Success through Planning - A Guide to Effective Web Business Plans - Mission Statements, Aims and Goals and Benchmark measures

20 January 2008 - By TimK - Filled in Blogging, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online, Webmaster

I have written about mission statements before in my series on Strategic Content Development, where the mission statement was used to help define and keep on task, content development projects. Essentially for the business plan the format is the same, it is a short statement which encapsulates the Mission of an organization and from it a set of aims and goals are developed to measure success of the site. Common mission statements include a general statement about the business such as

“TimK Copy Writing Plc is a dedicated web content development company which provides laser focused SEO tailored content for Webmasters in any Niche.”

This is included to give an immediate idea of the scope of the business, and should only include what it is, not what it isn’t. The second part of the Mission Statement should include the specific things which the organization aspires to in order to differentiate from its competitors. Such as

“TimK Plc will deliver low cost content within strictly defined deadlines. It will individually tailor unique content, relevant to the SEO needs of the individual Webmaster to the highest levels of professionalism.”

Increasingly Mission Statements include a little detail about the future of an organization as well, for example

“TimK Plc will grow organically to steady monthly targets, and increase its reputation on the Web for its level of proficiency in delivering content.”

From this mission statement it is possible to develop a set of Aims, which are the specific actions that are going to be undertaken to fulfill the mission statement, and Goals, which are the targets which can be measured to prove the success of the aims, so for each Aim, there should be a Goal. Here are my Companies Aims and Goals.

Aims	Goals
To Keep prices in line with competition for content of comparable quality	To update the charging of content on a monthly basis by comparing prices of competitors from their website
To Deliver content within tight deadlines	To have a 100% delivery on time per contract record
To ensure the relevance of content to SEO needs of the customer	To include all the customers keywords and phrases in content in a relevant and sensible manner
To ensure customer satisfaction in all cases	To ask for and keep a log of customer feedback, which will be 100% positive

From these two tools, the mission statement and the aims and goals, it is possible to develop the benchmarks of success. From my example it is clear that I measure success by being competitive on price, developing SEO targeted content, and by having customer’s satisfaction. (Shameless plug, although if you would like help with content development contact us,Benchmarks are important because its how we know we are on task, and they help you to develop the Balanced Scorecard, along with SWOT analysis (seen in later articles in this series)