Create your marketing strategy #3

Understanding your strengths and weaknesses

Every business has strengths and weaknesses. Your marketing strategy must take account of how your business' strengths and weaknesses will affect your marketing.

An honest and rigorous SWOT analysis, looking at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats is a good starting point for your marketing strategy document.
Also, conducting some market research on your existing customers at this point will help you to build a more honest picture of your reputation in the marketplace.

Strengths could include:

• personal and flexible customer service
• special features or benefits that your product offers
• specialist knowledge or skills

Weaknesses could include:

• limited financial resources
• lack of an established reputation
• inefficient accounting systems

Opportunities could include:

• increased demand from a particular market sector
• using the internet to reach new markets
• new technologies that allow you to improve product quality

Threats could include:

• the emergence of a new competitor
• more sophisticated, attractive or cheaper versions of your product or service
• new legislation increasing your costs
• a downturn in the economy, reducing overall demand

Find out how to do a SWOT analysis on the bizhelp24 website

Having done your analysis, you can then measure the potential effects each element may have on your marketing strategy.

For example, if new regulations will increase the cost of competing in a market where you're already weak, you might want to look for other opportunities. On the other hand, if you have a good reputation and your key competitor is struggling, the regulations might present the opportunity to push aggressively for new customers.