A SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning tool to help you position your business within your market and your industry. The components that make up SWOT are: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. As a bonus, you can also throw in an additional T (SWOT-T), Trends. Here’s a short description of the SWOT components: Strengths: What are your business’ strengths, […]
Strategy
Customer-Centric Strategies Win Over Product-Centric
Is your marketing focus product-centric or customer-centric? If you only sell products, it’s time to realize that times have changed. With a wealth of products now available, customers look for the most memorable experience, not just the best product. These days, a fun shopping experience, or no-question returns, often tips the scales over extra product features or […]
Holistic Security: The Most Effective Strategy for SMBs
The fight against cybercrime is constant—as soon as new security measures are established, hackers are working to counteract them. Whenever a new tool or update is released, it introduces other vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited. In addition, with attacks costing small businesses an average of $34,000, and as many as 60% having to close […]
Investors, Your Board, and You: Who Controls Strategy?
You’re building a company from your vision and a passion, and lots of people are going to tell you that you have this or that wrong, and that it just won’t work. Business plans rarely survive market contact The truth is that very, very few early business plans survive in a form completely recognizable when looking […]
How to Establish a Video Marketing Strategy for Your Business
A recent study concluded that the human brain processes videos at nearly 10,000 times the speed at which they process text. Quite clearly, videos are one of the most engaging forms of marketing for the millennial customer. However, compared to text, videos are also a lot more resource-intensive to produce. Establishing a clear marketing strategy […]
5 Key Elements of a Winning Business Strategy Today
Does your business have a visible positive strategy, or do your customers and employees still see your primary focus as closing more sales and killing competitors? Certainly that has been the strategy of many companies, and has worked in the past, but today’s customers and workers are looking for more. They want relationships, positive experiences, […]
The Value of Retrospectives After Marketing Projects
For all the millions of articles, eBooks, videos, and podcasts explaining marketing best practices, we have to face facts—success comes down to experimentation and continuous improvement. It’s easy to get stuck in silos as we try to make continuous improvements to our strategies. The social media team thinks about how to boost engagement. Email marketers try to improve […]
Want to Fully Engage Employees? Use These Proven Strategies
The obvious purpose of strategic planning is to decide what you want to become. The not so obvious purpose is engaging the hearts and minds of every person in the organization to engage in the journey to get there. So what is it that engages us? We know that people have a deep desire to […]
Strategic Planning for Business Owners
What Is Included In Business Succession Planning? A business owner needs to consider various strategies in order to prepare for the expected and unexpected legal challenges. To do so, the business owner should generally form a separate entity, such as a corporation. Next, whether the business is owned by one person or multiple partners, every […]
10 New Venture Strategies That Often Lead to Disaster
Every entrepreneur I know has their favorite excuse for a previous failure—an investor backed out, the economy took a downturn, or a supplier delivered bad quality. These things outside your control do happen, but based on my years of experience as a startup advisor and angel investor, I still see too many strategies leading to […]
