What are some of the tools and frameworks that you use for marketing strategy analysis?

For marketing strategy analysis, I leverage tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, and social media insights. SWOT analysis, a key framework, assesses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It helps identify internal factors (S&W) affecting strategy and external factors (O&T) influencing success.

Crafting a marketing strategy is like being a master chef in a high-tech kitchen. I employ the SWOT analysis for a quick health check of the business, like an Instant Pot examining ingredients for quality. I use the PESTEL framework to monitor the marketing environment - it's my culinary weather forecast. For understanding our target audience, I use customer personas, like taste profiles for discerning foodies. And the Porter's Five Forces? That's my trusty food processor, slicing and dicing the competition. Lastly, the Marketing Mix is my recipe book, balancing the perfect blend of product, price, place, and promotion. Together, these tools whip up a gourmet marketing strategy that is Michelin-star worthy!

Your Swot Analysis is an integral part of your business plan and should be reviewed on an ongoing basis. Not only can it help you identify gaps in the market that you can fill, it can help you identify trends that may cause you to need to pivot. The sooner you can identify these, the quicker you can adjust both your offering and your market messaging to fulfill these needs and/or changes.

Customer Segmentation Tools: Tools like customer personas, customer journey mapping, and demographic analysis help in understanding and segmenting target audiences. Competitor Analysis Tools: Tools like competitive benchmarking, SWOT analysis of competitors, and market share analysis help in understanding the competitive landscape and identifying areas for differentiation. Marketing Analytics Platforms: Tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and HubSpot Analytics provide data-driven insights into website traffic, user behavior, and campaign performance. Consumer Surveys and Feedback Tools: Tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform enable the collection of customer feedback and insights to refine marketing strategies.

SMART goals help to lay important context to your marketing strategy. It quickly provides a way for the organisation to measure growth. As Arthur Nielsen used to say, “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.” Organizations that are able to measure its progress is able to track growth and rightsizing resources to fuel that growth.

By knowing your product and your industry in depth, you can be better aware of the changing landscape and can be better prepared to pivot and adjust your offerings and messaging quickly to respond to changes.

This is where I usually walk through an exercise with my clients on their product or service where we list the FEATURES vs. BENEFITS. Nobody cares about the "features", they care about the outcome. This is where the importance of identifying you target market comes into play and creating your ideal customer avatar (ICA). By knowing them in depth you can speak to their pain points and why the BENEFIT of your product/service is what is going to solve it for them thereby creating the Value Proposition

Porter's Five is the most helpful tool to bring back to the table when helping a client understand the overall state of competition within an industry. Highly recommend starting with initial examples and building together in an interactive format.

Porter's Five Force is utilized by me to quickly outline the category dynamics to form a playing field. It could help to outline areas in which are opportunities to exploit, and also the guardrails on where we are not able to compete with competition. Given enough time, I would look to combine that with Blue Ocean canvas to outline whitespaces for the business to compete in and which spaces are up for aggressive competition. These would be my initial starting point before going into conversations about prioritizing bets and rightsizing resource sizes behind each bets.

There are 2 steps in Marketing: First strategy, then tactics. Here's how it works: 1) Define the Strategy through the following 3 steps: - Segmentation of the market (qual/quant) - Targeting: which target segment will you go after? - Positioning: setting up your brand for success taking into consideration consumer insights, competition and your own company's strength 2) Once this is done, you can move on to defining the Marketing Mix, i.e the 4 P's: - Product - Pricing - Place (aka distribution) - Promotion (communication) Simple to articulate, difficult to execute!

4Ps is the basics of Marketing. It might sound like an oldest tool but it works. It is important to know all your 4 Ps (Price, Product, Place and Promotion) in detail to have a successful srategy and result. And constanly ddevelop and adjust them based on market and competitiveness, goals etc.

Just want to take a moment to introduce a new solution to the mix. In my experience, I have found that there is a skill and probably even an art form when it comes to building a strategy, analysing and researching, including metrics/analytics and then managing time, input, results and even expectations from others not actually involved in the marketing efforts! Phew! Its quite a thing! In amongst all of that we have to do something on a daily basis and more granular level. I feel its super important to have a task management system that is set out with outcomes that can be tracked, measured and impacted on - if they are commercial outcomes that are "business essential" then the value of marketing goes up! Look at My Marketing Button

I advocate using BASES innovation research to form a full view on your marketing strategy. BASES frameworks have been tested and proven over 40+ years with a strong correlation to in-market success. It's data science is also translated into business language that is understandable and actionable for business with strategies to win and tactics to deploy.

I’d consider the 4C’s (consumer, competition, culture, company) as a sound foundation for strategic analysis. It provides a good grounding of key areas and identifies areas of opportunity to probe further.

Identify and reevaluate the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) in your industry. Have these changed? How does your company and its competitors perform against these? Is your marketing strategy still relevant and impactful?

While individual frameworks are critical for measuring and analyzing campaign performance, combining multiple to get the big picture is often necessary. A learning plan serves as a comprehensive framework incorporating various measurement and analysis types, like SWOT and PESTEL. By integrating these details, the learning plan becomes a single source of truth for a campaign, providing a holistic view of the internal and external factors influencing its success. This approach ensures that all stakeholders understand the campaign's objectives, challenges, and opportunities, enabling informed decision-making and effective strategy adjustments throughout its execution.