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What do you do? What do you sell? Seems like an easy question, but really it’s more complicated than it would seem. If you sell widgets, you might say, “I sell widgets”. But that’s not really what you are providing.
One of the sections of my “Down and Dirty Marketing Plan” involves spelling out what good or service you provide your customers. And when it comes to answering this question, you need to dig a little deeper. You have to know not only what literal good or service you provide, you need to know what your customers actually get. Do your customers get a widget, or do they get what the widget does?
Once you can frame what you do in terms of what your clients actually get, it becomes a lot easier to market yourself. Once you know what your clients get from you, you can better speak to the benefits of your product or service, rather than the features. Because when you’re marketing, discussing benefits always has a better impact on your potential clients than features. Example… which would you be more interested in… a widget with 3 splurgity gurgs and 200 whatchamacallits, or a widget that makes it easier to clean your bathroom?
So what do you do?
There’s a lot of marketing jargon out there, and most of it is really pretty meaningless. The exception to this is the SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis involves writing down your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And it’s a vital part of your marketing and business plan – one that is often overlooked and underutilized.
Why write out your SWOT? I would argue that the SWOT analysis is the most important component of your marketing plan. It gives a down a dirty version of the strengths you can build your marketing around. It provides the weaknesses you can either try to fix or do your marketing in such a way as to minimize their influence on customers. The opportunities show you who or where to focus your marketing on and the threats let you know which marketing path to take to minimize them.
If you don’t have time to write out a full marketing plan… at least take the time to write out your SWOT.
Do you have a SWOT analysis?
“I want my company to succeed” is not a goal or objective. It’s a vague hope that you can never really quantify or know if you’ve achieved it. When you are putting a marketing plan together, you need to identify real, quantifiable objectives.
Not measurable… “I want more clients”… Better, “I want 3 more clients per month”
Not measurable… “I want to make more money”… Better, “I want to bring in $20,000 more revenue next year”
Why is this important? In order to know if your marketing efforts are actually succeeding, you need to have a real goal you’re aiming at. You need a target. Additionally, having a real quantifiable objective focuses your efforts. Rather than floundering trying to figure out how to “get more clients”, you can figure out the steps you need to take to get 3 more clients per month.
What are your objectives? Are they quantifiable?
