Monday, August 17, 2015

Kicking Butt In Business With Good Old SWOT | The Strategic Marketing Planning Framework Part 1

Hello There It’s Tyler Sass The Marketing Guy Here to help you grow your business! If you know a fun company that has a cool idea please give me a call at (714)408-8759 because I am looking to work with a new business! Okay self promotion done now…

let’s get real here. You and your team are probably not doing a formal strategic marketing plan and who could blame you that stuff is all over the place marketing is such a vague concept why not just let the marketing people do their thing right? They do The Google, The Facebook, The Tweets, The Flyers, The Mail it all comes together. NO! NO! NO! Stop it right there 10 minutes in the corner right now! Time out!

You see that is what “marketers” want you to think so we can kick back relax and hang out on Facebook all day. Without a set strategic marketing planning framework your business is going to be in trouble. In this article I am going to go through a framework you can implement with your marketing team today so that you can start looking at your business from a micro and a macro level! In This Blog Series We are going to Cover How to Create a Strategic Marketing Planning Framework. 

SWOT
SWOT Analysis
The First step to creating a Strategic Marketing Plan is to identify your businesses unique strength weaknesses oppurutnity and threats. Yea Yea I hear you now saying “everyone knows SWOT this isn’t high school” and my response is cool show me where you have it written down for your business that isn’t more than 3 months old and where is it promptly available to your marketing team. Can I ask everyone on your marketing team to show me the location of the SWOT and will they be able to find it? SWOT is common sense and used to frequently for a reason… it works. So Buckle Down and break out the Pen and paper…
In a diagram like the one listed above you will be listing out 5 Strengths for your business, 5 Weaknesses of Your Business, 5 Oppurtunities for your business and 5 Threats for your business. Now let’s dive a little more into what those mean.

Strengths: First off if everyone in your business is doing it it’s not a strength get rid of it. Second if it’s amazing customer service get rid of it that’s not a strength that’s a requirement. Getting a little trickier now isn’t it? If you can’t come up with five strengths you need to stop and take note on a separate sheet of paper called the Brain Storm page (it is a legal requirement to draw a brain on this page) that you need more strengths.
Weaknesses: This one can get tricky because no one likes to think about why they suck. Also no one wants to crap on a business in front of their superiors. To fix this have everyone anonymously write down 5 weaknesses on slips of paper. Then add the weaknesses up and take an average. The top 5 most mentioned are your new top five weaknesses ties go to the boss.
Oppurtunities: This one is a really fun one. Think of all the things that are going on right now that your business could capitalize on. For example do you raise funds for breast cancer and breast cancer awareness is trending on twitter? Boom Oppourtunity. As with strengths if you can’t come up with five add it to the brain storming list.

Threats: Here comes the scary part. Think of things that could happen to your business that are out of your control. How would you company respond to a rich lunatic suing your company or perhaps an employee embezzling a hundred thousand dollars. These are all possibilities have you prepared for them?

Once you are done with your SWOT analysis you will be ready to move on to Step Two which will be covered in the next blog post.

P.S.
Just a reminder I am looking to help companies grow. If you know a really fun company with a cool idea that could benefit from more customers, better marketing and business development please let me know so I can get the job! Call me at (714)408-8759 or email me at tysonsoftwaresolutions@gmail.com

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