground? Or from the planter to a pot but they aren’t doing so well. It’s okay to adjust your goals for Q2!
So many people we know won’t set goals because they are afraid they won’t achieve them. This method allows you to know what’s working well and what you need to adjust because what you want to achieve may change as the year progresses. Just think back to last year and all the changes we all had to make.
Have you met your Q1 goals? Are you exceeding them? Maybe, you’re falling a little flat on your quarterly goals? It’s time to adjust! As a reminder, your goals should be SMART.
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timebound
If you find yourself falling flat on your quarterly goals, you should first go back and re-assess if your goals are SMART enough?
If they are and you still feel like you should’ve met them, it’s time to start looking at the tactics you’ve used in support of these goals. Are they working?
On the other hand, what if you are blowing your quarterly objective out of the water? It’s okay to take the data from your monthly reports in January, February and March and use them to challenge yourself more in Q2. Furthermore, look at what KPIs or Key Performance Indicators led to your enormously successful Q1. Are they relevant for Q2?
Planning your garden: making sure your seedlings are in line with annual goals
While it’s great to keep up with your quarterly goals, remember, the end game here is a beautiful, bountiful garden! Any adjustment you make quarterly should help you progress to have the best garden on your block!
There are a number of different scenarios that could impact your annual goals (we certainly saw that last year), so the best advice we can offer is to plan ahead on what might not work so that you’re ready to change strategy if needed.
I like to think of this as my squash and zucchini plants that had a hard time in the garden last year because there weren’t many bees. I couldn’t rely on the bees to pollinate the female flowers, so my fiance and I did some internet research, grabbed a q-tip and hand-pollinated them. Guess what? It worked! We met our end goal of having squash and zucchini, we just had to go about it a different way to reach our end goal...we MOVED THE STAIRS!
If you want to dive even deeper into the conversation, be sure to watch our video recap below!