I love January 1^st! The noise of Christmas settles down and life promises to get back to normal— whatever that is! But the New Year brings new possibilities. It brings hope and the promises of new and not so new passions.

Flowers bring hope and promise too. Somehow, every January my flowers push their little buds through the soil once again. They reach out with tender green shoots, testing the air for readiness. Each minute of sunlight brings them more strength to push on, yet they are patient, knowing that it takes time to reach the prize of a beautiful blossom.

Sometimes, they experience setbacks along the way. An early frost, a hungry bug, or a misplaced foot can cripple the tender shoot. But, that doesn’t stop the journey. Never missing a step, the bud heals its injury and keeps growing towards that eventful day when it can explode in full bloom.

What lessons can we learn by watching the flower?

1. Have goals you can reach for. Blossoms come in all sizes and goals do to. Not every goal has to be a stretch goal, sometimes it’s just as important to knock things off the to-do list. How about finally writing that white paper sales has been clamoring for?

2.  Take a risk. It’s easy to talk ourselves into waiting for just the “right” moment. But the flower pushes its new shoot into the crisp January air, braving the possibility of frost. What new marketing tactic will you try?

3.  Start small and grow. If a flower waited until it had a blossom before it broke ground, it would never happen. Don’t put off the journey until you know everything. The joy is in the discovery. Look for simple things you can do to improve the effectiveness of your marketing program.

4.  Announce your journey. Just as the flower pushes through the soil to let us know it will bloom again, a good marketing team will collaborate on the marketing strategy and share in the goals. Announce your team’s intentions by publishing your marketing collateral assignments on a shared calendar.

5.  Plan for setbacks. Sometimes the soil isn’t right, the rains don’t come, the tender shoot gets bumped and broken. Though the growth may be slowed temporarily, it rarely stops. The flower works on healing the wound and getting back on track. Take actionable steps with you lessons learn.

6.  Celebrate accomplishments! The long journey finally produces the ultimate reward – the beautiful blossom. The flower shows off his accomplishment in all its glory with color and fragrance, encouraging other flowers to do the same. Don’t be afraid to share your victory – you just might inspire someone else.

7.  Give something to others. With your cup filled, it’s so much easier to give of yourself to others. Having reached the blossom, the flower produces seeds and fruits that give life to other creatures and spawn new flowers! To date, I have developed eight websites for no cost to some of my favorite non-profits, including Friends of Gold Butte. Some have since generated paid work!

Take a lesson from the flower and set your marketing program in motion now so that it can bloom and bring you rewarding results in 2012. Happy New year readers and be sure to have a little fun while you’re at it!

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Have you or your company performed a SWOT analysis lately? If not, now is a great time to use a SWOT analysis to build a big-picture view of your company.

A SWOT analysis looks at an area from a few directions, specifically:

Strengths – characteristics that are helpful in achieving your goals

Weaknesses – characteristics that are harmful to achieving your goals

Opportunities – external conditions that are helpful in achieving your goals

Threats – external conditions that may reduce the chance of achieving your goals

A SWOT analysis helps you understand the “lay of the land.” It’s a chance to put everything on the table and understand the environment you are working in. It helps identify both the internal and external factors that influence the ability to reach your goals. As part of any annual planning, your SWOT analysis should be updated and goals appropriately adjusted.

Looking specifically at each area of the SWOT analysis, here are just some of the suggested characteristics to review:

Strengths – Customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics, brand recognition, intellectual property and patents, exclusive or advantageous contracts with highly desired suppliers or products, first-mover advantage, and high barrier to entry.

Weaknesses – Essentially, weaknesses will be the opposite of strengths. Low customer satisfaction, low brand recognition, low barrier to entry, little IP, high costs, lack of any advantageous supplier agreements.

Opportunities – New technologies, unfulfilled customer need or demand, loosening of external policies and laws, increased access to international markets.

Threats – Products that are out of favor or end of life, increase in copy-cat products across the market, introduction of new regulations, unfavorable economic conditions.

The goal of most companies is to sustain a competitive advantage. Michael Porter describes competitive advantage as two types: cost advantage and differentiation advantage.

Competitive advantage is achieved by using your company’s resources (capital, human, brand equity, IP, etc.) and your company’s ability to create efficiencies, quality, and innovation. These are the areas that should be included in your SWOT.

Marketing is often the owner of the SWOT task, using SWOTs to build detailed profiles of competitors in the market. Areas of analysis include your competitor’s cost structure, profit margin, resources (including capital and human), expertise, brand positioning, product differentiation, and market penetration (rates and trends).

Collecting this information is no easy task! It is time-consuming and requires a bit of sleuthing, especially if your competitor is a privately-held company. Be sure to perform your own SWOT in the same manner so you have an aligned comparison. 

Putting it all together, your SWOT analysis is the key to identifying areas that currently support and currently threaten your competitive advantage. This works whether you are performing a SWOT analysis for a large corporation or your own small business. You can even create your own personal SWOT – great for those New Year’s resolutions!

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI