OGSM: your marketing plan or business plan on one A4

When you prepare a business plan or marketing plan, it is good to remember that a larger, firmer and thicker plan is not always better. In fact, a concise business plan is accepted earlier and implemented better. But how do you ensure that all quality is summarized in a plan of just one A4?

What is OGSM?

OGSM is the abbreviation for 'Objectives, Goals, Strategies and Measures'. These are the four factors that ensure that it is immediately clear what the end goal is and how it will be achieved. It forces you to keep the focus on substantiating objectives and not getting stuck in side paths and management terms. In other words, KISS, another abbreviation: Keep It Stupid Simple.

Objectives

You enter the 'O' of 'Objectives' with a specific goal. Suppose you have a travel website about traveling to Africa. You want to become the market leader in the Dutch travel market for traveling to Africa. A great global goal that indicates what you want. It is the starting point for your marketing or business plan. The following letters explain how you are going to achieve this goal.

Goals

At OGSM it is important that you can quantify your goals. In other words: there must be hard figures about the way in which your goals will happen. The best way to formulate this is SMART: specific, measurable, achievable (“attainable”), Relevant and time-bound. An example of such a goal: "Within the next five months the visitor spends about ten percent more time on our website than in the past five months." Another example could be: "Within the next six months we will ensure that two percent of the visitors book a trip to Africa."

Strategies

What you enter in 'Strategies' is the approach. You describe how you will achieve your goals. They connect directly to the Objectives and the Goals of OGSM. The intention is that you describe a number of ways and methods with which you will achieve your goal. For example, you could describe that you are going to tackle the SEO and conversion of the website and how you are going to do this.

You can also describe here how to use the user experience of your website and how you ensure that visitors really get stuck. Here you can even describe the usefulness of A / B testing. But remember: keep it simple!

Make your plans measurable. Only in this way do you know whether your goal has been achieved.

Measures

How are you going to measure your success? How quickly are you satisfied? When was a goal achieved? You should preferably enter hard numbers here. In principle you can say that you are satisfied if you have had a million visitors in the first year. Or 20,000 bookings. It is not always possible to stick a fixed label on the measurability, but quality measurements, time periods and deadlines can help you to get something on paper.

Clear formulation

As you can see, the OGSM model is about clear formulation. Try to avoid explaining everything too much and making it into a whole book. This method is not only useful to get on paper exactly what you want to achieve, but it also makes clear to others what the goals are. If you have a company with employees, you could even print it and hang it large in the office. It would be nice if your entire plan fit on one sheet of paper. Then you really touch the essence of your plan.

Does OGMS have disadvantages?

OGSM does have a disadvantage: it is not always possible to capture a long-term vision in this model. Markets change quickly and then the plan may have to be rewritten several times. This is especially the case with successful start-ups. Fortunately, this model lends itself to be flexible and to update the plan quickly. And that is exactly where business