Once upon a time, in a busy town, there was a marketing consultant named Alex. Armed with a deep understanding of the marketing landscape, Alex had seen countless businesses fall prey to the allure of false promises and misguided marketing tactics.

One day, Alex received a call from a hopeful small business owner named Sarah. She was determined to take her business to new heights and was desperate for more marketing leads. Keen to help, Alex agreed to meet with Sarah to discuss her marketing goals.

“I can get you a stack of leads,” Alex proclaimed confidently when they met.

But then, with a mischievous grin, Alex quickly added, “Did I say leads? I meant weeds.”

Puzzled, Sarah asked. “What do you mean by ‘weeds,’ Alex?”

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

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 can be used quickly and effectively to understand what has been happening, what is going on now and where you may want your business to head in the future. It helps you develop a new strategy or to determine if your 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. This article focuses on SWOT use in a marketing strategy for small and medium sized business. 

What do the letters in SWOT stand for?

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

Whilst a SWOT can be used on its own, it is important to know that your SWOT feeds into your marketing strategy which should feed directly into the goals and objectives of your business. If you find your marketing strategy does not fit the goals and objectives of your business, then you should not be doing it – you need to take another look. A SWOT can help you take a deeper look at your business. You can conduct a SWOT analysis at any time but it’s a good idea to at least do so annually.

A SWOT analysis should be used to analyse each of these four points of your business. Your SWOT and ultimately your marketing strategy will identify your businesses:

• Strengths – that you want to keep, build on, grow.
• Weaknesses – that you want to reduce, eliminate, outsource, pivot, or improve.
• Opportunities – you want to build on, plan for and implement.
• Threats – you want to be prepared for, to minimise disruption and impacts.

I always use a SWOT analysis to understand the strategic marketing of a business. When I use a marketing SWOT analysis, I often take into consideration other areas of the business such as customer service or processes as these can all impact your business marketing.

Typically, the Strengths and the Weaknesses represent the internal factors of your business. The Opportunities and the Threats are external factors that may impact your business. These can be positive or negative factors.

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

When was the last time you reviewed your competitors? No matter what size your business – from solopreneurs to large corporates – it’s important to understand your key competition. Before we delve into why it is so important to understand your competition, what is a competitor analysis?

A competitor analysis compares your business to several other businesses in your industry – your rivals.  Rivals who are focused on a similar geographic location, that may also target similar customers, that may have similar products, services and marketing strategy to your own business – anywhere that you and they are competing for marketing share.

Ever had a Santa fail? Where the kids see you putting the presents under the Christmas tree?  A Santa fail happened in our house last year and we thought we had done all the necessary planning and preparation.

We had thought of a couple of scenarios in our planning, but did we really put enough deep thought into the entire Santa process?  

I’m sure no-one wants a Santa fail so why didn’t we prepare more?  Why didn’t we really think about what mattered? Our Customers!…and we were blindsided by our little customers: the thinking power of two young Generation Alpha’s.

In many ways our family’s Santa fail is relatable to a small business failing.  A small business can fail for several reasons. One of the top reasons a small business fails is when a business neglects to keep on top of their marketing strategy and their marketing planning.  

As business owners we all want a thriving small business and we know we need to plan to ensure our business and marketing objectives are being met. But how many small business owners have the time to plan – maintaining that strategy focus and momentum – when it all gets a little busy?  I’ll come back to business failure in a minute.

First, our Santa fail, and before I tell you what my Gen Alpha kids did, here is an overview of our planning checklist:

• Presents bought in advance when kids still at school and not on holidays.
• Presents well-hidden and not discovered (despite much hunting).
• Presents moved to several different locations because of the ‘much hunting’.
• Allowing kids to stay up late in the lead up to Christmas Eve so they would be tired and fall asleep easily on the big night.
• Watching Polar Express for the ‘nth time to reinforce the magic of believing.
• Giving kids warm milk to help them fall asleep and stay asleep.
• Prepping milk and cookies for Santa.
• Waiting over an hour after the kids were in bed before making our first move (just in case all those late nights and warm milk didn’t do the trick).
• Not wearing any shoes, in case the shoes made too much noise when walking.
• Lights off.
• Santa 1 moving presents in stages – from hiding spot to Location A.
• Checking with Santa 2 that there was no movement in the house. Check kids were still in bed.
• Santa 1 moving presents from Location A to Location B.
• Checking with Santa 2 that there was still no movement in the house. Yep! Kids were still in bed, breathing heavily and fast asleep.
• Final stage – moving of presents from Location B to under the Christmas tree.
• Santa 1 and Santa 2 drinking milk and eating cookies.

Unfortunately, the kids were one step ahead. They secretly planted their tablets and a laptop in prime locations, hitting the video record button before (VERY willingly) going to bed.  Despite the lights being off when Santa 1 and Santa 2 made their move, there was sufficient evidence to see it wasn’t Santa but rather mum and dad.  Fail 1. 

Our voices were also very distinct.  We had failed to do a jolly “Ho, Ho, Ho” or a “Merry Christmas to all and to all a
goodnight!”  Fail 2!

The kids had done even better planning.  They had done their research and due diligence.  In previous years, the children simply believed.  Little did I realise these little Gen Alpha customers were changing.  The kids were in effect ‘purchasing’ a product/service. In this case it was a Santa service: whereby Santa delivers the presents and places them under the Christmas tree.  They were on a product lifecycle.

With Christmas just around the corner is your marketing plan ready and ramped up for the busy period?  There is plenty of marketing that you need to be thinking about in the lead up to Christmas and if you are super organised your marketing plan was probably prepped months ago. 

But, for many busy small business owners it’s difficult to always be organised and focused on all parts of your business. Often, the marketing strategy and marketing planning get overlooked.  To help you this December here are 11 easy, must do marketing ideas if you have left your Christmas marketing planning a little last minute.

I wanted to make burgers for dinner.  I usually use eggs to bind the meat together but with all the panic buying there were no eggs left on the supermarket shelves.  Before I gave up on the meat burger dinner idea, I thought it was time to get creative with the challenge at hand: What was I going to use to bind my mince meat together? 

A friend suggested I use avocado to replace the eggs.  I admit, I was a little concerned.  I’d tried making chocolate avocado mouse before (an extremely unpopular and never repeated recipe in my house). Of course, there were plenty of avo’s on the shelf, so avocado it was!  Incredibly, it was a win win result! The kids didn’t taste the difference and dinner was a ravenous success.  

Away from my kitchen there are small businesses panicking.  Customers have stopped buying (apart from stocking up on essentials).  People globally have gone from a “I want” mentality to a “I need” mentality.  I no longer need that new dress or new shoes – quickly forgotten.  The new pergola or renovation you were planning is on hold…and that overseas trip…is now a dream perhaps for next year.

How do you keep success occurring in your business during a pandemic and economic downturn? It’s time to get creative: find those ingredients that binds you and your customers together to form a new marketing mix.  Sometimes you need to take a deeper look and think outside of the box for new ways of working or marketing.

For example: cafes and catering firms have been hit hard by social distancing.  Some are now offering a home/business delivery service. Travel companies, another hard hit industry.  I recently saw an accommodation company offering self-isolation packages including food and everything you’d need for the 14-day period.

It’s important to not give up on your business marketing especially during a time of volatility and economic downturn.

Now, more than ever, look at cost effective marketing measures. Know your break even points and think about your return on investment. Every business’ break even point is different and it helps to know this to work out how much marketing budget you can afford to spend for every new or existing customer.

Remember acquiring new customers is always more expensive than retaining your existing customer base.  Importantly, focus on retention marketing and look at ways you can work together with your customers.

As a marketing specialist, small and micro business owners often say to me: “I haven’t posted to social media for a while” or “I’m not good at posting to social media!” That’s understandable. You have various jobs to do – especially if it’s only you or a few staff and you may have no marketing experience.  Even with the best marketing planning, someone has to action those marketing plans and with limited resource you get busy, overwhelmed, stressed, forget to schedule or create (if you are your own designer and copywriter too). Taking time out to do social media is tricky.

In reality, your marketing shouldn’t be classified as taking time out from your day job. It’s a vital part of your business and is key.  Effective marketing ensures you can keep doing your day job.  The benefits of marketing should be obvious in your business even if you don’t track and measure your marketing activity.  I’m realistic, I know effective measurement is rarely done in a small business with no dedicated marketing person. Often because it’s considered to be taking time out of an already busy schedule.

When you first started your business you most probably started by telling people.  That ‘Word of Mouth’ is normally your first marketing channel and should definitely continue to be a key channel in your marketing plans.  Marketing channels are essentially all the different ways you can sell your businesses products.

From those initial start-up days, you continue to add marketing channels and today, social media forms a large part of most people’s marketing.  So how often should you post?

Plunging. 115km per hour down an eighty nine degree vertical drop, marketing, strategy and planning are far from my mind. Trapped in the hurtling train, I am being pushed, spun and twisted along the contorted, steel rollercoaster track.  My head forced to the left, forced to the right, then pushed back against the seat.

Had I not previously watched hundreds of people queuing, riding and safely climbing out of the rollercoaster train, I certainly would have thought I was spiralling, uncontrollably to my doom.

My train abruptly pulls to a stop before the platform. I peel my pale, bloodless fingers from the hand grips, relax my rigid body and with my hands covering my horribly stunned face, I laugh…ok cry, in relief.  THAT, I guess, was product delight and customer satisfaction!  Without any question, I had been thrilled.