What do you need?

Having worked out what it is you want, it might be a good idea to analyse what you need to put a successful marketing campaign into action.

The SWOT analysis is literally decades old, but the start of a campaign is a good point to run one. In case you’ve never been on a corporate training course for middle managers, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

Look hard at yourself, your business and your current presence, whether online or bricks-and-mortar, and list the SWOTs for each. You need to have all of them in mind when constructing your strategy:

1. Strengths: What is your business good at?
2. Weakness: What could you do better?
3. Opportunities: How can you grow, change and improve?
4. Threats: What could happen, internally and externally, that might affect you negatively? (We’re talking in business terms here – online threats are a separate issue that we’ll cover in a later blog)

We talked in an earlier blog about indicators – their full term is Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. Business is very fond of these, as setting and monitoring them gives managers something to do. They can be very useful to you too, but they have to be meaningful to your plan.

And even more importantly, they have to be realistic. Don’t set yourself the target of upselling a five-year premium support package with each widget unless you have good evidence that it’s actually possible. A good way to set them is the question “What do I need to happen?”

As we’re into acronyms today, here’s a third one to help you set your KPIs: SMART. It stands for

• Specific (well defined, clear, unambiguous)
• Measurable: (how far you’ve got towards your goal)
• Achievable: (see above)
• Realistic: (within your reach and relevant to your overall campaign goal)
• Timely: (having a clearly defined timeline with start and end dates)

Used properly, KPIs will be a lasting record of your initial goals, and can be used to tune your campaign as you go along.

Together, SWOT and KPIs with SMART will help you see what you need to do to put your plan into action.