How does Santa work out whether he needs to improve or grow his North Pole business marketing? What does Santa use to analyse his business marketing? Answer: Santa uses a basic analysis tool – the SWOT Analysis.

A SWOT analysis is a business analytics tool. With the right knowledge, it can be used across your entire business or to analyse specific areas of your business. It is often used when creating the marketing strategy in a business. It can be used quickly and effectively to understand what has been happening. Which means understanding what is going on now, and where you may want your business to head in the future. It helps you develop a new business or marketing strategy. It also helps to determine if your marketing strategy is on the correct path and in line with your business goals. 

A SWOT analysis forms a major part of any business and marketing strategy and is beneficial for your business when used correctly.

What do the letters in SWOT stand for?

S – Strengths
W – Weaknesses
O – Opportunities
T – Threats

For Santa, that means working out the Strengths and Weaknesses INSIDE Santa’s business. Plus, the Opportunities and Threats OUTSIDE Santa’s business.

You can do a SWOT analysis for your business too. Why do a SWOT? To analyse where your business is at and to help you find new opportunities.

Your SWOT can form part of your marketing strategy. It will identify your businesses:

Strengths – that you want to keep, build on, grow.

Weaknesses – that you want to reduce, eliminate, outsource, adjust, or improve.

Opportunities – you want to build on, plan for and implement.

Threats – you want to be prepared for, to minimise disruption and impacts.

Once you have completed the SWOT analysis, you should be able to assess and prioritise several opportunities. These opportunities should align with your business and marketing goals.

A SWOT doesn’t need Christmas magic. It needs a non-biased viewpoint. You must be authentic when you analyse your business, otherwise it is a waste of time. For Santa this was easy.

Is Santa being Good or Bad? Naughty or Nice? Santa put on his thinking cap to create his business’ 5-Step SWOT analysis. Let’s see the outcome of Santa’s Step 1-4. What would you add to any of these SWOT factors?

If you are like me, it feels like Christmas has snuck up this year. Marketing planning for Christmas has taken a back seat especially after the weeks of lockdown, preparing covid safe return and implementing new covid rules. It’s not too late to quickly plan and prepare your Christmas marketing. Make your Christmas marketing easy, with these Christmas marketing ideas for your business, plus some essential planning ideas you will need to get your business geared up for the New Year.

1. Do you prepare a pre-holiday checklist?

Before you go off on your annual January holidays or even before you shut down for a few public holidays think about all the business and marketing things you need to do. Create a simple checklist to check back against your marketing strategy and plan. 

Think about what was due for this quarter or month? Is everything up to date?

PRE-HOLIDAY MARKETING IDEA MUST HAVES:

• If you are taking holidays, post your holiday operation hours, your holiday closing dates, contact details for urgent enquiries etc. Post at least three times over December/January. Update your website, social media and search engines.
• If you are not taking holidays, posting “we are open” is also important.

Customers want to know specifics and want certainty. Customers who are unsure look elsewhere.

How much advance notice you need to give your customers depends on your business.  For example, a massage therapist might need to tell their customers weeks in advance depending on how regular their clients repeat book.  As a general rule of thumb, give at least twice as long as the time period you are taking off. If you are taking four weeks holiday, then give at least two weeks advance notice.

If you tend to plan and schedule social media content last minute to the point that you rarely post, then consider outsourcing. Organic posting is important for a whole bunch of reasons. And, over the Christmas period it’s vital so that your customers know you are open for business or on holidays