Has the SWOT moved on?

A very traditional part of a marketing plan and usually a business plan too, the SWOT analysis give us an excellent view of our business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I don't think for one minute we could replace it for strategic planning, but I have come across other models which help to define (in some ways much better) the direction we should follow for business.

I saw a presentation which really struck a chord, a few months ago delivered by Mike Kingston. He talked about defining the "right" customers for your business plan first, then checking that you are not breaking the main "law of business" which was essentially that you either specialise in a particular product or service or else you specialise by targeting a range of products or services to a very specific target market.

So you're either market driven or product/service driven. He pointed out that if you don't specialise in one of these, you end up in the middle of a line with "market specialist" at one end and "product/service" specialist at the other. And being in the middle means of course that you're probably trying to be all things to all people, which if nothing else is usually very hard work!

Now I now that sounds like a very long winded way of explaining something but my point is that now, when I work with my customers and we're strategic planning we look at these things first:

1. Who are their best customers? And we define them by writing a profile of a typical customer then.
   
2. What is it that those customers consistently come back to them for? (Often this is a particular service or specialism which is very easily missed until you go back and look).
3. Looking at what we discovered, what do they really specialise in? (product or service, or market).

Then we're ready to launch into our full stratgeic marketing plan. I have found this amazingly useful and in many ways more effective than starting with SWOT as it forces you to focus on the positive.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Ignore Social Networking at your Peril!

It's no good. I've discovered that no matter how much it goes against the grain, social networking is here to stay, and what's more it's good for business. Having spent the past year resisting these networks, reluctant to tell all about anything out there on the world wide web (well it's so public!) I've none the less felt obliged to learn more about them as a marketer. Well I can't miss any opportunities and besides it's fascinating to see how marketing online is changing.

So armed with lists of sites to look at, I've been trawling through them and learned that some are seriously scary until you master privacy settings and they're definitely aimed at different audiences. Facebook for example is increasingly used by businesses to raise awareness whilst Bebo is considered a "younger" network. I'm a fan of Linked In too, which is very much a business network.

Then there's social bookmarking, where you you can bookmark a website for other people to see. These also often allow "comments" like blogs do and the whole shared bookmarking thing is essentially about voting for your favourite websites. Then if enough users vote for a particular site it will appear in a "hot" list of the social bookmarking sites for its category.

All very clever and you can see how word starts to spread and of course more links are made to the original website that was bookmarked. There is, I discovered, a handy "add" tool which you can code into your website pages if you want to make it easy for people to bookmark your content. Have a look at www.addthis.com which provides an all-in-one button, very useful. Now we're looking at our online Marketing Plan Builder to add more of these options - internet marketing has become a much bigger part of the marketing mix and social networking justifiably counts as an important part of online marketing strategy.

Happy socialising!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk