A lot goes into creating the perfect marketing strategy for you, your team, or your whole company. First things first, it’s important for you to have all of your ducks in a row and understand what exactly you’re up against.
This doesn’t JUST mean what you’re facing as marketers now, but you need to ensure you have all future possibilities in mind, too. You don’t want to have to completely adjust your path as soon as you hit a bump in the road, so we need to create a SWOT analysis.
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A SWOT analysis helps you understand internal and external factors that can make or break your success toward your marketing goal. SWOT is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The SWOT analysis process is a brainstorming technique. It’s designed to help you understand what might differentiate you from your competition and what resources you have to execute upon that opportunity. In the same breath, the SWOT framework helps you understand what might prevent you from seizing that opportunity.
The four areas it encompasses are meant to help you explore internal and external factors:
Ask yourself:
Open your marketing strategy template spreadsheet and click on the SWOT Analysis tab. Enter in your strengths in Column A rows 5-23.
Ask yourself:
Enter your weaknesses in Column B rows 5-23 in the SWOT Analysis tab of your marketing strategy spreadsheet.
Ask yourself:
Fill in Column A rows 25-43 with your opportunities.
Enter your threats in Column B rows 25-43.
Now that you’ve worked through your rough ideas for your SWOT analysis, you may also opt to enter a cleaner version of these points in the editable PowerPoint deck also available in the marketing strategy template kit.
This will help you present your marketing strategy to team members and stakeholders in a format that’s a little easier on the eyes.
Let’s dive back into the CoSchedule example. If CoSchedule wants to hit the goal of 6,000 marketing-qualified leads by December 31, 2018, the SWOT Analysis may look something like this:
This is what that SWOT analysis example looks like in the PowerPoint deck available in that marketing strategy kit:
Now, there are likely many more thoughts to list under all of these areas. However, I recommend drilling into only a few factors to capitalize on (strengths + opportunities) and mitigate (weaknesses + threats).
This way, you don’t stretch your resources so thin that it’s nearly impossible to dramatically influence what could really help you make the marketing goal a reality.
Doing fewer things well often produces better results.
Now you have a clear understanding what the factors that will make or break your success:
Congrats! You’ve found your unique differentiators and understand how you’ll compete with your marketing.