The Effective Marketing Plan: SWOT Analyse Your Market

A SWOT Analysis is a chart showing those things within and outside your business that will make you swim or sink. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

What does is take to SWOT analyse your marketing objectives? Let’s look at the four components, picking up from the target market analysis we covered last time around.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths and weaknesses exist inside your company, and will require some hard core honesty on your part. What are you good at? What do you stink at?

For instance, maybe you’re well-educated, have a boat load of experience, and are fairly well-funded. On the other side of the coin, you’re disorganized, shy, and have a haphazard marketing strategy.

Threats and Opportunities

What things present potential opportunities for you from outside your office walls? Perhaps there’s a new office park under construction that will be filled up with juicy prospects in a year. Maybe your local economy has just had a major shot in the arm and is beginning to prosper.

On the other hand, what threats are there to your success? Are there new government regulations that present a potential problem? Maybe your key competitor just launched a new product or service? Does your industry have a low entry barrier that allows new competitors to crop up overnight charging a buck and a quarter?

Finally, take all these points and pop them into a SWOT chart. A review of the chart will enable you to get a better view of the big picture and formulate a strategy to play up your strengths, combat your weaknesses, seize opportunities, and thwart threats.

Links

To aid you in your SWOT strategy, here are links to SWOT Analyses for a few companies you may have heard about, collected by MarketingTeacher.com (Please note, these were not developed by the companies named):

Marketing objectives, goals, and strategies

Goals can be thought of as broad-based intentions. They’re often somewhat abstract and aren’t prone to being validated. Objectives, on the other hand, are narrow, precise, more tangible, and can be validated. In a nutshell, goals and objectives are what you’re trying to accomplish. Action plans are how you’ll reach those goals and objectives.

For example, let’s say your goal is to increase sales. (A reasonable goal for most businesses!) What are the objectives to reach that goal? The trick with objectives is that they should be clearly stated, obtainable, measurable, and have a time frame.

Here’s a few example objectives:

Increase market awareness by 15% by December 31, 2010.
Decrease the length of the sales cycle by 30% by September 15, 2010.
Add at least five new clients per month.

If you have multiple objectives, make sure they are consistent and not in conflict with each other. Also, be sure that the remainder of your marketing plan components (the marketing strategy, budget, action plans, controls, measures, etc.) support your objectives.

Setting your marketing objectives and finalizing the remaining components of your marketing plan may serve as a reality check: Do you have the resources necessary to accomplish your lofty objectives? Or are you going to need to tap into additional resources such as capital, staff, office space, etc. This way, your marketing objectives can also become a business management tool.

The four Ps of marketing strategy

The marketing strategy section of your plan outlines your game plan to achieve your objectives. It is, essentially, the heart of the marketing plan. The marketing strategy section should include information about:

Product: Descriptions of your product(s)and services
Price: What you’ll charge customers for products and services and how you will leverage pricing strategies to attract customers
Promotion: How you will promote or create awareness of your product in the marketplace
Place (distribution): How you will bring your product(s) together with your prospects

Let’s take a look at each.

Product/service descriptions

Describe, in detail, your products or services in terms of the features and benefits they offer prospects. Also, describe what you need to have or do to provide your product or service (how it’s produced).

Pricing

List the price of your products and describe your pricing strategy. List price ranges for each product or service and how that pricing impacts your positioning. In other words, will you be a low-price, high-volume provider or a high-price specialized provider?

Describe any price flexibility or negotiating room. Outline any discounts you’ll offer for long-term customers, bulk purchases, or prompt payment. Also, include the terms of sale, such as “net due in 30 days,” extended payment plans, and whether you accept credit cards, Paypal, etc.

Promotion plan

Promotion is what most folks think of when they think “marketing.” But, as you’ve seen, it’s only one of several aspects. A promotion plan describes the tools or tactics used to accomplish your marketing objectives.

There are lots of different marketing and public relations activities out there to choose from. Many come with aggressive salespeople who are more than happy to tell you why theirs is the best. They’re also tickled pink to take your money.

Choosing your activities can be tricky. You’ll need to find those tasks that are a good fit with your personality and reasonably easy for you to implement. Plus, it’s important that you enjoy doing the. Trust me, if you don’t, you’ll find a way not do them.

For instance, I’m an introvert. As such, I don’t do a lot of schmoozing at networking events. Ironically, when I do go, I’m the guy who starts the conservation at a dead table. I also don’t have any problem with public speaking. I’ve learned to “act as if,” and it works for me. I act as if I’m an extrovert at a networking event. I act as if I’m a public speaker. But this is really a topic for a different report or article. (If you are interested in public speaking and making presentations, you might consider the book Rockstar Presentations.)

Some promotion tools are:

Websites and blogs
Social media
E-newsletters and email marketing
Writing articles
Press releases
Interviews
Speaking engagements
Brochures, postcards, and other collateral
Print advertising (newspaper, magazines)
Cold and warm phone calls
Trade shows and business expos
Yellow Pages ads (If you think anybody still uses them)

Placement (sales and distribution)

In this section, describe how your products and prospects get together.

Describe your sales philosophies and methods. Do you employ an aggressive sales method for a large number of quick sales, or a relaxed method where the emphasis is on having customers feel comfortable to come back another time even if they don’t buy now? Do you use contract salespeople or employees? Or are you the lone wolf who’s an expert juggler? Explain your approach to sales issues.

Describe your distribution system – how customers receive your offerings. A few points about distribution to address in your marketing plan for products are:

Is the exchange of the product made in an office or store? Online? Through the mail? Through a direct sales representative? Do you go to the customer’s location?
What are your production and inventory capacities? (How quickly can you make products and how many can you store?)
Are there cyclical fluctuations or seasonal demands for your products? For example, if you produce Christmas decorations, how will you manage peak production and sales periods as well as slow periods?
Do you sell to individuals, companies, distributors, or to re-sellers? Your company may use more than one method. For example, you may sell directly to customers who place large orders but also sell to customers who buy small quantities of your product through retail outlets.

The same general idea goes for services.

Summary

Once you have a handle on the four Ps, it’s time to draft your objectives. While going through the four Ps exercise, you probably found some weak spots or places where you can improve your position. Those will be your first objectives – those things you can do, or need to do, to clean up and optimize your business.

As previously mentioned, two things to attach to your objectives are some quantifiable number and a time frame. Without those, objectives move back to the “nifty goal” area. Once there, they tend to get put on the back burner, if addressed at all. Dates and numbers help keep you on track. If you know something needs to be done by a certain date, it’s easy to work backwards when creating your action plans. For example, if C needs to happen by a certain date, then B needs to done by a previous date, and A before that. Pretty simple, eh?

Finally, ensure that your goals and objectives are attainable. A little loftiness is good to stretch your abilities, but keep things out of the stratosphere. Let’s say you are a solo designer working out of your house. Landing the entire Procter & Gamble account by the end of the month probably isn’t going to happen. No, allow me to re-phase. There’s no way it’s going to happen. But making a contact there by the end of the month just might. Landing a gig by September could happen too, with the right marketing.