It's time to take your first steps in planning and developing your marketing in social media. But before you start building a business presence and start creating ads, it's important to first reflect on what you want to achieve with your marketing. Before starting on a journey, it's good to determine where you want to go. It's the same with marketing, you need a goal post and a way to measure whether you're successful. By the end of this video, you'll understand the meaning of business and marketing goals and why you need them. When you're starting a marketing campaign, you may be tempted to just dive right in. Why wait and why waste time writing down what you want to achieve? You may feel like you have a good sense and you won't forget. Well, I can tell you from my personal experience that it really helps to formulate your marketing goals before you get started. It helps to crystallize the description of the results you would like to achieve. It helps you to communicate what you want to achieve to other people in the team, and it helps you decide on the metrics, you'll need to assess success. According to dictionary.com, a goal is the result or achievement toward which effort is directed. So it specifies what you want to achieve and it helps to make sure that you and the people you're working with are all aligned. In fact, research from Gail Matthews in 2005 showed that when people write down their goals, they accomplish significantly more. While the research focused on personal goals, it's no different for businesse. Writing down the goals for a business really helps to achieve them. Let me introduce you to Calla and Ivy a flower business located in Amsterdam. Calla and Ivy was started by Imra when she opened the flower shop on one of Amsterdam's canal streets. Her hand bound bouquets became really popular in Amsterdam, and Imra started a website where people can order bouquets for home delivery. Okay, if you go to Amsterdam to find the store, you'll be disappointed as the company doesn't actually exist, but we're going to use it as one of our examples throughout this course. Imra started a company with the objective to sell flowers and delight people with her creations. But she was able to grow her business by setting clear goals for herself and writing them down every year. When she brings employees on board, she shares the goals with them, so they are always clear on what they're trying to achieve. Imra firmly believes that this habit has been crucial to the success of her business. Businesses have goals at different levels. For example, Calla and Ivy's overall business goal is selling flowers. But different teams or people with different roles can have their own goals. For instance, to marketing department may have the goal to increase visitors to the Calla and Ivy website and maybe the operations team has goal to reduce costs for packaging and shipping or flowers. These are subgoals that all serve the bigger business goal, selling flowers. In what follows, we will look at how you can formulate your goals in such a way that they will help you to be successful.