I’ve been extremely fortunate lately to have time to explore and be a part of some really interesting projects, within business as well as personally. Much of it has resulted in me challenging myself in one or another and it’s been fantastic but has also resulted in lots of creative ideas scribbled down in my notebook. As we continue to face uncertain times, I’m really trying to stay focused on not taking on too much but one of the elements that I’ve been delving into again is the notion of going back to basics.
In marketing, going back to basics is so crucial as it allows you to step back and re-assess, making sure that your foundations are still supporting current and future needs, internally and externally. With so many external factors affecting business and change being the only real certainty, I thought that it might be beneficial for me to share what I see as the important steps in either building, or assessing your brand and marketing foundations.
Below I’ve outlined what I believe should be the very first review you should do in assessing foundations of your business, whether existing or new. I honestly believe that this step is crucial to setting up a business correctly and should be undertaken openly and honestly.
Step 1: Write down, understand and review the internal and external influences
If your an existing business, this is something that you’ve probably done before but the good old “SWOT” analysis can sometimes be a bit of a forgotten task, but yet is possibly one of the most beneficial for both new and existing businesses. The external environment is changing constantly so reviewing how things are going internally and externally at least every year is going to help you keep on top of things.
When looking at internal influences, these are your strengths and weaknesses – think of them as the things that you can control.
For strengths, ask yourself some of the following questions:
- What are we doing well?
- What are we doing better than our competitors?
- What’s really working for us?
- What do our customers or businesses like about us?
Many businesses find it easy to identify strengths, they tend to be quite visible and can be quite obvious and attributed to a lot of successes however, weaknesses tend to be a little more challenging. These are the areas that will require a little more attention and it’s crucial to be brutally honest:
- What’s not performing as well as it should?
- What do we need to improve on?
- What resource limitations that we have?
When looking internally, you need to consider all aspects of your business including your brand, people, financials, physical location, logistics, manufacturing, equipment, website – everything that you have control over.
An interesting exercise for those who have dusted off their previous analysis is whether or not you can identify if any of the previous weaknesses have actually become strengths. When writing down your weaknesses, many can become overwhelmed but you must remember that weaknesses are elements in which you do have control over. By having control, this means that you have the opportunity to overcome weaknesses or even learn from them and adapt so that they become one of your strengths. This isn’t going to be possible for all weaknesses but there are many that you might want to challenge yourself to explore converting them to strengths as they may help to differentiate you with competitors or improve customer engagement.
Now that you’ve looked at your internal operations, it’s time to look at the external factors of opportunities and threats. For my own benefit, I like to look at threats first. It’s possibly just to a mindset thing, but ending on opportunities tends to be quite exciting and definitely can help maintain motivation.
As strengths and weaknesses are internal, you’ve probably already guessed that threats and opportunities are external influences. For me, I believe that anything that you write as a threat should be continually monitored. Realistically, you’re probably just trying to stay ahead of the day to day things and quietly rolling your eyes at me as you read this. If I didn’t point this out however, I feel that I wouldn’t be doing the right thing by you. Threats are a real risk to your success and as they are external, you can’t control them but need to be prepared to defend or react to them.
So, based on this, I’m going to chat a little more about threats.
- What is going to stop us from being successful?
- What is going to get in our way of reaching our goals?
- What do we need to be aware of?
- What economic and social influences do we need to stay abreast of?
- What environmental risks do we need to stay close to?
Threats are not something that you want to push away from, they should actually be embedded in to your business so that you can monitor them. Factors such as COVID, climate change, economic climate, war, bushfire, storms, are all things that are actually happening now and both individually and collectively could have direct and indirect influences on your business. If we take probably the most visible issue of COVID. This has direct impacts with many businesses needing to shut their doors and find other ways to service their customers. Further to this, there are also impacts to supply chains, manufacturing, access to parts, resource availability, managing staff remotely, business operational changes, the list really could go on. All of these will threaten the operation of a business in one way or another and it’s vital that businesses identify the implications and ways to mitigate those.
When writing your threats too, don’t just write something like “The impact of COVID on our business” – you can’t develop a to manage COVID. Get right down in to the detail and consider the fundamental threats, for example:
- Supply shortages from overseas affects production
- Stock delays results in a reduction of product lines availability for customers
- Office closures results in the need for remote working applications to keep staff operational
This is confronting – it also can create a real fear of what might be but, by writing it all down and exploring to full details you can develop a strategy to manage the threats including work-a-rounds, finding alternate suppliers, product lines etc. Threats are just that, they are potential impacts to your business. The more aware you are that they exist, the quicker you will be able to respond and find a way to manage to them.
So, I’d suggest that now would be a good time to step away from your notes, have a coffee or tea and re-focus before moving on to opportunities. As much as threats can create negativity and a slight state of depression and sadness, opportunities can really get your heart and mind racing
Opportunities, well these are the areas that you want to be prepared to capitalise on. They might be current or future but they are certainly a strategy driver to help build success. When writing about opportunities think about the why’s and what’s of:
- Why do our customers want to engage with us?
- What will help us succeed?
- What are other market opportunities for us?
- What environmental factors are going to help us?
- What social changes are going to be good for us?
Opportunities can help drive strategies of diversion, growth, expansion and even technical investments. I recall a time when online banking was only just being explored and there was a real hesitation as it was such a big change for business and markets. Banks could have sat back and looked at the internet as a threat, it would limit the dependence that customers had on them but, many looked at it as an opportunity and I feel that you would probably all agree with me that it was an opportunity worth taking! So many fundamental changes to our lives have been the result of someone capitalising on an opportunity and establishing a strategy to make it a success. The most important thing with opportunities is to make sure that you are planning and timing your execution correctly. If you try to go to soon when you’re not ready, it might be a failure, and, if your too late, well you’ve possibly just created a competitive threat. Once you’ve finished writing down your opportunities, list them in order of capability and priority. The ones that you can act on now or in the short term without too much resource or financial investment are the best to go for first. It doesn’t mean that you can’t work on the others, but strategically approaching opportunities will help set foundations for the future success of your business.
Now that you’ve finished writing your SWOT, it’s not time to just put it aside and go back to the day to day. You need to develop an action plan which will allow you to manage each of the elements that you considered.
Implementing your SWOT into your business through people, process, technology, planning and strategy is going to ensure that you are constantly securing your current and future success.
One of the most important bits of advice that I like to share with all businesses that I work with on foundation work is that you must also set a review period for your SWOT. Go back to it regularly, tick off things that you’ve achieved, move things around and add more to the list. Nothing in life is static, everything moves and a SWOT is definitely one of those things and it must move about. By building it in to your regular business reviews will allow you just to reset, check that you are still achieving and protecting what is yours.
So, I hope that I’ve inspired some of you either to dust off the old SWOT or sit down and start working on a new one. For those who have a support team, get them involved. It can be extremely motivating for teams if they are a part setting the foundations and direction for a business and we definitely want “our people” on your list of strengths.
Good Luck!
The Marketing Elf
©August 2021
The Marketing Elf 