Situational Analysis in Marketing | Free Digital Marketing Course

What is a situational analysis in marketing, when to use it and how to do it. In this free course, we look at what is situational analysis? We also look at the benefits and challenges associated with digital communications and the importance of researching and selecting the most appropriate digital channels to reach and engage with your target audience.

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Digital Marketing Budgets - The Full Toolkit

Brand Awareness: Why a Digital-First Approach Is Essential

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What is situational analysis in marketing?

A situational analysis is a review of activities both competitors as well as various things that are happening in the marketplace, such as trends.

A marketing situational analysis brings a number of benefits:

- Define your target market and target audience: You can do this in a robust way. Ultimately, what you’re looking for is to try and identify new targets and new audiences that are not currently targeted by competitors.
- Understand your competitors’ weaknesses and strengths: This helps you to define the digital marketing approach that you then take to find a gap in the marketplace to be able to penetrate in a better way and be more successful than your competitors.
- Identify opportunities and threats to your offering: Being able to identify these will be critical for you to be able to overcome some of the hurdles and challenges that you may find in your way.

Stages of a competitor analysis
A competitor analysis involves seven key stages.

Identify your current competitors

You might think it's easy to understand who your competitors are. In reality in today’s environment, it’s very difficult. For example, who was to ever think that Vodafone was going to become one of the biggest financial services institutions in Kenya with M-Pesa, for example? So it’s very difficult to identify who your current and future competitors could look like.

There are a number of different techniques that you can use to do this:

- The first one is by being able to determine who your primary set competitors are.
- The next thing is to look at who could possibly be your secondary set or even competitor substitutes. If it’s not the product that you are currently offering, what other products could it be? A simplistic example would be if a customer’s not traveling by train, they may take a plane or car so those individuals or those companies operating in that environment actually become your competitors as well.
- The third layer to think about is who else could potentially move into your space given their core capabilities that they have around? So, for example, organizations may be able to leverage data to be able to start a bank which is what a number of institutions are thinking about doing.

00:00 What is situational analysis?
01:20 Stages of a competitor analysis

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