Small Business: Do You Have A Dream?

3 Steps For Small Business Success

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired a generation with his “I Have A Dream” speech. With amazing content, Dr. King moved people who were at the Mall in Washington and who were watching via television.

Dr. King’s vision was a call-to-action for social change. It mobilized people towards the goal of racial equality. As a business owner, while your objectives aren’t as lofty as Dr. King’s, you must be able to mobilize your audience to action. 

Small business owners need to have a dream that drives them to create their business. To ensure that your company is on track to succeed, here are three actionable business steps you need to follow.

1. Build a vision. As a small business owner, you have to think big to motivate yourself and your team to achieve great things. This requires developing a goal that’s more than just getting the next sale. Like Dr. King, you must elevate your objectives to set your business on track for future success. Actionable Marketing Tip: Develop trackable metrics associated with your goals so you can measure your progress over time.
2. Create a plan to achieve your goal. Map out your strategy for your business. Without this step, you’ll find yourself jumping from one emergency to another. (I call this Nimble Marketing.) While you can keep your business going this way, you’ll have trouble attaining your objectives in a timely, cost effective way because there’ll always be something else demanding your attention. Actionable Marketing Tip: Set achievable milestones. These check points should be associated with your goals and related metrics.
3. Leverage resources to reach your objective. Small businesses tend to have limited resources, both financial and personnel. As a result, they tend to tradeoff time for money. Actionable Marketing Tip: Assess each investment and major effort against your long-term goals to maximize resource utilization. If you have employees, make sure that their activities also work towards these goals. If they’re too focused on doing things for the lowest cost, they may miss strategic opportunities. Planning content reuse before creating major pieces of content to minimize resource investment and time is one example.

While few of us have dreams as powerful and mobilizing as Dr. King’s, we can follow his example by setting our goals high and working to achieve them.

To inspire you on your journey, here are Dr. King’s words.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

May we continue to dream of a better future for everyone.

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

Note: This article title was inspired by 40 Free Titles for Content Marketing.

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• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Social Media Dream [QUOTES]
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Influence on Social Media [QUOTES]

To learn more about Dr. King, please check out the King Center for Non-violent Social Change.

Photo Credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Martin_Luther_King_-_March_on_Washington.jpg