Understanding Situation (SWOT) Analysis of Your Marketing Plan
By Ty Swartz, M. Photog., Cr., CPP
At the core of every marketing plan is the comprehensive blending of the Four Ps (product, promotion, place, price) to create a marketing mix relevant to each target market. Each marketing plan consists of seven elements:
1. Executive Summary
2. Situation (SWOT) Analysis
3. Goals
4. Budgets
5. Measures (performance analysis)
6. Marketing Strategy
7. Marketing Mix
This article will cover element 2—situation (SWOT) analysis. A SWOT analysis is an essential part of any business marketing plan. It allows you to create a plan of action based on your interest and not rely on your gut feeling about what you need to do in the given market situation. The SWOT considers your marketing capabilities against competitors and examines opportunities created as new technologies are introduced.
What is a SWOT?
It is a 2x2 matrix summarizing the internal Strengths and Weaknesses against external Opportunities and Threats. These external opportunities and threats are available to all competitors in the marketplace and are not unique to one business.
Why is the SWOT analysis practical?
When creating a digital marketing plan, SWOT analysis is an essential step. It's not an academic exercise; a SWOT analysis will give you a strategic view of the main opportunities and challenges. An excellent way to look at it is a high-level view to help you see the most critical issues that must be managed to achieve business objectives. Any form of SWOT analysis is better than none. The best technique for digital marketing is reviewing five points when creating the SWOT.
Those five points are:
1. Based on the existing SWOT for the business.
2. Use a TOWs matrix approach.
3. The TOWs technique for SWOT analysis is created specifically for multichannel marketing.
4. The RACE framework considers key digital marketing activities within SWOT Analysis.
5. SWOT in conjunction with TOWS and RACE helps identify details on specific markets depending on your company size.
1. Based on the existing SWOT for the business. before looking at SWOT for your marketing strategy, you need to look at the broader picture. What are the key issues that need to be managed for the business to be successful? This should not be a generic review but a targeted review of your market or a customer segment.
- A. By Segment:
1. What value is required by the customer?
2. What value are you offering to entice the customer to buy from you?
3. Avoid SWAGS (Scientifically Wildly Aimed Guesses)
4. Avoid using generic words (the weather, competitors, etc.)
5. Avoid using the same words on both threats and opportunities.
6. Ensure your actions are more complex than...improve communications.
7. Refrain from doing a generalized, unfocused SWOT analysis. This method makes the creator feel good but needs to dive deeper into analyzing what is happening.
Assemble in an environment where you won't be interrupted and be prepared to be totally open-minded about the task to be undertaken. Look at the graphic labeled "Effective template for completing a SWOT analysis." You need to complete it with segments in mind. If you have 5 or 6 segments, you need to do 5 or 6 SWOT analyses. Ideally, if you are starting out in photography, you should only have one segment and focus on building that segment until you are ready for diversification.
Step-by-Step Process for an Effective SWOT Analysis
1. Identify the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that influence the customers' decisions. There are typically six significant factors (price, reliability, customer service, offerings, products, and services).
2. Assign an important weighting to each CSF so that the weighting for each segment totals 100 percent.
3. Identify the key competitors for each segment and score your company's performance with each key competitor on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 = very poor and 10 = excellent. Limit to a few competitors (between 1 and 3).
4. Multiply weights by the scores and add up the weighted score for each competitor.
5. Access your relative strength by dividing your score by the best competitor's score.
6. Identify the key issues from the analysis.
7. Note that you can change your relative business strength by focusing on improving your strength on the criteria that matter most to customers.
You should include a multi-disciplinary team in completing your SWOT analysis. For example, you should have a salesperson, customer service person, or your accountant. For most photography businesses, you are a workforce of one. That is why it is crucial to network and partner with other photographers. Don't give your business higher scores because you feel you are doing good in an area. Working with a group of people helps you keep your evaluation honest, for the most part.
Complete the following template for each identified segment. You need to think carefully about the Critical Success Factors (CSFs), particularly how important they are to the customer, in other words, the weightings.
On the next page, you will see an example of a completed Swat analysis on a segment. Please note that the Critical Success Factors for this example are shorthand for what the customer considers important. For example, you must understand the meaning of SERVICE. It could mean anything from answering the phones/text in a timely fashion to being on time for appointments once it is acceptable to write down the word service in your SWOT. You must understand what it really means to the customer. This is where you must think about customer needs and how you define each competitor.
Once you complete your SWOT analysis, you can now begin to think about what improvements you need to make to the Critical Success Factors. When completing your own plans, you would increase the CSFs with the highest weights and those that would improve your competitiveness. Suppose you had been doing what was recommended previously. In that case, you can now set strategies for each of your important market segments or products. You can start to detail these strategies, determine how much they will cost you, and who will be responsible for making the necessary changes.
This aims to help you create a relatively simple method for ensuring robust strategies to meet your objectives based on rational analysis.
2. Use a TOWs matrix approach. When you develop your SWOT, you should also discover the TOWs matrix approach as invaluable. The power of the TOWs matrix format is in the way it not only gives a review but also helps you create and summarize strategies to improve the marketing plan.
Most of the time, the SWOT is placed in the appendix of a report or on the shelf. It does not drive action, but the TOWs approach integrates the SWOT into the whole strategy process to help you create your plan.
Below is an example that shows how the TOWs matrix reviews the situation in internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats around the edge and shows four boxes for creating strategies to succeed in the marketplace.
3. The TOWs technique for SWOT analysis is created specifically for multichannel marketing. The Internet and other digital technology offer new opportunities and threats by creating a SWOT-specific to the internet is important to help meet this challenge. When you create your internet SWOT, consider online channels in collaboration - customers can choose multiple channels. So, your SWOT should consider how a company's Internet presence integrates with the offline world.
Customers often need and want to contact a company by phone, text, or callback. Companies need to use offline communications like print, direct mail, billboards, and in some cases, TV. A marketing plan should optimize key marketing channels and platforms in a consistent fashion. When developing a marketing campaign, it is important to integrate across the customer journey touch points of REACH, ACT, CONVERT, and ENGAGE. This will help you gain growth in areas you need so that you can win more clients.
4. The RACE framework considers key digital marketing activities within SWOT Analysis. The internet-specific SWOT is an excellent way of identifying main areas of online marketing activity, namely areas of customer acquisition, conversion, retention, and growth. You could create a separate SWOT for each of these, particularly relevant to your business. You should identify and focus on activities that impact your business the most first and then lesser items.
R: REACH - Reaching customers and raising awareness on your site or other sites
A: ACT - Achieving interaction
C: CONVERT - Conversion to sale online or in-person sales
E: ENGAGE - Long-term relationship building with customers
5. SWOT in conjunction with TOWS and RACE helps identify details on specific markets depending on your company size. Breaking down the SWOT further may be useful for very large companies but not needed for smaller businesses. You can develop SWOTs for specific cities or states. Alternatively, a SWOT can be created for key customer segments, demographics, or B2B. When marketers use SWOT and TOWs, they gain a wealth of knowledge to develop their strategy.
When you have gone through this process for each of your segments, you have a more robust understanding of what sets you apart from your competitors. You can focus on your clients' needs and stop doing spot marketing based on gut feelings. The biggest mistake photographers make is waking up and realizing they don't have a shoot scheduled for the day and immediately jumping on social media and promoting some big discount they are having. Doing this screams desperation and a lack of organization and planning.