SWOT Analysis and How It Can Be Used to Improve Your Marketing

gnooko is proud to announce the release of our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy. One of the things we talk about is the SWOT analysis and how it can be used to improve your marketing efforts. This blog contains a small preview of the help contained therein. To download the full white paper and explore a variety of different digital marketing topics in depth, click the link at the end of this blog.

SWOT analysis is a great method of analyzing your business and how it’s performing at any given time. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Between those four things as they apply to your company, you can get a pretty good idea of your successes, your failures, and how you can improve going forward.

You can also use SWOT analysis to evaluate specific aspects of your company, such as digital marketing. Here’s how you can improve your digital marketing strategy using the tenets of SWOT analysis.

Strengths

Start with what you’re doing well, and what is important to your company: i.e. your critical success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs). There are a number of analytics tools that can help you determine this. How many people visit your website each month? How many followers do you have on social media? What’s your e-mail list like? How many leads are you generating?

Of course, it’s about more than just numbers. Are people interacting with your content in a meaningful way? When people receive your e-mails, do they open them? Do they click through to your website? Are your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) keywords effective in helping people find your website as they’re looking for help in your field?

Look at all of these numbers and statistics and determine which ones you’re happy with, and which ones are important to your digital strategy and goals. Those are your strengths. That’s not to say that there isn’t still room for improvement, but these are the areas where your efforts are most effective, and getting the best overall results.

Weaknesses

Now that you’ve determined your strengths, look at the results of your analytics again. Which numbers aren’t you happy with? Which statistics are lower than they should be? Which areas need improvement? Those are your weaknesses.

This too extends to more than just individual numbers, though. Maybe all of your individual marketing tactics are doing reasonably well. You’ve got a great social media presence, a popular blog, and plenty of people on your e-mail list. But somehow, you’re just not generating the leads that you should be, and your sales are falling short of your goals.

That in and of itself is a weakness in your digital marketing strategy, but it’s also indicative of another, underlying weakness, which is causing this failure to meet your goals. Find this weakness and figure out what can be done about it. At what stage of the buying cycle are you falling short? Do you have a huge audience, but still find yourself not generating very many leads? Do you have plenty of leads, but find it difficult to convert them to sales? Pinpoint your weaknesses and ask yourself what you need to do to improve in those areas.

Opportunities

One way to overcome your weaknesses is to look for new, unexplored opportunities that can be implemented in your digital strategy. And one of the best sources of opportunity is new technology.

Technology evolves very rapidly, especially when it comes to marketing. And as it does, it creates new ways to market your company. For instance, maybe there’s a new social media platform that your company isn’t on yet—but that your customers are. Now you have a new way of reaching out to and connecting with them.

You should also look at what your competitors are doing, and others in your field. And more importantly, look at what they aren’t doing. Is there an area of marketing that’s not being explored very much in your industry? Your organization could fill that hole. Maybe it’s video marketing. All of your competitors have blogs, but not many of them are making videos. By focusing on video production as part of your own marketing plan, you have the opportunity to stand out from the competition and reach people in a new and unique way.

Threats

Now that you’ve identified your opportunities, what’s to stop you from pursuing them and improving your overall digital marketing results? There are always threats to your company. It’s important to be aware of them.

The biggest threat is likely to be your competitors. What are they doing that you’re not? What do they do better than you? Maybe their prices are lower. Maybe their social media channels have more followers than yours. Look at their digital marketing tactics carefully, as well as the results they’re getting, and determine the areas where their success might be a threat to yours.

Technology can be a threat too, if you don’t use it correctly. If you continue to stay on top of evolving technology and use it for your company’s benefit, then it’s an opportunity. However, if you let yourself fall behind, then it becomes a threat. Or if you attempt to implement a new technology and do it badly. Are there ways in which the technology you’re using is dragging down your digital marketing strategy?

With the SWOT analysis, you can significantly improve your approach to digital marketing. Focus on your strengths, identify and eliminate your weaknesses, take advantage of new opportunities to grow and improve, and be prepared to overcome any threats. By performing this analysis regularly, you can achieve your goals more effectively and improve your overarching digital marketing strategy.

This is just one aspect of a much larger digital strategy, though. To learn more about the benefits of SWOT Analysis in digital marketing and other ways of integrating digital tactics into your company, download our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy!

Robert (Rob) Burns is a digital business development specialist in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Rob prefers to discuss a business strategy with his clients before talking about any technology, marketing or digital tactics.  Once Rob understands a client’s business objectives, he will then advise them about gnooko services and solutions: including Digital Marketing Strategy, Audience Segmentation and Persona Development, Website Design and Development, Search Marketing and SEO, Social Marketing and of course Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, and Marketing Technology.

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