2014 SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL SEASON
Warmest Festivals in June
STRUCTURED ANALYSIS : SELF
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly... "The harder I work the luckier I get." If you want to succeed at anything in life, you must know what you are GOOD at and find work doing it, you must know what you are BAD at and learn to work around it so it does not affect your work and make for an UGLY situation. The business world knows this as SWOT, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and you can see it in action on page 46 later. For now we will use them to understand your brand but also to analyze your business FRONT OFFICE (customer facing) initiatives like your marketing campaigns and website and BACK OFFICE ERP or CRM applications
PROCESS MAPPING. The first step in any analysis is to map the current AS-IS using a drawing program known as flow charting. You should prepare a list of the processes you want to understand. Next you will gather information from all those involved and after SWOT analysis is complete, agree on improvement changes to staff, technology or process, if necessary.
INTERNAL OPTIMIZATION relies on ANY, MANY or ALL of your back office and front office analytics but actually goes a step further by allowing you to implement html code into web pages. The code allows you to directly monitor activity on your website and to create real-time reports. When you understand what works you can optimize your website accordingly affecting, folder structure and html file naming conventions, navigation flows, anchor links, categorization, meta-tags, titles, headings, alt-descriptions, keyword phrases, densities, proximity and relevance as well page themes, color schemes and fonts. External files for html/javascript, cascading style sheets and multi-media should be compressed in order to increase page load times.
FRONT OFFICE SWOT includes internal and external aspects with the EXTERNAL visibility, reach and buzz of your company, products, services, advertising and marketing campaigns being the easiest and least expensive to perform. This involves researching though external sources how many business directories, online classifieds, ads, companies, partners, affiliates, consumers, customers, social media fans and blog subscribers are talking about you or searching and using your solutions. There are many vendors like Nielsen.com ratings and CommScore.com that can help you obtain this information and I have included a matrix of them on my blog.
BACK OFFICE SWOT involves Enterprise Resource Planning Software modules ( ERP ) used to manage the back office tasks like supply chain, inventories, pricing, accounting, human resources / payroll and even sales or customer service functions. These can be difficult to implement and costly so often they are handled by one person only which can be incredibly stressfull and time consuming. Customer Relationship Management software ( CRM SFA FFA ) provides the inventory, sales and customer service aspects of ERP but at a much lower cost of ownership and maintenance. This allows for lower implementation costs but there are still many technical hurdles to overcome. Last but not least, Information Technology ( IT ) infrastructure which lays down an internal network ( LAN, WAN, WIFI VPN ) so that you can install and run your necessary back and front office software. Most business have at least this in place as it is easily scalable from low cost consumer products to large scale enterprise installations that require CEO, CMO and CIO approval & executive management staff. See Page 23 for vendor matrix.
STRUCTURED ANALYSIS : MARKETING
PRIMARY SECONDARY
There are many reasons why knowing the market you serve is important but the two main that we will cover in this publication are Start-up of a new business ( MARKET ANALYSIS ) and Growth of a current business ( MARKETING ANALYSIS ).
Both share similarities in statistical data sourcing ( Census.gov, Business.gov, SBA.gov, BLS.gov, DOL.gov, BuyUSA.gov, etc... ). More importantly their data collection and analysis of Primary and Secondary consumer segments use the same Quantitative and Qualitative standard methodology for capturing Geographic, Demographic, Psychographic and Psynographic info.
The resulting dataset provides historical benchmarks upon which current and sometimes real-time data can be used to discover leading and lagging macro economic indicators that support the desired business goal.
MARKET ANALYSIS is a part of every Business Plan and used to seek startup capital, therefore it needs to be as accurate and direct as possible including an industry description, current size, forecasted growth, current lifecycle stage, economic indicators for employment, income and earnings.
A successful analysis will also include additional divisions of the market and its consumers indicating prospective customers from a Primary and Secondary segment of the total market.
Primary Research will find distinguishing characteristics by asking questions for "critical product needs", "last purchase made", "where are they located?", "seasonal or cyclical purchasing?", "pricing points and gross margin targets", "volume discounts and "how much market share can be gained?".
Competitive Analysis should identify your competition by product line, service and market share while providing SWOT.
MARKETING RESEARCH is part of every Marketing Plan and used to understand if a company is meeting the needs and expectations of its customers, products and services. Analyzing the data will help you understand which products and services are in demand, and how to reduce risk.
Primary research is performed by asking questions directly to analyze current sales and the effectiveness of current practices using interviews, surveys, questionnaires and focus groups. "Why are you purchasing now?", "Which other products do you like?", "What price would be fair?", "How would you make it better?"
Secondary Research is used to analyze data that has already been published to asking the same questions.
STRUCTURED ANALYSIS : Competitive
Ever wonder how your competition does what they do? Well you don't need the NSA to help you snoop on them. Today, companies like Compete.com, CoreMetrics.com and Webtrends.com to name a few are making it easy for anybody to understand any business. The power of the data factory has enabled a new business to start-up and scale faster than ever before but it also means that since most companies have some exposure to the Cloud it becomes rather easy almost foolish not to spy on your competitor's industry visibility, consumer and supply chain reach.
Google, Yahoo and Bing make it real simple to spy right on the search engine query itself. enter a few keywords and you can see how your target company ranks in the SERP, It gets better when you search using Yahoo.com [SITE EXPLORER] Google.com [LINK : DOMAIN ] or [SITE : DOMAIN] to find their backlinks or outbound links. For Bing use the website MarketLeap.com.
Another simple trick is to [VIEWSOURCE] on your competitors website. There you can find all kinds of goodies including [KEYWORD DESCRIPTIONS] to ascertain some of their SEO optimization tactics. Seotoolset.com has a [PAGE ANALYZER] feature that searches your competitors content and sorts it based on keywords repeated to reverse engineer their strategy. You should also install their SEMTOOLBAR browser plug-in and try Multi-Page Analyzer which charges $29.95 a month and can certainly pay for itself with just one sale.
My recommendation would be to spy on the top three companies in your industry or your direct competition and average the results of your findings so that you can optimize your own efforts with similar if not better results. Some companies will even go as far as hijacking their competitors traffic but I strongly advice against such black hat strategies since they usually do more harm than good in the long run. I promise you slow and steady wins the race so long as you are willing to work as hard as your competition. It just takes a bit more thinking and you will also wind up working smarter. Remember you must be EQUAL before you can set yourself APART.
Now, when it comes to content the game changes a little. You can use CopyScope.com WordTracker.com or the Google Ad Planner to not only research competitive keyword phrases but also find single keyword strategies, long tail combinations and even negative keywords that allow you to optimize your content, landing pages and SEM campaigns. Understanding proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast will help you improve conversion rates, quality scores and reduce your advertising costs on Google AdWords/AdSense, Bing/Yahoo AdCenter and others. Remember "high traffic" and "high conversion" keywords do not have the same costs or results.
Last but not least, just like in self-analysis, blogs, directories, social media, rss feeds, shopping feeds are great ways to search for link magnets, link buying, link baiting, link requesting and link exchanging. What's good for the goose kinda thing... Again these are just some of the most important issues so feel free to use the matrix to explore more advanced tools.
One topic that I will leave for a later publication will be website design standards for your web pages, landing pages and ads. A good Content Management System ( CMS / WMS ) will answer all your questions if not a good designer..
