By Abdulhafeez Yusuf, Guest Contributor

Setting new financial goals for your business is one sure way to achieve long-term success. However, setting goals is one thing, and achieving them is another. As much as many people are fond of setting excellent business goals at the start of every year and forgetting them midway into February, you want to avoid being caught up in such an act as you and your business may suffer a tremendous financial loss.

First, you need to get clarity on your current finances and also take time to visualize how you want the future of your business to look like. Take into account all the figures that go in and out of the organization, compare your earnings with your spending, and see how much you can save if you continue on that path. And if you are not impressed, then it is time to create a new financial strategy and work with it.

In this article, we will learn what a business’s financial goal means and the specific steps to achieving it.

What is a business’s financial goal?

A business financial goal includes the economic vision a business or company aims to achieve. These visions could be long-term, mid-term, or short term but they are indispensable for any business to attain financial uprightness.

What are some examples of a business financial goal?

Financial goals make you understand your financial strengths and weaknesses, and it helps you know when to spend money, what to spend on and why. These goals are necessary to stop you from running your business like a headless chicken. Here are some feasible goals you can set for your business and work towards achieving them.

1. Cash flow management goals: Cash flow management is the process of having full knowledge of the amount of money moving into and out of business at all times. Simply put, it measures a company’s financial health at specific periods. Managing your cash flow is one of the most critical goals you must set for your business to avoid running it into the ground.

• Increasing profit margins: Profit margin determines your business’s financial performance. It is calculated by subtracting the total cost to run your business from its total revenue generated. Multiply the end figure by 100 to get a percentage, therefore, increasing your profit margin is a healthy goal for your business. Some of the ways to increase your profit margin are: reducing labor costs, reducing interest expenses, reviewing your pricing strategy, and cutting down overall costs.

• Reducing /avoiding debts: It is better to prevent debts as much as possible; however, having debts is not the problem; keeping them too long is. The faster you pay your debt, the less you have to pay in interest in the long run. Settling debts requires discipline, and a proven way to make it easier is by assessing all your debts and calculating your debt-income ratio. Then you can focus on the best strategy to eliminate the debt in bits and pieces.

• Increase savings: In every business, emergencies are bound to come; how do you handle such trying times without proper savings? Creating a savings account for your business and putting a substantial amount of your profit into that account will significantly help the future of your business in case of unforeseen economic crises. As for how much to save, it is only wise to keep aside at least 10% of your monthly income in the savings account, and you will be shocked at how much you have gathered in the next 12 months.

• More effort in marketing: A critical goal for your business is increasing your marketing budget. With effective marketing, you can gain more customers and increase your revenue.

• Diversification: Generally, the more income streams a business has, the fewer financial risks it faces. Having more than one source of income can save your business from going bankrupt when one product or service fails due to an economic downslide. Diversifying your income is worth including in your financial goal in the long term.

• Hiring a content marketing expert: Content is an investment.  The best decision you can make for your business is to hire a professional content marketer. Content marketing is essential as it generates six times more conversion rate than any other form of digital marketing. A good content marketer will help you retain loyal and trustworthy customers. 

Some benefits of hiring a content marketer/writer are;

1. You get quality content regularly, which will help you attract more visitors and strengthen your online presence. 

2. Engage your prospecting and existing customers with highly optimized and entertaining content and boost their motivation to patronize your business.

3. Improve your ranking on search engine results with great SEO strategies, increasing your brand awareness and building trust between your customers and your products or service.

4. Better social media engagement: As social media is vital to growing online presence and increasing sales, professional content writers can help you achieve massive engagement on social media platforms which may lead to enormous patronage from fans and potential customers. A good content writer knows how to create well-researched and up-to-date content that keeps people coming back to your website, blog, or social media platform.

5. Save time and money: Without content, your advertising budget could go down the drain. A good content writer will help you create attention-grabbing headlines and highly optimized content that will reach a number of your audience and capture their interests.

Employ the services of a professional content writer and SEO specialist to handle your content marketing strategies.