The businesses that get marketing right don’t start with tactics. They start with clarity.
This is the first stage of developing a marketing strategy: getting a clear, honest picture of where your business stands before deciding what to do about it. It's not a nice-to-have, it's essential. Skip it, and your plan is really just a guess dressed up as a strategy. Get it right, and everything that follows becomes not just stronger, but a lot easier too.
Are you focusing on the right things?
One of the most common mistakes businesses make, when it comes to marketing, is jumping straight into action with a new campaign, some social media content, a rebrand… without first asking themselves whether they are focusing on the right things.
The businesses that get their marketing right don’t start with tactics. They start with clarity about where they are now, what’s working and what isn’t, where the real opportunities lie, and what’s standing in the way of growth. Getting to that clarity requires doing some deliberate groundwork, and doing it regularly.
Make it an annual habit
Once a year, before you develop any marketing plans, start with a proper 360 situation analysis. Not a quick gut-check, but a structured, analytical review of everything relevant to your business and the market you operate in.
Think of it as your annual health check. The thing that tells you what you’re actually dealing with before you decide what to do about it.
What to review: the 6 Cs
A useful way to structure your situation analysis is around six areas, which are best summarised as the 6Cs, making it easier to remember! Each of the 6 Cs gives you a different lens on your business and the market you compete in.
Context
What is happening in the broader environment, and what's most likely to impact your business? This covers a few different angles: economic factors affecting businesses and consumers (e.g. inflation and rising costs); legislative changes (e.g. new food labelling requirements, packaging regulations, advertising rules); social shifts (e.g. growing interest in health, sustainability or provenance); and technological developments changing how people shop or discover products.
You won't be able to control any of these. But understanding them helps you anticipate what's coming, and adapt accordingly.
Category
What is happening in your specific product category? Is it growing or declining? What trends are shaping it, and how does performance vary by channel or season? You need to understand the category you compete in before you can identify where to focus within it.
Competitors
Who are you competing with, and what are they doing? It’s worth looking at two types. Direct competitors are brands or products with similar features to yours, targeting the same customers. Indirect competitors are those meeting the same underlying consumer need but with a different type of product. A sparkling soft drink, for example, competes directly with other soft drinks but indirectly with anything else someone might choose to drink instead. What are your competitors getting right? And where are the gaps?
Channels
This is about understanding how your business performs across the different channels where your product is sold or discovered. Which channels are growing and which are declining? Which are most profitable? Which do your customers prefer, and is that changing? Are there channels becoming more important that you are not yet capitalising on? Are there channels that are taking up more resources but delivering less and less return?
Customers
Who is buying from you, how often, and why? What do they value most? What would make them buy more, stay loyal, or recommend you? This is also where you look at broader consumer trends and how attitudes and behaviours in your category are shifting over time.
Company
An honest assessment of your own business. How are you performing financially and against your key marketing metrics? How does your pricing compare to competitors? What has your recent marketing activity actually delivered?
Turning your analysis into a SWOT review
Once you have done your 360 review, the next step is distilling what you have learned into a SWOT. A structured summary of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
The quality of your SWOT depends entirely on the quality of thinking that goes into it. A good SWOT is grounded in facts rather than opinions, specific rather than vague, and concise enough to be useful. Pick the biggest and most significant things from your analysis for each quadrant. No more than 6 per quadrant, less if there aren’t 6 significant ones. Exclude the things that won’t make much difference whether you address them or not.
Two things worth keeping in mind:
Strengths and Weaknesses should always be assessed relative to your competitors, not in isolation, and should be well defined.
For example, “We make a great product” is not a strength. Instead, “We are the only brand in our category that is growing” is.
Opportunities and Threats should come entirely from the external world. Things outside your control that could either work in your favour or against you. The rapid growth of the No and Low alcohol drinks market, for example, is an opportunity for some businesses and a threat to others. Opportunities and Threats are not things you could choose to do. Those decisions come later.
Using your SWOT review to find your focus
Producing the four quadrants is only half the job. The real value comes from what you do next: diagnosing what your SWOT is actually telling you, and using it to identify the three to five key challenges your business needs to address to grow.
Ask yourself:
Which strengths can you leverage to take advantage of the opportunities you have identified?
Which strengths can help you navigate or reduce the impact of your biggest threats?
Which weaknesses, if left unaddressed, will hold you back most?
Is there a weakness that, if fixed, would unlock a real opportunity?
The answers point you towards your key areas of focus. The things that most need your attention and energy. These become the foundation of your marketing objectives and strategy. Rather than spreading your efforts across everything, you know exactly where to concentrate.
Why it matters
Most businesses skip this step, or do a version of it that is too quick and too surface-level to be genuinely useful. The result is marketing that feels busy but lacks direction. Activity that doesn’t add up to a coherent plan.
Taking the time to do this properly, once a year, changes how you make decisions. It means your marketing is built on a clear-eyed view of where you actually are, not where you hope you are.
And that’s the difference between a plan that looks good on paper and one that actually drives your business forward.
Making it happen
Knowing how to do this and actually doing it well are two different things. Here are a few practical tips that make a real difference.
Treat it as a priority, not a background task
This process will never feel urgent. There will always be something that feels more pressing. But that’s exactly why it so often doesn’t get done properly, or at all. Block out dedicated time in your diary, away from the day-to-day. Real, focused time where this is the only thing on the agenda.
Don’t try to do it all in one go
The secret to getting this right is not to power through it in one long session. Strategic thinking needs time to breathe. Do a section, step away, let it sit, then come back with fresh eyes.
A data point might suddenly spark a light bulb moment about something that belongs in your SWOT. You might realise one of your six points per quadrant isn't actually the most important one. Or you might just feel a point needs defining better. Whatever it is, that reflection time is what sharpens the thinking before you move to the next stage.
It isn't the most exciting part of developing a marketing plan for most marketers. But done well, it often becomes one of the most rewarding stages, because it's where the light bulb moments happen, the ones that give you real confidence you're focusing on what will make the biggest difference, and ultimately lead to a stronger plan.
That said, giving it time to breathe doesn't mean giving it unlimited time. Diarise the sessions, and stick to them, but also set yourself a clear deadline for when the situation analysis needs to be finished. Without one, it's easy to keep coming back, keep tweaking, and never quite move on to the next stage.
Use the process to get alignment
If you can, involve everyone who will ultimately need to agree on where to focus and what to prioritise. This is the ideal scenario. When people have participated in identifying the challenges, they are far more likely to commit to addressing them. You won’t need to spend energy persuading them to sign off on a plan, because they will have helped shape the thinking that led to it.
If you can’t get all the key decision-makers to take part in the process, use the outputs to take them on the journey. Walk them through the situation analysis, show them what you found, and present the SWOT as the preamble to your plan. A plan that arrives with that grounding behind it is a much easier sell. It shows the thinking that justifies every choice you have made.
A final thought
Like most things worth doing, this is harder in practice than it looks on paper. Doing it well takes discipline, and it gets easier with experience. Don't be discouraged if your first attempt feels incomplete or uncertain. That's normal. Persevere, because when it's done well, the right plan emerges naturally from the process. You won't be scratching your head wondering what to do next. The analysis tells you.
Need help?
This is exactly what I help clients with through my Strategic Growth Roadmap service. Get in touch if you have any questions or would like to arrange call.