We have now covered marketing, sales, leads, marketing strategy and creating a marketing plan and now finally we are on our way and defining something that is nothing other than pure, unadulterated, marketing jargon.

So when marketing people talk about situational analysis what exactly is it that they mean? Wikipedia defines situational analysis as “a marketing term, and involves evaluating the situation and trends in a particular company’s market” and that “when developing strategies, analysis of the organisation and its environment as it is at the moment and how it may develop in the future, is important.”

Now that makes perfect sense, if you think of your marketing as a journey that you are planning you need to know where you are starting before you can plot a course to wherever it is that you want to get to. Your statring point will not only dictate your first action it is, at this point in your planning, the thing that will most influence your end goal.

You are most likely creating a marketing strategy because you want to change things, and nobody plans to make things worse, so you are almost certainly planning for things to get better. You might be planning to be have better products or services, to generate more awareness of your business, to have more leads, more sales or happier customers or to increase your turnover and your profitability, maybe you are really ambitious and you are planning to increase the value of your business so that you can sell the entire thing at some point in the future. The simple point here is that you can only make things better, or increase things or make people happier or increase the value of something in relation to the way things are now, and to do that you need to analyse your current situation through situational analysis.

There is a danger here that this analysis could turn into navel gazing, so is it important that you focus on the things you really need to know about your situation that will really benefit you in your marketing planning?

For Effective Marketing the things that you really need to understand are:

• your market
• your offering
• your customers
• your competitors
• your performance
• your resources

And that is probably a natural order for you to understand them in so that will take care of the next six if you haven’t got a blogging clue  posts.

So I hope that you now have a better blogging clue about what situational analysis is and how you could be doing it to benefit your marketing efforts.

Tune in next week if you haven’t got a blogging clue about market research.